Murder Your Thirst And Measure Everything

Summary

Podcast Summary: AdExchanger Talks – "Murder Your Thirst And Measure Everything"

Date: August 11, 2026
Host: Alison Schiff (AdExchanger)
Guest: Benoit Vatere, Chief Media and Digital Commerce Officer, Liquid Death

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into how Liquid Death—a brand known for its irreverent, viral creative—is driven by rigorous measurement and hardcore media strategy. Benoit Vatere, Liquid Death’s Chief Media & Digital Commerce Officer, shares his eclectic background, the evolution of CPG marketing in a digital world, the challenges of incrementality measurement (especially for in-store sales), and why ROAS can be misleading. The conversation also touches on the myth of loyalty in CPG, the role (and limits) of earned media, and how agentic AI might change—or not change—the fundamentals of brand marketing.

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Detailed Breakdown

Benoit Vatere's Unusual Journey to CPG (02:05–10:11)

Key Points:

• Background: French engineering degree, major in marketing, early interest in entrepreneurship and tech.
  • "I am a builder and a product-heavy guy with a heavy tech background." (05:17)
  • Early ventures: startup founded at school, then years developing ad tech and mobile platforms in LA.
• Early Digital Marketing:
  • Deep dive into audience development and customer acquisition, especially in the early MySpace and Facebook days.
  • Mammoth Media pivoted from direct paid UA to influencer/UGC campaigns after Apple’s privacy changes; led to a focus on measuring offline/retail impact.
• Entry to CPG:
  • Developed VTags, an attribution platform for linking social content with in-store sales: "A lot of large CPG brands came to me, I didn’t have any background in the CPG world, but they wanted help connecting media to sales." (08:14)
  • Collaborated with Liquid Death first as an advisor, then as Chief Media Officer.

Media + Commerce: Why Combine? (10:11–12:47)

Key Points:

• Vatere’s role expanded to Chief Media & Digital Commerce Officer.
• E-commerce is the fastest-growing area for CPG retail, with most retailers pushing omnichannel (order online, pick up, or home delivery).
• "In the digital world... what grabs the attention? It’s media. What drives growth in digital is media." (11:11)
• He now manages both media buying and retailer relationships (Amazon, Target, Kroger, Walmart): "Day to day, I’m not just buying media. I’m also managing the P&L on revenue." (12:25)

Creative, Media, Earned Media & The Funnel (12:47–23:55)

Liquid Death’s Creative Strategy:

• Brand built on viral, outrageous campaigns (coffin-shaped makeup, can of water ‘certified’ by Alexa, snowboards with no edges, etc.) (13:59–15:29)
• Creative handled almost entirely in-house by the "Death Machine" team; Vatere is “heavily involved.”
  • “I’m not the creative guy, but now what we do is making sure everything we create is built to actually drive sales.” (15:39)
  • Feedback loop: measurement data shared back with creative to inform future work.

Earned Media: The Early Engine

• Earned media (press/social buzz) was the core strategy in the early years: "Earned media was the key metric the first couple years of Liquid Death." (18:21)
• Now shifting focus to converting awareness to purchase; paid targeting becomes more important than relying solely on viral spread.

Channel Mix & Paid Social Philosophy

• Early-stage CPG/DTC brands "have to start through social...where you can deploy not huge dollars and get a return quickly." (21:06)
• The “Facebook crack cocaine” analogy: easy early wins from paid social, but diminishing returns and higher CAC over time.
  • "You want more and more, but it doesn’t perform as well." (21:36)
  • Paid social’s real value is not at the awareness level, but at the mid-funnel/consideration stage.
• For awareness, CTV offers outsized “disruptive” impact compared to being one of many social ads: “What I look at from a social media standpoint, it’s consideration...for me I do upper funnel on the bigger screen, and then I target for consideration on social.” (23:22)

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Measurement: Incrementality, ROAS, and the Offline Problem (24:41–42:35)

The CPG Measurement Dilemma

• CPG sales are mostly in-store, where “media measurement goes to die.” (28:41)
• Can’t put a pixel on a bottle—must use external data.
• First challenge: assembling granular, retailer-bought sales data, typically at the zip code/store level, to build models.

ROAS: Not the Holy Grail

• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is misleading unless paired with “new to brand” metrics.
  • “I track ROAS attached to a new to brand metric...combined together it’s a good proxy for incrementality." (33:48)
  • If ROAS is high but new buyers are low, it often just means you’re paying for sales that would have happened anyway.

Incrementality Testing

• Main approach: regional holdout or “synthetic control” experiments.
• Tools like IBOTTA allow Liquid Death to measure retail lift after targeted offers, helping to calibrate offline impact.
  • "We run MMTs all the time to understand the impact...that lets you calibrate some of your models." (35:14)
• MMM (media mix modeling): difficult for fast-growing brands because "you need two years of data...[but] what I was doing two years ago versus what I do now, it's like 20 years for another brand." (36:38)
  • Uses agile, short-term models for signals, prioritizing “loud signals” for high growth rather than small optimizations.

Rethinking Loyalty in CPG

• Most buyers are not loyal; more than 50% of big beverage brand revenues come from “light buyers” who purchase just a few times per year.
  • "On the CPG side, you don't have that [retention metric]...people are just not loyal." (41:31)
• The best use of incrementality data isn’t chasing “loyalists,” but bringing back lapsed buyers and increasing purchase occasions.

Notable Quote

"If someone buys it once or twice, we want to get them to buy one more time...you’ve already spent so much to get them to try first. Now let’s build up their value.” (38:54)

Promotions, Discounts, and End Caps (43:25–45:16)

• Be careful not to overuse discounts—otherwise, you train people to wait for a deal.
• Promotions tied with in-store display are more about grabbing attention than price education.

