How Liquid Death is Murdering Marketing

[00:00:04] Phillip: Hello, [00:01:00] and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm speaking to you from London, England. I'm spending the summer here with my family, and we are drumming up a bunch of Future Commerce activities. I had the amazing pleasure of speaking to the PayPal UK team this [00:01:30] past Wednesday. And we talked about the multiplayer brand, and we talked about multiplayer dynamics, and how business is changing because customers have unprecedented power and a bigger voice than ever before. Due to what? Gen AI tools, online discourse, and how radical design shifts are giving customers even more power. It was an amazing time. I actually wrote a good deal about some of my first week's experiences over on The Senses, and that's our newsletter. You can get that at FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe absolutely [00:02:00] free. And my log, my weekly two times a week digest of what's happening here in London, which I think is one of the most amazing culture and commerce cities in the world, is going to be found twice a week. Like I said, on Wednesday and Friday, you can find my diary of the experiences that I'm having in meeting with brand leaders, retail tech partners, and meeting with people [00:02:30] in spaces where commerce and culture happen, and you can find it all on The Senses. Today, we are going to go over to a conversation I had in front of a live audience at the Retail Innovation Conference and Expo just a few weeks ago in Chicago, Illinois. We met with Dan Murphy. And Dan Murphy, if you don't know him by name, you will soon. He is the SVP of Marketing at a little company called Liquid Death Mountain Water. And he and I got into a conversation about how they do more [00:03:00] with less by infusing comedy and incredible creative and employing nontraditional marketers and nontraditional marketing techniques to get earned media in their business, and it allows them to have massive impact with very little spend. He says anybody can do this. Any brand can do this. And I want to know if you think that he's right. You can pilot some of his content by putting his best practices to work, found right here in this [00:03:30] recording. So we'll go right now live to my conversation with Dan Murphy, SVP of marketing over there at Liquid Death Mountain Water, on of my favorite brands. Let's go and take a listen.

[00:03:46] Dan Murphy: We kind of white-gloved the creative department. So it's not as though they're just, you know, absent to the production realities and realities of the business, but it's a group we call Marketing Operations. It's like the [00:04:00] concierge. "Hey. Here are the most important things this week. Here are the briefing meetings. They don't have to click buttons and fill out forms.

[00:04:09] Phillip: What's your sense around this little org? It's like a a highly empowered team that you're giving a lot of creative license to to steer the brand. How many of those projects can you focus on at a time? What's the cadence look like as to what they're needing to deliver, and how planned [00:04:30] out are you?

[00:04:33] Dan Murphy: The people that we have at Liquid Death are dedicated beyond belief. Everyone's just enough crazy, so we're probably taking on way too much at all times. But if you think about, like, a car I mean, I'm a car guy, [00:04:46] but if you're idling. You're inefficient. You're in the red line, you're burning the engine up, but actually that proper torque curve is somewhere a lot closer to red line than you think. And I think most organizations are kind of chugging along close to idle. So [00:05:00] there's a bit of the, dare I say, chaos or intensity is probably the better word, that really helps us. It helps us go that extra 10% from the 90% idea to the thing that, like, "Oh, yeah. They're going to write about this." [00:05:13] We have so much in the pipeline at any time. We've built this creative team. Our problem isn't coming up with the idea. We have too many of them. It's figuring out which one fits in the calendar at what point in time. We have a cadence where we're looking for one major creative campaign drop [00:05:30] a month, like a metronome, month over month. It doesn't exhaust our social audience. Now there's plenty else we do on social with influencers and all sorts of different posts. Doesn't exhaust press. In fact, press is now calling us. What do you got coming up next month? That's pretty rare. And we have this massive pipeline, and we're very responsive to what's happening in culture and what's happening with our customer and product. And so we'll move things up or push things out, but we have plenty going on. [00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Phillip: Alright. Tell me about this. What the hell possessed you guys to sell a fighter jet?

[00:06:07] Dan Murphy: That may be the next slide. These slides aren't in any order. They were just ambient background. I had to deliver a deck. I just picked some, please. And maybe I didn't put the jet in here.

[00:06:16] Phillip: Is it not in there?

