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[00:00]
A
On the show today, we have an incredible guest I want to welcome, Bino Vatar. He is the Chief Media Officer and Digital Commerce Officer at Liquid Death and he is the best person I have ever met when it comes to talking about advertising and how you use advertising to generate real revenue. He's built a full funnel media system. He has unique creative equations that fuel that system and he has a real methodical process for how creative and messaging maps to that system. And we're going to break down all of those for you on today's show. And he, he told me something that there is a certain metric that if you as a marketer follow it, you are destined to fail. And the reality is most marketers follow that metric. And so we're going to tell you what that metric is. We're going to tell you how to avoid failure and how to think about your marketing spend in completely new and actionable ways. Benoit, we are so excited to have you on the show today. So Benoit, I think the story of Liquid Death in marketing circles has been told a ton of and people know the skull, they know kind of the origin story of Mike and how that all came to be. I think there's an untold story around Liquid Death that's way more important that no one knows or understands. And that's the fact that you actually have figured out how to build remarkable systems and creative to actually drive sales. It's not just like you didn't sell all these products because you're cool. Obviously being cool helped. But you have to do real marketing over and over again to actually penetrate such a crowded market like you're in. And so maybe just to kick us off, give us your origin story, like how the heck did you get to Liquid Death? What was like the first thing you worked on? And then from there I want to go into kind of the systems and everything that we're going to cover on the show today.
[01:47]
B
So yeah, you're completely right. We've been talking over and over about our amazing creative machine, Liquid Death, but we've built a lot from that angle all the way down to yourself. So from my origin story and how I got to liquidates, it's actually a very, I would say non linear way to get there. I'm not a CGC guy exactly. I'm not a CPG guys. I'm a founder, I'm a startup guy. I build a lot of ad tech platforms over the years because I always, from a media standpoint, never had really what I wanted to buy media properly and to Buy actually media the way I want, which we're going to talk about, going from awareness all the way down to conversion. And so the last platform that I built was a rebate redemption platform for measurement, meaning I wanted to measure the impact of creators on social, in retail sales, brick and mortar retail. So I built an attribution platform, which at the same time got me in front of Liquid Death in the very early days, before actually even the water was in the can with Mike Cesario, our CEO and founder. And over the years as I was building, we always kept in touch, became friends, and I was always here to kind of exchange ideas on the media side. And then it came from exchanging ideas on the media side to becoming an official advisor and then also allowing me to really build a platform that we leverage within liquid debt that I was building. And then from there we went from doing this to, hey, you need to come in full time to run the show when it comes to media and acquisition. And that's how I joined as a, as a chief media officer a little bit over two years ago. Now.
[03:33]
A
First of all, I think that's just such a cool story around like creating situation. Just because you were out building, trying to solve a problem you had experienced firsthand, you knew a bunch of other brands were experiencing. People, by the way, still really experiencing that problem. But I imagine you took all of what you learned and you brought that into liquid death. And that was probably the foundation of the early systems. Because I think when it comes to liquid death, people talk about the creative, the design, the esthetic, they don't talk about the distribution. And to me, like one of my mantras in life is distribution is undefeated. Like, you have to figure out distribution at a reasonable cost that works for your business or you don't have a business. And it seems like to me, like that's that at the, the core DNA of who you are is you're trying to figure out distribution and build systems for distribution. So you come into Liquid Death, you kind of have this background, like, how do you get started? How, like, how do you actually figure out what media to buy? How do you figure out if it's working or not? These are questions that everybody watching this is struggling with. And so I want to like hear how it started and kind of how it's evolved to where it is now.
[04:37]
B
For me, first order of business was to understand where the money was spent and at what stage of the funnel. So I came in with my full funnel approach from day one and now I started to categorize of that spend. So first I understand where we spend, how we spend, at what stage of the funnel. Categorize the whole thing. Now you start understanding, hey, we may spend too much on one stage, not enough on the other stage. Now, in parallel, I had to also understand if it was working or not, right? So measurement was another thing. Obviously the first measurement that you have access to is measurement on platform, like on the Amazon platform, on Meta, you name it. It's not perfect, but it is a signal. And by the way, that's been always my mantra in what I work with. I don't need perfect, I need signals. Yes, yes, search for perfection. This is important, I think, for the right metric, the right confidence level, you will never get it or it's going to take forever to get it. And by the time you get it, it's over, right? So signals, strengths of the signals is what matter. And I was looking for that from now that I categorize my media mix what is working, what is not working. First I got in the platform and understanding. And a lot of people in media pay attention to roas, right? Because you are, especially in the early days, you want to understand if, when you spend money, do you get money in return? If I spend $1, do I make $3 or 2 or 50 cents? Right? And people start making decisions on that. This is a big issue. If you do that, here is why. Yes, you want money return on your investment, but the other metrics that you need to pay attention to, because I can, as a media buyer, drive very high return, but those high returns are actually fake. What I mean by that is they are not incremental. That means that the platform will tell you, Meta will tell you. You spend $1, you made three. The problem is those $3 that you made that Meta says they were driving because someone clicked on an ad of you. An ad would have happened without the ad as well. So you need to understand the incrementality of your spend. Now, this is a big word in media, incrementality. And there's a lot of people talking about it and there's a lot of platform being built. For me, the best signal of incrementality is I'm acquiring new people to the brand, right? So the new to brand metric was very important as I was categorizing the efficiency of my media because I couldn't run incremental tests on previous data. It was going to take me months, an mmm of two years. Those kind of things that big brands do, that will never get me where I need to be within the next couple of weeks. So when I start mapping roas with new to brand, I understand if the roas is high and the percentage of new to brand is high, that means that it is probably very incremental. So now I can just triage my spends based on that filter. Now after that, as I start, I understand where I spend, I understand the mixed by funnel stage, and I understand do I have some kind of incrementality or not. So that was the, that was the beginning.