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The Future: Agentic AI and the Role of Branding (45:16–48:15)

• Even as agentic AI promises to change shopping (“agentic purchase journeys”), awareness and branding are still vital.
  • “You’re still going to have to do the work upper funnel. I'm not worried it’s going to replace what happens on social or TV.” (46:15)
• The real concern is figuring out how to show up in AI-driven prompts; it’s a new kind of discoverability akin to early SEO.
  • “The data they tap into—we don’t know really what it is...this is the early days of SEO, but for agents.” (47:45)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

"The only brand that can answer that—no, we've always done it. We always did it. We never had something like, ‘This is way too much.’"
— Benoit Vatere, on unhinged creative ideas never being too much for Liquid Death (49:05)

"On the CPG side, you don't have that [retention metric]...people are just not loyal."
— Benoit Vatere (41:30)

"Earned media was the key metric for the first couple years of Liquid Death."
— Benoit Vatere (18:21)

"ROAS, if it's too high, that's actually sometimes a signal—this is not incremental. Go back at it."
— Benoit Vatere (34:46)

"Loyalty is more like you buy what your parents bought, but even then, if you're at the store and there's a sale, you might buy otherwise."
— Alison Schiff (42:35)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [02:05] Career background and segue to CPG
• [10:11] Media + Digital Commerce: managing P&L and retailer relationships
• [12:47] Creative strategy and earned media
• [18:21] Shift from earned to paid media for conversion
• [21:06] Why paid social is "crack cocaine" for startups
• [24:41] Hardcore measurement, incrementality, and the offline sales challenge
• [33:48] ROAS and why it matters only in context
• [35:14] Practical incrementality testing
• [38:54] The real value is in bringing back lapsed buyers
• [41:30] The myth of brand loyalty in CPG
• [45:16] Agentic AI: will it change everything?
• [49:05] Why nothing is "too much" for Liquid Death creative
• [50:30] Is Benoit the most hydrated man in media?

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Takeaways for Marketers

• Virality and edgy creative can give you a head start, but rigorous, granular measurement is needed to scale sustainably.
• Paid social is a strong early channel but leads to diminishing returns at scale—brands need to diversify quickly.
• Most CPG loyalty is a myth; focus efforts on turning trial into repeat, and don’t over-index on “loyalists.”
• Incrementality is king—ROAS alone is not strategic.
• AI discovery and shopping are coming fast, but human branding and upper-funnel creative still matter.

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(End of summary)

Transcript

[Alison Schiff]

Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast

[Anna Slater]

devoted to examining the issues and trends

[Alison Schiff]

in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.

[Sarah Sleuths]

This episode is sponsored by Verve, an ad solution that helps brands activate consumer intent in real time across platforms. As AI reshapes how people plan vacations, Verve helps travel brands show up when it counts.

[Alison Schiff]

I'm Alison Schiff, editor in chief of Ad Exchanger, and you're listening to Ad Exchanger Talks. In this episode, we'll be cracking open a tall boy of media strategy with Liquid Death's Chief Media and Digital Commerce Officer, Benoit Vatere. We'll talk about how a brand known for unhinged creative runs on hardcore measurement, including the finer points of incrementality testing, why roas can be a very misleading KPI, and what it takes to prove that ads are working in the real world when you can't exactly slap a pixel on a 12 pack of water. We'll also get into the concept of loyalty in cpg, or the lack thereof, and why Benoit doesn't think ingenic AI will kill great branding. But before we dive in, programmatic I.O. new York is coming up on September 28th and 29th at the New York Marriott Marquee in Times Square. It's time to unleash growth across the open web. And to do that, we've got a seriously good agenda lined up for you, with excellent speakers, including Chris Kane and folks from Zoom, Time Horizon Media, pmg, hey dude. The Brandtech Group, Dentsu X, Razorfish, Goodway Group, the Guardian, and more. I'm losing my breath just trying to list them all. Podcast listeners get 10% off with the promo code POD10. So what you waiting for? Get your ticket and see you there. Hey Benoit, welcome to the podcast.

[Benoit Vatere]

Thanks for having me. Alison, good to see you again.

[Alison Schiff]

Yes, good to see you again because we've actually. Well, it feels weird to say we've known each other for 10 years because we haven't been in constant contact, but you were one of the first people I interviewed way back when, because Mobile was my beat when I started at Ad Exchanger. And you have a long history in Mobile, which we will talk about. But first I want you to lay it on me. What is one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know?

[Benoit Vatere]

There is. There's quite a few, I would say. The one that probably is not expected is I run ultra marathons and I just finished a 50 miler recently. I think people don't know that or don't expect that. That's one of them.

[Alison Schiff]

Damn. Okay. I ran track in high school, but that was over two decades ago and I barely exercise now. I'm very impressed.

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, I'm. I. I used to not be a runner. I used to not be able to run a mile about two years ago and here I am now. So. Yeah.

[Alison Schiff]

Well, is the runner's high real?

[Benoit Vatere]

It is real. It is actually very real. It was. I would run and I would not want to run because I didn't like it. And then I just got hooked. And it goes from a half to a full marathon to 50k to 50 miles. Like it just keeps on going. You just get hooked.

[Alison Schiff]

Well, I've yet to be hooked, but I'm going to take your word for it. Maybe I'll start running one day. So I want to do a quick career rewind on you because your path is interesting and maybe a little unusual. You have a master's degree in engineering from a French agricultural school, which is. I don't know, it just tells me maybe you had a different career in mind or maybe not, but that's kind of a curve ball. And then you spent 25 years in LA building ad tech with a focus on mobile. You had a conversion optimization company that you founded. You ran a mobile gaming monetization platform called Playhaven, which is actually when you and I spoke for the first time, because like I said, mobile was my first beat area when I started at Ad Exchanger, which is funny to say because no one now would say, oh, I cover mobile, because mobile is so infused into everything. But back then it was a different story. And then you started Mammoth Media, which is a mobile entertainment and tech studio. Created a bunch of apps targeted at Gen Z, Yarn, Wishbone, we wrote about those also. And Yarn was a pretty prescient idea. Like it's chat fiction, so people tap the screen to reveal text messages one line at a time to tell these short, suspenseful, dramatic stories. And it feels like a text based precursor to microdramas. Like in retrospect. But yeah, then liquid death, they came knocking. Summer 2024, you started out as a media advisor on contract, and then by December you were their chief Media officer. So I will ask a question, I promise. What would you say your background, Media, mobile, tech, agricultural studies, all of that good stuff. What did it give you walking in the door that say, a more traditional CPG marketer wouldn't necessarily have?