[00:06:17] Dan Murphy: Well, let's see. Yeah. No jet.

[00:06:19] Phillip: It would be great organic search. Everybody search Liquid Death jet right now.

[00:06:24] Dan Murphy: Yeah. So, you know, we're all in the circle of trust here, so I'll let you know how it really went down. I'm old enough to remember a [00:06:30] big soda company tried to give away a Harrier jet in the nineties with points. And Netflix, two years ago, two holidays ago, came out with a documentary, "Where's My Jet?" That was my Christmas where CEO Mike calls me up. He's like, "We're getting a Harrier. Get a Harrier. We gotta get this thing. It's gotta get live quickly." I'm like, "Okay." So that holiday was all about figuring out Department of Defense Regulations and where these things are and how much they cost. And all we could really afford was what is called a museum [00:07:00] shell. Didn't have any engine, didn't have anything else, but it still could have been fun to do. And we pursued it, but they were built over in England or at least the British Air Force used them mostly so that we had to get them on a boat. And we couldn't really give it away because you have to go through a whole bunch of red tape and paperwork to even acquire the thing, and the person might not qualify. It was just a nightmare. And the reality of it all was, if we do this, it can't be for six months. And Mike kind of rightly thought, "Well, the moment would have passed by then." And [00:07:30] plus the thing was I mean, unless you live on a farm, what are you really going to do with it? Right? And then we're going to be stuck with a Harrier. But there's usually a germ of something super interesting in ideas that if it's there, it burns like an ember and can reignite. If it's not, it just goes out, and it's no worries. And I'm not even joking. This was like, I mean, we did this whole thing in 90 days, like, roughly 90 days from the idea. And [00:08:00] just to let you know what we're talking about, Liquid Death is giving away an L-39 C Albatross jet. People refer to it immediately as a fighter jet. Technically, it was never weapons capable. That helps us get through some Department of Defense and FAA regulations. It's a two seater. We're paying the sales tax for you. Six months of hangar space, custom helmet, year's supply of Liquid Death. And for this summer, Memorial to Labor Day, every can of Liquid Death you buy is an entry, AI, receipt scan, bada bang. Great data on that for us. And [00:08:30] it's probably better odds than any lottery you'd ever enter for a dollar, and you can drink your ticket. So we're calling it The Dehydrator, because the premise is with the g's it pulls, 30,000 foot service ceiling, 500 miles an hour. It will rid you of your bodily fluids, so you have to buy more Liquid Death. Yeah. This was kind of an idea that came back when Mike never really let that go. And he goes, "Wait a second. Here's a jet." This jet is actually hangared. It's painted up with the Liquid [00:09:00] Death logos and dehydrater and all that. It's in Rockford. It's right here outside of Chicago. Somehow he thought about it. He stumbled on it. It was a price we could afford. He goes, "We're doing it." There's a reason no beverage company, no company at all has given away a jet, a fighter jet, this type of jet. It was very difficult at every step of the way. Our lawyers love us. They're great. We have amazing... We learned after tasing people who couldn't pick our beverage as the right one, that we have to [00:09:30] go with some in-house counsel. It's a little more liberal, a little more understanding of what we're up to. But, yeah, it was still all manner of aviation and contest legal. You gotta post bonds on that thing 45 days out. Point of sale at retail needs to be done 60 days out. It's not giving us a lot of time to source a jet, paint a jet, pay for it, and all the rest. Get it in escrow.

[00:09:50] Phillip: You hinted at something I think is really important right there. And there are sort of two sides to this. Number one, the earned media and  [00:10:00]the charter of the organization to break through through these incredible creative campaigns, that seems very obvious. And you can measure certain things like that. We saw it in the video reel. Billions of earned media value. Right? Now you're linking it to something that's really performance based. It's can I turn the creative campaign into actual sales that become attributable back to my organization? That makes you [00:10:30] part of ops now and having to deliver and report on the efficacy of a campaign. What does that do to the nature of the types of campaigns that you're getting into testing now? And because really it's putting a lot of pressure then on a performance metric, I'm assuming. Or am I wrong?

