Small brands need to be provocative to stand out. No one knows that better than Liquid Death co-founder and CEO Mike Cessario.

Cessario has built canned water brand Liquid Death on that foundation. The brand puts still water inside an aluminum tall boy can with a picture of a melting skull on it, with the tagline “Murder Your Thirst.”

Cessario launched the brand in 2017 after spending his career in marketing. He realized all of the “cool and fun” marketing was for products that were “bad for consumers,” namely alcohol and junk food, and products that were good for consumers didn’t have fun marketing, Cessario said in his keynote address at the Awin ThinkTank Conference in April in Chicago. Awin is an affiliate marketing platform.

“I wanted to create a truly healthy beverage company that marketed like we were a beer company or a junk food company,” he said.

And so, he began building Liquid Death. Cessario hustled to get the funding for the initial product run, which was roughly $200,000 for the minimum of 250,000 cans.

He spent $1,500 to produce a provocative video (a woman waterboarding a man while proclaiming why water was more extreme than energy drinks) which Cessario then posted to Facebook. Over the course of four months, Cessario put $5,000 of paid media behind the ad until the video amassed 3 million views and 80,000 Facebook followers.

Entertainment as the Marketing Hook

Consumers followed Liquid Death because they found the video entertaining and proved Cessario’s marketing and business premise.

“The way I think about our business model is that we’re an entertainment company that monetizes via beverage,” he said.

This is stealing the playbook from Red Bull Energy Drink, Cessario said, in which the marketing does not feel like marketing, but rather entertainment.

“A guy jumping out of outer space with a parachute, that’s entertaining,” he said, referring to a Red Bull ad. “People will pay to watch that and when they do watch it, they can tell all their friends for free, ‘Oh my God, you got to see this Red Bull video.’ That doesn’t feel like a commercial, but it is 100% a commercial for Red Bull that builds their brand and makes you more likely to buy their energy drink.”

Liquid Death Takes Risks

Liquid Death has delivered on this ethos of edgy entertainment, such as its “Kegs for Pregs” video showcasing pregnant women (including internet personality Kylie Kelce) drinking Liquid Death from a keg at a bar. Another video promotes a “new” type of plastic surgery of putting discarded water bottles inside the body as a way to recycle the plastic, because the majority of plastic is not actually recycled.

Any brand can commit to leading with entertainment in its marketing, Cessario said, but it’s hard to do. Marketing agencies don’t specialize in entertainment and it’s hard to predict — even for professional comedians — what is going to make people laugh.

“If you ask most people, ‘Do you think you could come up with a good idea for a commercial?’ Most people said, ‘Yeah, I think I could,’ because the bar is so low,” he said. “If you had someone say, ‘Do you think you could write a hit TV show and sell it to Netflix?’ ‘No way, what are you talking about? That’s for professionals.’”

The Key is to Keep Marketing Costs Low

Because predicting what will entertain consumers is hard, Liquid Death works to keep its marketing costs low and produce a lot of content.

Liquid Death has its own internal creative team that is small enough “to fit into a large SUV,” he said. It also has its own production company so it can create videos quickly and cheaply.

“We’re going to probably do close to $300 million in revenue this year and we still don’t spend more than $100,000 or $150,000 on a video and that enables us to put a lot into the world,” Cessario said. “Even when we work with celebrities, we have never paid full price for a celebrity because it’s a different value transaction conversation when we’re actually a proven entertainment brand.”

Celebrities Want In On Liquid Death Energy

For example, Cessario said tastemaker Martha Stewart did a commercial with Liquid Death for a tenth of her usual $1 million-plus fee.

“She knows it makes her relevant to be a part of Liquid Death,” he said.

One of the brand’s most successful examples of this was when it worked with skateboarder Tony Hawk in 2019. Hawk invested in Liquid Death and then the brand gave him a few extra shares in the company to do a commercial, instead of paying him a typical celebrity fee of $1 million. The brand then got to work on how to use this star power for entertainment in a way that would grab attention.

“If we would have used a video of Tony Hawk doing a cool trick, it would have got 5,000 views on our social,” Cessario said. “No one would care because everybody has seen Tony Hawk do a cool trick a hundred times. It’s not interesting; It’s not press worthy; It’s not shareable.”

Instead, Liquid Death did something that was press worthy and sharable: It filmed a phlebotomist taking blood from Tony Hawk. The brand then mixed the blood with red paint for a silkscreen to manufacture 100 skateboards that it sold for $500.

The stunt worked, and several media outlets picked up the story. Cessario estimated the earned media attention from the video brought in $15 million to the brand, with only a $10,000 video production value.

Brands Clamor to Collaborate

Liquid Death’s proven track record has attracted other top brands to work with the beverage brand on a collaboration. Recently, cosmetics brand E.l.f. reached out to Liquid Death wanting to work with the company. Liquid Death’s creative team came up with the idea to create “corpse paint” for make up for a heavy metal look. E.l.f. paid Liquid Death’s production team to create it and put an agreed upon paid media spend behind it.

“We put a commercial out there that got 40 million views and 8 billion earned media impressions for free as a brand,” Cessario said. “It helped us sell more Liquid Death, and it cost us zero dollars because we got a brand that paid for it. Now we got our brand exposed to a totally new teen girl audience that buys E.l.f. cosmetics that maybe they didn’t even know about Liquid Death before.”

Don’t Act Like a Big Guy (Except For the Super Bowl)

This type of marketing works because the brand has found a different and entertaining way to present its marketing message. This content stands out in a feed, which is critical when you are a small brand, Cessario said. He advises brands not to spend huge dollar amounts on making the product look good, because small brands won’t stand out in this way when compared with big brands spending big dollars.

“When cash is your most precious resource and you’ve got small marketing budgets and you need to grow incredibly fast to get to where you’re trying to go, if you start trying to market the same way that the big guys do with safe marketing, that’s not actually going to move the needle,” he said.

Instead, brands have to make big bets and spend as much time on their marketing as they do on their product.

“We take just as much painstaking time, energy and attention to detail crafting our marketing product as we do our physical product,” he said. “Because as we see it, if we can nail that marketing product, we can spend a fraction of the cost of big companies and still get that reach and lift of a big company.”

The Super Bowl Ad Is Worth It

When Liquid Death does spend money “like a big company” it is for a Super Bowl commercial. Even though the spot costs millions it’s the “most efficient reach media buys you can possibly make,” Cessario said.

“You are reaching 100 million unique people who for the only time in the whole year actually pay attention to the commercials,” he said.

Having a spot in the Super Bowl also gives the brand cache and an edge when it talks to retailers annually about its plans for the year and to negotiate in-store shelf space.

“I don’t care about the lift,” Cessario said referring to sales volume after the ads. “The shelf space that I gained, just by telling them I’m running a Super Bowl commercial, is probably $30 million in value right there.”

All of this culminates into creating a brand and a moat, Cessario said. Most products are commodities that can be copied, Cessario said. Liquid Death is one of them. But now it’s built a brand and a fandom.

“Anybody can put water in a can,” Cessario said. “But no one can copy our brand.”