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, I think the big thing that I have is I am a builder and I'm a product heavy guy with heavy tech background. And that led To a lot of different things. And so to start my education actually France French education is a little bit different, but I went through what they called in France prep school, which is heavy math. You did 10 hours a day of math and so heavy, which gets you into if you're good at this in top engineering school. And I didn't want to be specific in terms of engineering. And what is bio basically bio focused, gives you let you open to any kind of. Of basically engineering. Which led me actually from that to go actually in computer science and marketing. Because on your last year of engineering school, you can pick a major that is not engineering. And so I major in marketing at the end of the year, which is things that you cannot do here in the US but you cannot do back there. So that's kind of my background. So I got out of school, but actually not even got out of school. My last year of school I started my first startup in school, which I end up classic selling and then moving to la. But that's where it all started, right? I always wanted, I always had this entrepreneurial in me, DNA that I wanted to build, I wanted to create. And, and you know, it was back in 2000, that was the dot com bubble. So from the very early days of my career, it was, it was digital, I was always digital. And from the very early days as I started my first company, I realized that reaching out to an audience, be able to control that through, you know, things that you can replicate over and over, which in that case is media. On the digital side, if you want to keep on growing, you need to understand how to acquire customers. Led me to, well, I need to know that myself, I cannot lean. I understand how to code, I understand how to build, I need to understand how to acquire customers. And so I went deep in the media world and that was the early days, you know, of MySpace and then Facebook and all of that. And so I was like, okay, I can build on top of those platform to be super efficient at buying media on those platforms. So that's what led me into ad tech. But always on, always building, always creating, always starting companies. So I actually most of my career have been a founder, right? And so that led to having a lot of background in ad tech. But then with background in ad tech, as you mentioned, mammoth media as we actually, I think we talk about that Alison, at some point with people may remember the iOS 14.5 release which basically crashed everything in terms of user acquisition, very granular on mobile. Then I pivoted Mameth Media to actually Lean on influencers, right? From a user acquisition standpoint, instead of leaning on just pure media, buying that now was not really as advanced as you could because of what Apple released. And so I went into the creator side, built one of the largest TikTok creator network as part of Amos Media to focus on downloading apps, right? And then that got me like, hold on. I had a lot of brands coming to me, says, hey, we want to leverage UGC content. Which now is like, everybody's like, of course, like we all do that. But back then was like leveraging UGC to drive awareness and then people to consider buying the product. And that's where a lot of CPG brands came to me. I didn't have any background in the CPG world, right? But then I started having like large CPG brand, large retailers coming to me with that ask. And very quickly the question came up of, okay, I get a lot of views, but is it really driving sales? And at that point, and obviously it was mostly brick and mortar sales, right? Because that's still where 70, 80% of CPG sales are happening. So I was like, okay, there is a problem to solve here. And this is where I build out of Mammoth Media, this company called VTags, that was an attribution platform from social creator content to in store sales. And that's what got me over two to three years deep into the CPG world. Food, beverage, essentially a lot of large brands that I work with that got me up to speed very quickly on the CPG world, but also with a very different angle and different way to look at how you market cpg. And in parallel, I was already very close to Mike Cesario, founder and CEO of Liquid Death, and was, you know, always talking about, you know, more the pay media side of how you can leverage it to scale Liquid Death. And Mike very quickly says, hey, can you advise us? Is like, I would love to. And from there, you know, like you quoted, I went from advising to pretty quickly chief Media Officer to run all, all, all paid media for Liquid Death.

[Alison Schiff]

But, well, not just a Chief Media officer because in June, just a few months ago, you had Digital Commerce Officer added to your title. So now you're the Chief Media and Digital Commerce Officer, which is a very interesting title because you were just talking about how so many CPG sales still happen in store. So what does that addition mean in practice? What's changed about your job? Like, why does it make sense to combine these two roles? Are you selling more water online?

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, I mean, that's a very good question. So yes, why digital commerce is because digital commerce is where actually CPG retail sales are growing the fastest. Right? So obviously Amazon is all digital. So first that this is a big retailer that we at. Liquid death is massive for us. And so that part. But then when you look at the other one, the target, the Kroger, the Walmart, all of them are growing through massive digital penetration. So a lot more sales are occurring through digital. And digital doesn't mean they buy and they receive necessarily through someone that ships at their door. It's what a lot of people call online and pickup delivery. Right? So you order and then people pull, the shoppers are pulling off the shelf and then you can pick it up or it delivers to your house. And this is what really drives growth right now at those retailers. You can talk to the Walmart exec, to all those different execs, like, yeah, this is where it's at, right? And you look at, you know, all those companies are public. That's a big metric that are reporting on what drives retail, digital retail sales. Well, when you're in a store, it's pretty easy. What you need to grab attention, it's end cap, right? It's display. That's how you get attention in the digital world. You don't, you have basically endless shelves, but you don't have end caps. What is the end cap? What grabs the attention? It's media, right? So what drives growth in digital world is media. So now when you see, hey, the focus is push digital because this is where the growth is for the retailer, what supports that media. It made a lot of sense for us to combine all under me. So what does it mean for me from a day to day standpoint is now I'm not just buying media, I'm also managing all the relationship with the retailers from a dot com perspective. And I'm also now owning the P and L from a revenue standpoint, right? So, so it's a big, it's, it's a big jump. It's exciting though. And now I can also see the direct impact of everything that I do from a media standpoint, from a growth standpoint and on the revenue side.