[00:10:47] Dan Murphy: Well, this is the rare idea that does it all. It truly does. It was absurd enough and press connected the dots between, you know, the Pepsi giveaway and ours even though we were a wink. We weren't super overt. It was shareable. [00:11:00] It took over local media. It was every morning TV jock in Omaha, Nebraska. "You know what? This crazy beverage company is doing..." Including all the majors. I mean, you know, New York Post, you name it, we were in it, Newsweek, all the rest. So it did that. It generated awareness. It made people wonder, what is this thing Liquid Death if you're unfamiliar with it? But, yes, this mechanism of entry gives us data down to the purchase. Let's well, don't tweet about this, but, apparently, [00:11:30] we are 4X the conversion that... We're using a platform called V-Tags. They're really amazing. It's AI receipt scanning. You can use incentives on top if you want to, or it could be contest driven. There's a lot you can do with it. Check those guys out. Amazing start up. We're 4X the conversion two weeks in that they've ever seen with any incentive ever. And by the way, we're not discounting our product. People are paying full price to go in and get it. We're talking to our retailers saying, "Guess what else is in their basket?" The average person [00:12:00] who we drive in is getting six things, basket size over $40. We know how much Liquid Death they're buying. And again, the average is tremendous because some people are getting a single for $2, and some people are loading up. We had one person $500 worth of Liquid Death to max out their entries. So, yes, very performance in this idea. We're probably way more science in the art and science mix than anybody on the outside will ever know. We judge our social with a proprietary score where we use some logic and [00:12:30] kind of weight that a share is worth way more than a view or a like. That's somebody who watched it all the way through, that liked it enough to send it to their friend, family, buddy. And when you get that media from somebody, you're going to watch it. It's been validated for you. So we know that that's an important thing. That's part of our matrix, our algorithm with it. We don't do any pretesting, though. And I think a lot of orgs, lot of companies that I've done marketing for in the past live and die by that, and it's just not accurate. [00:13:00] When you pay someone to sit in a focus group, that is not representative of the marketplace, the consumer, or the person on the other side of that screen. When you do the surveys, has anyone here ever willingly taken a survey? Never. I've never met one. So [00:13:16] our litmus test for it to go out, again, our lane is comedy, did it make us laugh? [00:13:21] And we're in that writer's room, and there's plenty of times where the feedback is, "I didn't see anyone smiling or laughing. This isn't right yet." There are plenty of times we're in [00:13:30] edit, and we just didn't get there. You know? Okay. This isn't funny enough. But, yes, [00:13:35] if it makes us laugh, if it holds true to our brand values, our weird comedy, SNL world, we push it out into [00:13:43] social and see how it performs. And again, we're pushing it to an embedded group of 9,000,000. So it's a representative size to go, "Okay. Is this something that works?" If it works, we elevate it to an ad-expected environment like YouTube pre roll. You went there for the cat video, the car video. You weren't expecting Liquid [00:14:00] Death to interrupt you with something wild. And if we see people watch past and not smash that 5 second skip button, which at times we're getting to 50% view through. And that's people watching it entirely through and then a handful of people skipping. It's tremendous, sometimes more than that. We realize there's something there in the ad-expected environment. So we can elevate that to connected TV, where we take the fingerprints, the DNA of our customers and prospects, target them, and throw it through the glass. People don't realize on Hulu, sitting on the Apple TV, [00:14:30] lounging on the couch, they view that the same way traditional linear was. Oh, wow. And now we're in between a Ford F150 and a Progressive commercial, and we're putting something wild and memorable in front of them, and we're seeing the results there. And then, okay, now we might have a candidate if we want to dabble in broadcast at something.

[00:14:48] Phillip: Of [00:15:30] all the campaigns to date based on this scoring that you do, what's worked better than you thought it would, and maybe what didn't work as well as you had hoped?

[00:15:53] Dan Murphy: I would say genuinely, pass a lie detector test, we haven't in my view, there's been no duds. [00:16:00] There have been no failures. Because, again, all of it passed our litmus test. This is genuinely funny. We all like it. We share it. It says something about the brand. But there are certain things that didn't perform quite as well as we expected and others that kind of blew the roof off it. So one that comes to mind that we thought was going to do maybe a little bit better, we love to play with nostalgia. There's a lot that comes along with the ride if you kind of tap into tropes. I mean, a lot of what Liquid Death is is an art project making a meta critique of marketing in many ways. There's [00:16:30] familiarity there that makes people lean in. And then we put some weird Liquid Death logic to what we do. So we thought, "What if we did, like, a Nike athlete commercial, but the parody was instead of the athletes that were celebrating," you could just imagine what it is. It's the slow mo, the moody music, all of that. "What if we're actually celebrating the water boy?" Hydration EExpert is what we called him. Because again, without hydration, all these athletes would be dead slow, not watchable. [00:17:00] So we did the first six figure contract endorsement to a water person, held the combine, made him deliver the water, all that kind of stuff, and shot the spot. And we all laughed, but it must have been a news day. It got views. It wasn't a fail, but I thought it would be a little bit bigger. On the flip side, we did a funny, we thought about it and produced it in, like, under two weeks. It cost $30,000. And it was a spoof on the Shake Weight kind of commercials. [00:17:30] We called it Chest Blaster. And the joke there was that Liquid Death cans are now a workout device. And you can crack them and shake them, and we had kind of ripped beautiful people doing it. And we tossed it on social, and that thing might be sitting at 8,000,000 views right now. Again, like, $30K. We just, you know, ripped it out there. So our philosophy is very much a stock portfolio. It's day trading attention. When we go with the Travis Barker, a Martha Stewart, a Tony Hawk, like, okay. We're pretty... That's like a blue chip. We know we're going to [00:18:00] get something, especially with the ideas we attach them to. But then the rest is a lot of small bets. And the stuff that hits, we'll put a little gas on it. We might elevate it through our system. And the stuff that doesn't, well, it was like $25K, I think. You know, some organizations spend that on a dinner.

[00:18:17] Phillip: Oh, yeah. A 100%. And that's so sweet center for this crew here who probably get invited to 15 dinners a week. Yeah. That's a big thing. I thought you'd laugh more at that. It's true, though.

[00:18:30] Dan Murphy: It's [00:18:30] a tough room.

[00:18:31] Phillip: It is a tough room. I don't know what the deal is. But, you know, probably because they look at what you're doing and the assumption is, well, you can do anything creative when you have unlimited budget. Is that true?

[00:18:45] Dan Murphy: Yeah. Our budgets are so micro, they would be unbelievable to most. Our incumbent competitors, it's, like, a 1000X our budget. And I think budget haiku is [00:19:00] part of our superpower. The fact that we are so limited in what we can spend. We spend virtually no media. I mean, it's all earned. It's all stuff that people write about, share about for free. It forces you to focus on the idea, which is 80% of the success. It's not the production. Most people are looking at your content on a phone about yay big. So if you hired an expensive post-production company and rented a Phantom, it is all for naught. Could have been shot on an iPhone. And [00:19:30] especially in social, hyperproduced content, immediate flick, 300 milliseconds, they haven't registered it. It is not authentic, organic. They're looking for stuff that's largely coming from others in social. So it can be just laziness too. I mean, again, I'm not naming names, but [00:19:46] I've had a marketing career with a lot of major brands, and it's, "We'll just hire so and so celebrity," who is probably super saturated that does 100 deals. Pay a ton of money, expensive director, do all this stuff, it goes out, and the reality [00:20:00] is it probably didn't move the needle with those millions of dollars. Meanwhile, 30 grand divided by a million equals a lot of different small bets. [00:20:10]

[00:20:13] Phillip: When [00:21:00] you're looking out into the future and where the brand is heading, you're going into bigger echelons and bigger spheres. Has the tenor changed around the kind of response to the brand as it's penetrated more? Or do you feel like there's still [00:21:30] a huge job to do to win people over, or do you care to try to win people over?