[Alison Schiff]

So I want to spend a ton of time talking about measurement. And for anyone who's listening and not watching, Benoit just took a sip of a liquid death from the liquid death can. So I'm pretty sure that everyone listening knows what liquid death is. But I just want to make sure that I actually say it. You're one of the most entertaining, wacky, hilarious brands out there. You sell canned water, so still sparkling flavored, sparkling. I think there's also iced tea now packaged in tall boy cans marketed like it's for people at a heavy metal concert. And the campaigns are like really unhinged in the best possible way. So when you talk about grabbing attention, that's what you're doing. That's infusing your media with really fun off the wall stuff. And you guys handle most of your creative work in house. And I think it's worth rattling off just a few campaigns to give people a taste. I know you weren't here for all of these, but they're just, they're so fun. You guys collaborated with a snowboard brand to build a deliberately flat, like deadly snowboard with no edges. I think they're right behind you.

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah.

[Alison Schiff]

Right now. And then you dared pro snowboarders to try and not die. You made skateboards with just a little bit of Tony Hawk's actual blood mixed into the paint. There was a collaboration with elf, the cosmetics brand, to make coffin shaped makeup sets called corpse paint. That's right. There was one with Amazon where you launched Certified Smart Water targeted at college students. And the joke was that there was a pseudo scientific theory water molecules could retain thoughts and words. So you could prompt your Alexa device and say, alexa, make my Liquid Death smarter. And then choose a subject like quantum physics and then have Alexa read textbooks, textbook excerpts to their can of water. And then I guess you would pass your test. There really are just so many examples. I was having a lot of fun reading about them and I can't list them them all, even just the recent ones. But I want to talk out and talk out. I want to zoom out and talk. I can speak English about strategy. Like how involved are you as the media person in the creative process? Like how closely do you work with the creative folks at Liquid Death and how closely, like should creative and media work together? Because I feel like the closer the better. Right. Like that's when you end up with really cool stuff that also works from your perspective, from the media perspective.

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. And, and we're going to have to dig in, into the details because from a creative standpoint, and I'm, I've been very vocal about this, it's, there's also look at the stage of the funnel and different creative at different stages. So what you meant, what we talked about, all those different campaigns that you mentioned here are mostly upper funnel awareness campaigns. So they are here to grab attention. And one goal is to Remember the name Liquid Death. Now we understand that we are beverage, but not necessarily know exactly what kind of beverage. After that we go in the second stage where we, we go after all those folks and making sure they understand it's all healthy beverage, water, tea, energy. So from a creative standpoint, we have our own internal team agency called Death Machine. They are people that are coming up with ideas all the time. I'm heavily involved with them. We have those, you know, weekly in person meeting on Thursday morning and I'm part of those meetings. So I'm not obviously the creative guy, but I'm part because now what we do is also making sure that everything we create is built to actually drive sales. Right. So it's not just, hey, let's get fun, funny and get people attention. It's also what is going to educate people, what is going to drive people to the store, what is going to get people to swipe their credit cards. So I'm heavily involved on making sure that's what we do now from a upper funnel standpoint. But from a mid funnel and lower funnel standpoint, I'm heavily involved to the point that we test and actually share data back. And I know we'll talk about measurement at some point, but I share data back to the creative team so they understand what, what drives consideration, what drives sales. Right. So they can then start tweaking the creative and create different versions of those creative from a, from just a pure creative standpoint. So it is. People won't necessarily realize that, but I work very closely from a media standpoint with the creative team and actually the creative team is very receptive to that which people's like, they cannot, they must be just creative people and not really care about the data. The complete opposite. They are all looking for what works, what doesn't work.

[Alison Schiff]

You could also argue though that wild and hilarious creative does some of the media buying for you in a sense. Right. You earn so much organic coverage because the stuff that the creative team comes up with is so fun and made for sharing. It gains all of this social attention that you don't have to pay for. So do you think about earned media in that way? And how do you consider earned media when you, you're coming up with your media plan, deciding how to allocate your spend and I'm assuming the creative folks are also keeping that in mind, knowing that this is just going to travel pretty far without necessarily having to put as much money behind it.

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, earned media was the key matrix for the first couple years of Liquid Death.

[Sarah Sleuths]

Right.

[Benoit Vatere]

That was the way to get massive volume of eyeballs at a very, very, very low cost. So that was the key metric. Now it's a little bit different because now we have massive awareness already. Right. But we need people to consider buying the product. So we have. Now we're trying to close the gap between people that know us and people that buy us. And so the problem, the good thing with our media, it's free, right? Kind of free. You need to have the creative, obviously, to be done. Now the problem with our media is you don't control in front of who you're getting in front of. Right. And so for us, that's why also I got in and really get involved from a media standpoint is. And that's why also I started my career around, that is with paid media, you can decide who you get in front of, how often you get in front of them, and you can get them to take action. Right. And so to, to, to try to summarize all of this, we care a lot about our media at the beginning. We care less about our media now, but now we care a lot about what we get in front of with the right message in order to close that bra, that gap between awareness and consideration.

[Alison Schiff]

So it's getting more and more strategic, more precise.

[Benoit Vatere]

Correct. Correct.

[Alison Schiff]

I want to talk about where you do spend because, I mean, I don't know if I want to call Liquid Death a Challenger brand because like you were saying, Liquid Death has a lot of mind share. But I'll just, I'll lump you in with Challenger brands. And Challenger brands, like, they go ham on paid social. It's their main channel, especially when really when they're starting out. But you've made an interesting case against paid social in some cases. I remember reading an interview that you did with the Drum last year where you were talking about how like Organic Social works so well for Liquid Death. So like, why, like, why pay for it? Like you'd rather put pay dollars into CTV where you can tell your whole brand story on a bigger screen. Well, like if people aren't like me and don't just lie down in their bed and stream all their shows on their phone, but you can really stand out in that way. Like you, you put it like this. I'll just quote you from the story. So like when Liquid Death shows up between a farmer's insurance spot and a domino spot, people ask like, what just happened? Like, what did I just see? And you can stand out like just more on TV than you can on Social. So our Challenger brands and like D2C brands that lean like super heavily into social. Are they making a mistake or is that just the natural way of things? That's how you have to start. And then you can branch out and think a little, I don't know, bigger. If bigger is the right word.