[00:21:35] Dan Murphy: Well, I mean, we absolutely have a huge job to do. We have amazing brand awareness, but a fraction of those people understand we're a healthy beverage. They think we're beer. They think we're energy, that we're actually a low calorie soda alternative, natural flavors, low caffeinated iced tea, and then obviously premium water. So we've shifted our strategy a bit. A lot of the creative and [00:22:00] targeting is much more just driving that message home. But we've seen this kind of beautiful, big tent of different cohorts come into the brand. In the beginning, it was people that might have responded to the aesthetic or the punk nature or metal or those sorts of things or the celeb set and the cool kids. And now we've gotten into parents that are excited that their kids don't want a sugar bomb. They're begging to drink water. We've got folks that love our environmental message. We have so many people that for whatever reason, maybe [00:22:30] they're sober or they don't want to drink that night, feel comfortable in a social setting. And that's a lot of Gen Z, by the way. They look at alcohol the way I looked at cigarettes in high school. It's like, "Ugh, don't want that."

[00:22:41] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:22:43] Dan Murphy: And so many different people in between. So, yeah, our brand resonates wider than people might think.

[00:22:51] Phillip: I went and looked at my own receipts, and I spent about $450 on Liquid Death last year, which is ridiculous. That's b [00:23:00]etween merch and NFTs. I'll admit I bought a couple of NFTs. I also found that it's kind of an incredible way for me to share something that I love and have a story to tell around something that a lot of people just haven't encountered or seen. How many other brands are there that you feel compelled to tell the story of the brand when you share it with someone else? I think that's really magical.

[00:23:28] Dan Murphy: It is. I mean, we're in [00:23:30] a way, living in lonely times. We're all behind screens and, you know, especially coming out of the pandemic. I mean, it's a thing you can hold in your hand, and it's the same $2 you're spending at 7 ELEVEN, you're pulling this one or that one, that will have people talk to you. It's that nikaret of rebellion on a 10 AM Zoom where they're, "What are you guys doing? It's it's a little early for that." "Hey. It's just water." Not only is it just water, but it's infinitely recyclable, and proceeds are going to pull trash out of the ocean. And it's from a great mountain source. [00:24:00] We don't do enough of a job talking about that, that it is on the level of others. That's another bit of work for us to do.

[00:24:07] Phillip: Incredible. Well, congrats on all your success. I'm sure there's a lot more to come. Anything you can give us a hint about to look out for?

[00:24:17] Dan Murphy: Yeah. I will. But, again, keep this off Twitter. So a couple of months back, we experimented with hydration packets, Death Dust, we call them. I mean, there's, you know, electrolytes, a [00:24:30] lot of different use cases. Some of them are long-distance runners and athletes, and you replace the sodium. For other folks, it's vitamins and health. But there's a huge chunk that's hangover prevention or remediation. Right? And that seems like a fun lane for our audience. And so we came out with them. We did a little spot, And it did well for us, but we're like, "Hey let's put some fuel on the fire." So we're shooting this weekend, which is almost now, with [00:25:00] a true household name celebrity that's going to play the part of a law enforcement officer with a crazy concept around this. And I'll bet you we're live in two weeks. So be on the lookout for that, and you'll know exactly who it is when we drop it.

[00:25:16] Phillip: Incredible. Well, thank you so much.

[00:25:16] Dan Murphy: Any time for Q and A?

[00:25:17] Phillip: Yeah. Do we have a minute or two for Q and A? It looks like we do. Yep.

[00:25:21] Audience Question: Hey. I got a question. So I know you talked about one large kind of creative lump. Are you also trying to feed the algorithm every single day? Do you guys have a limit on is it quantity [00:25:30] over quality? How do you guys look at the other ecosystem underneath that one large campaign?

[00:25:35] Dan Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. We definitely skew more towards the quality over quantity. We do consider ourselves, though, day traders of attention. So we're not only social. We've found podcasts to be a tremendous source of awareness and affinity for us. I mean, if you think about it again, so much of this stuff doesn't need to be so data-driven and crazy. Just, like, be real, be logical. It's like podcast is what you're giving focused attention to when you're distracted from the thing you're [00:26:00] supposed to be doing. You're driving. You're at work. You want to pay attention to whoever you like. You're doing chores. It's captured your attention. Whereas TV, when that commercial comes on, you're on your phone doing something else. You're not even paying attention. So we have a channel that's in real life and awareness and festivals and podcasts and connected TV and influencers that are winning their audiences that are new audiences for us on social on our behalf. We've got press ripping and running on a whole number of things, and product innovation, business news, and [00:26:30] all this stuff. But we do have and have for many years, one big, press worthy campaign that anchors the month. But, yes  I don't know if that answered the question exactly. Yeah. But it's like on social, like, Mr Beast, number one in the world, he's got it right. He drops once a month, maybe.