[Benoit Vatere]

I think the answer to that is few folds. This is how you have to start at a, as a very early stage company, you have to start through social because this is where you can really deploy not huge amount of dollars and get a return pretty quickly. Now what I always say to everybody that is starting in the CPG world or on the DTC side, this is I call Facebook crack cocaine. Right. You get hooked on this very quickly. But then the problem is that it hurts really bad because you want more and more and more, but it doesn't perform as well. Right. And, and why it's because the way Facebook, all those platforms are built is to make you believe that you can. They will decide who you should get in front of because they know better their audience than you do. And then also they will know what to serve to who in terms of creative because they test and they have a bunch of algorithm in the backend that will decide that. The problem is when you do that, you have zero control around, you know, your media mix. And also from, from a, a creative standpoint, you basically think that you can do everything in one creative from awareness to consideration to conversion. And I think that's the biggest mistake ever. And that's something that doesn't scale. And then a lot of people's like, oh my gosh, the cost of acquisition, my CAC on Facebook just went through the roof. I was like, of course. Because what I call about this golden core, the first few million of dollars that you will make are people that will convert no matter what. Now when you start going beyond those first few million dollars now it gets very complicated. And that's why you have to really lay out the fundamentals of marketing and your media mix. And so I would say you have to start with this, but very quickly you have to understand that you need to eat those of different stages. And for me, social media is not an awareness play. This is not where you get awareness. Like you what I mentioned around ctv, I stand out between a pod of four ads and I'm number two ads in the pod. Now I stand out. Now when I have an ad that is in the middle of a three thousands ads or million pieces of content that people scroll through, it's very, very difficult to stand out if you ever stand out. So for me though, what I look at from a, from a social media standpoint, it's consideration. So people that now know us, if, and that's why I leverage ugc is if you see someone talking about product, encouraging you to try the product, this can be very, very efficient. But this is now not ad units that you run and you throw, you know what they say, hey, go ahead and throw five different ads a week. This is how you find the right one. No, no, no, no, no. For me, I don't do that. I do up a funnel on the bigger screen and then I target for consideration on social.

[Alison Schiff]

So you mentioned not giving credit for something that would have happened anyway, which is another way to say incrementality. And that's what I want to talk about in the second half. We are going to nerd out so heavily on measurement. Stick with us.

[Sarah Sleuths]

Hello listeners. I'm Sarah Sleuths, editorial director of Ad Exchanger, and I have with me today Anna Slater, VP of Global Brand Partnerships at Verve. Welcome, Anna.

[Anna Slater]

Thanks so much, Sarah. It's great to be here.

[Sarah Sleuths]

So we know that AI is changing how people plan trips. I've heard the anecdotes from my friends. I've done it myself. So can you give some insight into traveler behavior right now?

[Anna Slater]

Yeah, absolutely. I really don't want to date myself, but I've been in the travel industry now for almost 20 years and having worked so long in one particular industry, it's been amazing to see the overall progression. And I really feel now that the adoption of AI and this trip planning process is the most impactful transformation we've seen over that time. And looking at our own LLM data here at Verve, consumers are using it for general discovery. Around 28% of the prompts that we're seeing relate to these types of inquiries. And this is growing. And AI use for travel inspiration has doubled in the past year, especially amongst the 25 to 34 year old audience, which it's grown to around 18% adoption. And we're also noticing there's a shift away from keyword searches like cheap flights to Spain and treating AI now more like a travel agent, which is adapting in real time. However, there's still an element of nervousness around utilizing AI to book, you know, since the prompts that we're seeing here are certainly dominated by that discovery, the timing, the itinerary building. But I'm sure if we're going to have this conversation this time next year, that will have all changed.

[Sarah Sleuths]

So if I'M a brand and I know that AI is owning discovery. People are using it as a travel agent, but not for the booking part of the equation. Where does that leave brands who are trying to reach travelers?

[Anna Slater]

Good question. Travelers are using AI to navigate every stage of their holiday planning. But the biggest challenge with this new way of researching it's having on brands is the pace at which it takes consumers from dreaming to consideration. Prompts get incredibly specific, and in a very fast way. Someone can go from give me trip ideas straight to a shortlist without ever touching a brand's website. You know, and we're also seeing really heavy vendor comparison, you know, with travelers using AI to sort of audit those travel providers and then benchmark prices. So by the time the brand actually shows up in the conversation, the shortlist may already be set. So it is a very difficult moment for travel brands at this, at this time. And then furthermore, that intent is scattered across more and more devices and platforms. But these conversations, they're carrying some of the richest signals that we have ever seen on intent. And AI is forcing the conversation to accelerate the decision making. And if they can tap in to use these signals to target, they're going to get better performance overall and have a chance at winning that conversion of the traveler's itinerary.

[Sarah Sleuths]

So you just described a very complicated, complex, scattered and rapidly changing set of consumer behavior. So what steps do you recommend to brands who are trying to capture this consumer intent at this, at this moment in time?

[Anna Slater]

Yeah, absolutely. And this is conversations that we're having with our clients daily at the moment. And the answer really is twofold. Firstly, travel brands need to see the intent and then also follow up and ensure that they show up in it. But there are a lot of brands that are still missing out on both right now. So on the seeing side, you know, that's LM data, the conversational signals that we're pulling from AI chat tools. We layer them on top of actually search and zero party signals. And when you combine this, it provides a bigger, fuller picture of consumer intent. And importantly, you know, the LLM data shouldn't be seen as a replacement. It's a real complementary intent signal. So obviously we're encouraging brands to sort of see what's out there in market. And then on the showing up side, it means being present inside the AI conversation itself and not just hoping that the LLM happens to mention you in the brand.