[00:26:50] Audience Question: Is the resemblance of your can to other beverages a part of the intention also?

[00:26:54] Dan Murphy: 100%. Mike may have talked about it, our CEO and Founder, in that video. But the [00:27:00] premise was if you market the way beer and energy and unhealthy things do, can you kind of sneak a healthy thing into somebody? And kind of at a psychological level. We're co-opting and capturing and benefiting from 100 years of usage occasions and attitude and energy and culture and just kind of power around alcohol. And it's coming along for the ride. It's the reason why it feels [00:27:30] cool to hold that can at a live nation show, at a house party. Do the experiment. Crinkly plastic bottles, Liquid Death, two coolers, see what people gravitate towards, see how it makes you feel in a social setting, an environment, a bar, that kind of stuff. So it's very intentional. Let's dress water up like beer and kind of see what happens.

[00:27:52] Audience Question: This is a triple-check. Your target audience is who?

[00:27:54] Dan Murphy: Anybody who has a sense of humor and drinks beverages. And [00:28:00] we are not for everybody. I mean, there's going to be a small portion of folks that aren't kind of in on it, that think we're out there doing something bad. Yeah. No. We're trying to get kids to not drink sugar bombs and 200 milligrams of caffeine. We're trying to get plastic bottles out of the ocean, out of landfills. We're trying to educate people about that, not the Prius-driving farmers market crowd that knows it. Me. I didn't realize 95% of plastic bottles, doesn't matter if you throw it in the blue [00:28:30] bin, landfill, ocean, burnt up. Economics are upside down. Trying to do healthier for you products to people that don't get that marketed to them and not be preachy about it. So if that's an evil mission, you know, that's what we're up to.

[00:28:44] Audience Question: You talked a lot about social and video and stuff like that. I also saw one of your emails recently organic marketing. It was like, did you die in... Really clever. But creatively, did it take a while to get every piece of marketing to have the same brand voice or was that, from the beginning, already more [00:29:00] in every piece of marketing?

[00:29:04] Dan Murphy: Yeah. It would be really hard to rehab a brand and evolve it and overhaul it, but Mike is the voice. Liquid Death is Mike. And as we've grown out again, it's important that we have this small team, and we're not all into the same stuff, but we're all kind of there's a little bit of there's a lot of Liquid Death in all of us. And there's ultimately, with the CEO, a gate, a factor. It's like, "Oh, this doesn't [00:29:30] go out." He reviews a lot of stuff. I mean, he's very, very actively involved in the creative and the brand voice. But that particular email was written by our VP of Creative, Andy. He's a genius with that kind of stuff, and it shows how what people would think is a throwaway, you probably wouldn't even update the system. It just says, "You've abandoned your cart. Please click here to buy..." Fill in blank. Most brands would just not even think of that. And we didn't anticipate that that was going to go viral on LinkedIn and make it out in the world, but every detail matters for us.  [00:30:00]And [00:30:00] we view the people that are part of this brand and their time as precious. We don't waste it for a minute. Every email we send should be funny, laugh-out-loud funny. [00:30:11] Every product we do is... We have a crazy merch business. You know, if you haven't seen our the stuff we sell in merch, it's nuts. I mean, golf toppers and drinkware and crazy fashion with collabs and big fashion brands and beach towels and... [00:30:30] We're going to come out with, like, a tea set. It knows no limits how broad we go with that. But every piece of merch has a wink, has a joke in it, has something funny and weird and maybe subversive, and that makes into the email. The abandoned cart email, the legal copy is written in kind of a more fun way. So I don't know if I rambled and answered the question or not. Thanks.

[00:30:55] Phillip: Thanks, everyone.