[Sarah Sleuths]

Well, thank you Anna for those concrete steps and recommendations and thank you to Verve for supporting adxchanger podcasts.

[Anna Slater]

Thanks so Much. Sarah.

[Alison Schiff]

All right, we are back. And as promised, it is time to be absolute dorks about measurement. So we published a story in April about liquid death's approach to incrementality. It's actually one of the top three most read stories of the year on Ad Exchanger. So it clearly struck a nerve. I mean, that's kind of crazy. I know, it's awesome. And it just shows how much people want to really understand measurement. Like it is the, the most important topic. Anytime we publish stories about measurement, they, they generate a lot of traffic. But this one just went nuts. And the setup of that piece was basically that behind all of the really fun and wild creative and all the edgy branding like we were talking about during the first half, Liquid death has the same gnarly measurement problem that every CPG brand has. Because I know it's changing, but a lot of sales happen at the register and not online. And that's like where media measurement goes to die. That was one of my, very proud of that. That was one of my jokes in this story. You can't, you know, you can't put a pixel on a can of water. So as the media guy, you've, you have to measure the impact of your spend. And like you were saying during the first half, you're responsible for that. So like, what do you, like, what do you do? Like we're going to get into the details, but you got that assignment, you, you sit down, you're like, damn, I need to figure this out. Like, what was, what was your to do list? Like, how did you start thinking about dealing with the measurement issue?

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, it was my me doing myself, my own to do list, right? Because from the very early days pre Liquid S, I was like based on the last company I started, right? Before that, it was all about trying to understand the impact. And I know also as a media buyer buying media for a long time that ROAS is not the metric, right? I can drive IROAS because I'm buying against branded keywords or so different ways that you can show iroas. But if I was not spending that money, I would get the same amount of sales, right? So this is where I was like, I need to be able to measure my media and not just my media from A1 channel, but my media mix overall about how impact sales, like you say sales in retail. And really quickly as I start thinking about that problem is the biggest problem to solve is the quality of the data, right? Because if you don't have the right data to measure what the Sales have been at a granular enough level of geo, but also timing, you won't be able to measure properly. And a lot of folks out there says, oh, incrementality is not that difficult. There are models out there. Yeah, there are very well known models out there, but they are all building that for D2C brands. Right. So they plug in their shopify feed of sales, they know exactly when, who, what time, how many times. That is easy incrementality. Now you start moving that into a store, it's a very different story. So you need to be able to understand how many of your products were sold in that zip code or if you can go more granular. But I haven't been able to get more granular than zip code. Add a zip code for what exactly? Product at what store. Exactly. So you can start measuring movements of those cells. And it's difficult. Is very, very difficult. Is very expensive too because this data is not free. Right. Most of the time you have to buy this data from the retailers. Yes, it's true. You buy the sales data from the retailer themselves. They don't give that to you. So you need to do that. Then you need to make sure that all the data is basically templatized the same way. So now you can build models on top. So that was the first job and it took a while to get all this data in. Now we're probably going to talk about platforms that can do that for you. Like, you know, like what we had in the first story with ibotta and I bought I leveraging circana and a lot of different things like that. So you can work with those kind of partners. But that's one channel. If I want to work across all my channel, I still need my own data. And that, that was the first part of my to do list. And then the second part is who am I measuring with? Right. Do I measure with the retailer? Do I measure myself? Do I do both? Yeah, that was that and that was the last couple years of work.

[Alison Schiff]

It's a lot of, it's a lot of stuff. I want to go back though to something you were saying about roas, like a return on ad spend, which is something I think you basically ignore. That came up when we chatted for the story about IBOTTA incrementality and I've heard people voice a similar opinion that roas, I mean it's not useless but it's just very limiting because it leads you to chase reach and quick conversions. You're prioritizing these immediate sales over Long term profits and then over time that's just obvious for obvious reasons a bad idea. But do you still track roas just like with a grain of salt? Is it still just one input for you or are you super skeptical about the value?

[Benoit Vatere]

No, I track it, but attached to another metric. I track it attached to new to brand metric because combined together is a very good proxy into incrementality. If it's iOS with IMW2 brand, this is most likely very incremental. Right. So I didn't look at ROAS on its own. I do it with YouTube brand attached to it. Which is why also some of the what I was calling out, the branded keywords could be actually very incremental on the search side. Right. Because if you do massive upper funnel then you have a lot of new to brand coming in through your brand terms. So that's. I use still roas, but just if it's attached into brand, if it's R on its own, I don't even pay attention. I don't look at it at all. And actually for me it's sometimes a single. If the R is too high, I'm like, okay guys, what is going on here? This is, this is not, this is probably, this is not probably. This is for sure not incremental. Go back at it. Because there's a problem with this campaign. So that's actually usually the opposite.

[Alison Schiff]

That's so interesting, using it as like a negative metric.

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, actually I do.

[Alison Schiff]

So let's talk about how you practically embraced incrementality testing. So running controlled experiments where some people see your campaign, some people don't, and then watching to see if the people who saw it actually bought more. Which of course sounds extremely straightforward, but then it is quite difficult when you're trying to do that well in the physical retail world. So you knew what you had to do. How did you do it?

[Benoit Vatere]

Well, once I had the data then there are a lot of different models out there. Some are open source, some are three different platforms that you can pay to run those models. But there's two different type of. I mean, I'm pretty sure all people that are listening know about this. But there's, you know, you can do your MMTs, you can do your MMTs. The MMTs are where you actually hold a certain region and you try to find a similar region where you run the media and you compare the lift on sales on the the two regions. And those MMTs are pretty lengthy to run. But then you have platforms like, you know what we do with. And I think we'll talk about it with ibotta. But it's. You have synthetic control, right? So you don't necessarily need to hold. You can run your media in the entire country but then you can start analyzing the data to understand some that actually didn't receive the, the impression and some that did. So we run MMTs all the time to understand the impact of cells and that lets you calibrate some of your models from an MMM standpoint. Now I don't like MMM at all and I think from all emerging brands or fast growing brands MMM are very difficult to, to run or to believe in because you need two years of data on the most of the MMM models. And what I was doing two years ago versus what I do now, like it's like it's like 20 years for any other CPG companies that have been out there. So it's impossible to really run an MMM of what we do. So now I'm like really looking at more like what I call, I call that myself, Agile mmm. So on a much shorter time period. But try to understand the incrementality of this which is for me basically lowering the threshold of how accurate it is because for me I need signal, I don't need perfection and I'm looking for loud signal because if it's not loud, if it's not strong, it's probably not moving the needle as much as I need because I'm not looking like a lot of very large CPG brands to either have a single digit growth year over year or even worse try to not decline. I'm looking for double, high double digit growth and what is going to move I double digit growth is big swings swinging for the fences and so I should find those through shorter time period on mmm even if the, even if we believe it's not a very accurate but it's so strong that even with more data it will hold. So that's how I look at it right now. Pretty high level description of what we do but that's, that's how we look at it.

[Alison Schiff]

And one thing you've been doing with IBOTTA that I think is really interesting is a focus on incrementality that isn't just about new to brand buyers. That's not how you think about it. Although in CPG a lot of brands do think of it that way but they really shouldn't because there is no such thing as loyalty. Like water drinkers will balance between four or five different brands. It really depends on what's there, what's Cheaper. So the more interesting cohort to you is lapsed buyers. So people who bought Liquid Death maybe once or twice and then drifted. And I actually, I think I'm in that category because I, I can think of a few times where I be sure they can. I'm like, yeah, cool. And then I often just reach for like the dollar Poland Spring bottle in New York City just out of like laziness and a reflex. So how does having that. But I think Liquid Death is like so cool. So like why don't, why am I buying it more? Right. So how does having incrementality data like change how you think about that group, how you think about me? And how are you going to reach me better using paid media?

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's the lapse customer is a big one. Right. And for us we look at laps especially like you said, you usually buy amongst four or five different brands. So and data is pretty public out there. But for all the brands that are at scale, like all the big solar companies, more than 50% of the revenue are on people that are buying two to three times a year. So what we call the light buyers. And so for us that's that like I'm not looking at someone that lapsed because they buy, they bought six times and I need them to buy seventh, eighth time. For me I'm looking at people that bought once or twice and need to buy one more time. Right. So I'm focusing on that category heavily and those ones are actually should be easier because they already tried a product but also are worth going after because you already spent so much money to get them to try first. So now let's build up their halftime value and if we do it right it should be really worth it. So I think about those course all the time at all retailers and so and what we did with Ibotta, it's going at it with an offer, right? And so what is the right offer to get in front of them? Is it $0.50 off? Is it a dollar off? Is it $2 off? But then what is the right mix of offer versus incrementality? So is it worth to run at $0.50 because you get maybe I don't know, 10% left or to run at $2, but then it's only 20% left so it doesn't matter, right. It's more efficient to run under 50 cents. Offer, offer. So measuring incriminality against offer is really important and definitely works really well for labs in order to scale.

[Alison Schiff]

And what is the. I don't Know the sort of Threshold is it 2, someone tries it twice, they lapse, they try it a third time, they're good to go. Or what have you learned about what it takes to really push someone from aware of Liquid Death? They've tried it a few times to fly full on. You know, Liquid death is in my cart every time. Customer.

[Benoit Vatere]

Yeah, so that's actually a very interesting question because from back, from my other days on digital with apps you have those metrics, right? If someone opens the app at least four times in seven days, you know, they are retained forever. Like I remember back then when it was called Twitter, when the initial, the very first team of Twitter, I figured that out, right? I was like, hey, if you open three times in the first week and if you at least post once in the first, first two weeks, you are on it for a very long time. On the, on the CPG side, you don't have that. Actually, you people are just not loyal.

[Alison Schiff]

I'm so sorry.

[Benoit Vatere]

People are not loyal to CPG brands. People want to believe that, but it's not. Now, yes, you have the extreme loyal people that just are hardcore fans and we are probably the brand that has the most of them, right. We have those folks that will just do anything that will get the, the logo of the brand tattooed on themselves. Like and, but that's, and we love those people because also they are, you know, they are out there talking about it. But that's a small core. That's not how you get to be a billion dollar brand, right? In order to be a billion dollar brand, you need to get the people that are not that heavy and committed. And so this is where the other folks are just non loyal. Like you said, you are working in New York City, you know, you don't see the liquidity. You're going to pick another one. It doesn't matter, right? And so that's why it's so important to have those campaigns going, because people are not loyal. But now there is no such recipes. Like I need them to buy three times and they will come back. No, doesn't happen. You will have to bring them back.

[Alison Schiff]

Loyalty is also such a strange beast for, well, for anything, but particularly cpg because the only brands that I'm extremely loyal to are ones that I grew up with. So I buy Tom's toothpaste because my dad bought Tom's Silly Strawberry Toothpaste. Like I'm an adult woman and I use silly Strawberry toothpaste and I buy it even though it's a little more expensive. But I don't always buy it. Like, I sometimes buy AIM because it's a dollar. And I'm not actually as loyal as I think I am. So there's not really a question there. But it is really difficult, the science of loyalty, because there is no such thing. There's so much emotion, there are weird memories, there are associations, and there's just how much money you literally have in your bank account and groceries are expensive

[Benoit Vatere]

and what gets in front of you. Also, what do you have when you walk by and you see an end cap with a product with a markdown on the products and you've heard of that one before, you pick it up. You don't go down the aisle to try to find something else. It's really, you know, effort and just looking for the right deal. And what, what did you hear last? If, like, for example, if we have one of our crazy campaign that you saw on Social, and then you walk into Target and you see it and it's like, oh, wow. Oh, yeah, let me remember that. Let me pick it up. There's so many factors, but for sure, this is not loyalty. And I get into a lot of arguments around that. This is not loyalty. In CPG that will get you to scale.

[Alison Schiff]

I am My Dog agrees with Good Lord Oliver.

[Benoit Vatere]

Or you can keep it in. That's actually pretty good.

[Alison Schiff]

You kind of want to keep it in.

[Benoit Vatere]

Yes.

[Alison Schiff]

If people got to minute 37 and 54 seconds, then they are with us.

[Benoit Vatere]

That's right. They are in. And they love the dog.

[Alison Schiff]

What I was going to say before that distraction is that I'm such a sucker for a sale and you have to be really careful about sales because then you train people to just pay less. So it becomes a sort of, you

[Benoit Vatere]

know, yes and no down to the bottom. Yes and no. Because I think like you said, the, the, the, the discount is more like you get a deal more than really pay attention to the final price. Right. And so, and also there's a strategy about when you put an offer on the product, especially in brick and mortar, usually it goes with display. Right. You get on the end cap or you have a yellow tag on it. So there's a lot of things that come with the promo that are not just educating on the price, but just getting the attention.

[Alison Schiff]

So there's one other topic I wanted to broach before we run out of time. This went very quickly and it's kind of related to, I know, questions of humanity and loyalty and how do you appeal to someone when you're not actually appealing to someone. And I speak of the rise of agentic AI and what that means for cpg. Like this idea that AI systems might start making or heavily shaping grocery purchase decisions. And in that world like a product's price point and the nutritional metadata and that kind of stuff might matter more to the algorithm that any piece of creative or even like what the person feels and what they would act, what they would really what they would do if they were making the choices. And Liquid Death has built its brand almost entirely on like cool vibes and entertainment and comedy and just like fun in general. So the way the world seems to be going, like how are you thinking about it? Does. Does that worry you?

[Benoit Vatere]

No, it doesn't at all. Because I think you will still need to be aware in order to consider and I think my opinion and what I see and where it's going is all agentic. You know, path to purchase is from mid to lower funnel. It's just what Google was at the beginning. It's search. Right. So it is. You're going to go to. What is your favorite agent to ask? Hey, I don't know, I'm on this new weight loss journey. What is the right beverage to drink? Well, the agent is going to recommend different beverage. Well, you're still going to have to pick one. And the one that you're going to pick is the one that again has the right price or you remember of again the lack of loyalty is going to play in there. So for me it's just a new type of discovery, so a new type of consideration, but doesn't really hurt the awareness. So you're still going to have to do the work up a funnel. And so I'm not worried that it's going to replace what happens on social, what happens on tv, all those different things. But now we need to make sure we show up though. So that is what worries me. It's like, how do we show up on those prompts? And you know, it's moving so fast. Like they're releasing a new model every six days at this point and the data that they are tapping into, we don't know really what it is and we don't know how index everything. So this is kind of the early days of SEO, but for agents trying to understand, but it's like now you understand, but then two days later it may be different. So that's what worries me is like how do I show up there?

[Alison Schiff]

If it's any comfort, no one has any answers.

[Sarah Sleuths]

Exactly.

[Benoit Vatere]

That's true. That's true. That's very true, but at some point, some will, and I want to make sure I'm one of them.

[Alison Schiff]

So, I mean, I have no doubt you are a very plugged in dude. My last question, totally different kind of question. What is the most unhinged marketing idea that you or your creative team wanted to do but it never actually happened? Something just, like, hilarious for the cutting room floor. And while you think, I will share one from the CMO of manscaped, Marcelo Cortez, he came on the podcast. He said that they were thinking about doing, like, a pair of testicles floating like a balloon floating over Coachella. It was going to be branded and they got close to doing it, but they didn't end up doing it. The fact that it was even being considered is, like, really funny. Is there some crazy thing that you guys talked about, but then you just never did it?

[Benoit Vatere]

But that's the thing, I think. And that's only where we are the. The only brand that can answer that. No, we've always done it. We always done it. We always did it. The only time, sometimes, maybe where we couldn't push is because, let's say it was a Super bowl ad and we couldn't push it because the NFL would agree. Wouldn't agree to it. But then we push it on social. So there is nothing that we didn't do because also all the ads that we have, we keep them, right? It's. We're not working like a traditional agency. We have a brief. We're going to create a campaign for that date. We're coming up with ideas all the time. And sometimes the ideas are just parked and come back later. And we never park because this is not. This is too much. We park it because this is not funny, right? So that at this point, we don't want to touch it anymore. But the. We never had something like, oh, this is way too much. No, no, no. Never. We say, this is not the right time to run this, but we're going to keep it. Like the. For example, our thing about drinking on the job, which was two Super Bowls ago, that's an idea that came up, like, maybe like three years before, right? And we never had a chance to run it. And we realized that for that super bowl, that was probably a good idea. So the answer. That was a long, long answer. But the short answer is, no, never.

[Alison Schiff]

I love that. Um, okay, for real, last question. Are you the most hydrated man in media? Like, how many cans of water do you drink a day?

[Benoit Vatere]

I drink a lot of them. And that's my favorite one.

[Anna Slater]

The.

[Benoit Vatere]

The black one, which is a sparkling water. And I drink a lot of them. I. I'm, I'm probably, like, I would say seven to eight cans a day, for sure.

[Alison Schiff]

Benoit, I'm so thirsty. I'm going to go grab a drink of water.

[Benoit Vatere]

Please do. Please do. And I won't, I won't be bothered if it's not liquid. That. Because you're going to come back to it at some point when I get in front of you.

[Alison Schiff]

You're right. I'm lapsed. For now only.

[Sarah Sleuths]

This episode was sponsored by vrv, an ad solution that helps brands activate consumer intent in real time across platforms. As AI reshapes how people plan vacations. Verve helps travel brands show up when it counts. Find out more at www.verve.com. that's V-E-R-V-E.com.