[07:53]
A
That was the beginning. There's two key lessons there for anybody watching in what you just said. The first is you wanted to move spend full funnel and you needed, you wanted to audit spend and make sure the spend was full funnel. When people think about brand dollars or creative dollars, most consumer companies are just at the top of the funnel. Most B2B companies are just at the bottom of the funnel and very few are very full funnel. So that's, I think having a full funnel media approach is something any company, regardless of how small or big you are, can do. The second thing that I think is even more important is when you talked about the roas plus new customers, we covered a lot on today's show. You probably have some questions. We are giving you free additional resources to answer any of those. You can scan that QR code or click the link in the description below and go get everything you need. I've got a book coming out in September called Loop. One of the core points in that book is this idea of creative equations that the marketers that win measure their marketing very differently and measure it very creatively. And if you just measure the easiest thing to measure, one, it's probably wrong like roas, and two, it's highly competitive, it's highly saturated. Everybody's doing stuff around the easiest stuff to measure, which means you're paying way more for it than you should. And so you gave us one creative equation. Are there other like creative equations that you've used over the years that you felt like really unlocked growth for the brand and unlock sales?
[09:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's the one that actually I'm paying a lot of attention on right now, which is the true incrementality. And there is a lot, especially in those days and probably a lot of listeners have heard a lot of, for example, TikTok shop or like social school. It's social commerce. And I'm very curious about the impact of social commerce on true sales. And you can see that maybe from social commerce that for me is mostly a discovery tool. More than it is a scalable tool. What is the impact on the scalable sales? Retail sales, let's say on Amazon.com or walmart.com on target.com we are by the way, a brand that doesn't sell D2C. Right. We don't sell directly to customer on our website. So that's why I'm not talking about it. We only sell on retailer website. But what I'm paying a lot of attention in talking about this, you know, equation, I'm looking at what I call now incremental roas, right. And so that means that this incremental rise and this is where it gets a little bit more technical and you need models and platforms. But there's a school of thought right now where we can get that data pretty quickly because models move or better.
[10:28]
A
Yes.
[10:29]
B
And I can understand if my incrementality is true or not. And so the incrementality and maybe to try to simplify, please, for the audience is I look at a region, two regions, right. Like let's say LA and New York. And let's say they are very similar in terms of shoppers. For me, I'm going to spend money in New York and not spend money in la. And I'm going to see if my sales go up in New York and don't go up in in la. And if it does, that means that what I did in New York works because if I didn't do it in LA and he did if and he didn't move, then that means that yes, it worked. So that's a very simple. If people are very deep in incrementality on the audience, they'll say what is he talking about? But this is kind of the fundamentals, right?
[11:11]
A
Yeah.
[11:11]
B
Is there incrementality in sales with the media that you spend? So that's something that I pay a lot of attention that I'm trying to actually simplify because out there there's a lot of complexity around that a lot of takes forever to do. How can we shorten the cycle to test? How can we get the data fast? But I'm looking at the incrementality that goes beyond what we talk about new to brand and roas like true incrementality.
[11:37]
A
When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, do you know if you're showing up or not? At HubSpot, we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in AI search. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Go check out HubSpot AEO. You can trial it for free and it's going to help you understand how you're showing up in AI search and how you can show up even more. Yeah, so I think you're making a couple points here that are really important. One that like innovations in data science and AI is making the ability to do these tests easier and faster and which is really changing advertising and media buying at its heart. The second thing you're basically saying is there's lots of different ways something can be incremental, right? And you can look at incremental one channel versus the other, one region versus the other. The actual important part is actually setting up the experiment and having a thesis to know what am I actually trying to figure out. And even if you have thousands of dollars, you still can do small incrementality experiments to unlock insights, right?
[12:49]
B
Correct, correct. And I think that goes along with the other thing that I do a lot, which is testing. I test all the time, not just for incrementality, but for any metrics that matters. Right. So for example, another one that is very important for me in the consideration stage, which is the mid funnel, meaning people discover your product and are intrigued and want to try the product. For me it's the efficiency of driving from someone that see your ad to go to your pdp, right, your product page on the retailer, right on the dot com. And this efficiency can be measured by click through rate. Yeah, but click through rate can be misleading and maybe I'm going to go into too much details, but I think it's important for.
[13:36]
A
No, no, we want all the details here.
[13:39]
B
So click through rate is important. But if you have a good click through rate on a high cpm, it still drives a pretty expensive cost per click, which leads to a pretty expensive cost to get someone to your product page view. So click through rate is not the only metric. It's click through Rate CPM which gets you to your cost per click. Now there's even more than that is cost per click usually is correlated with the cost to get people to go to the product page view. Because if you click, usually you land on the product page view. But in the current world, especially when you're on social or any platforms, you have some kind of a loop happening. There's a pop up window that says you're leaving the site. There's a lot of that could happen that you don't Necessarily aware that will get people to click but don't land on your product page. So you need to measure that as well. So that's why I look at the cost per product page view and that I test a lot to get to the most efficient metric here. And that takes a lot because again the levers, there are a lot of different levers. So my lever is the click through rate. I need to test my click through rate. My lever is the CPM because also if I have a high click through rate on the low CPM now I'm golden. And I need to also measure if there's any kind of drop off from the click to the product page. Right. So I spend a lot of time testing all those different levers.
[15:07]
A
And when you test those levers, are you getting small gains, big gains? Like how do you know what tests to run? And if they're really all these tests are worth it.
[15:17]
B
I'm only looking at big gains.
[15:19]
A
Yes. I love this.
[15:21]
B
I'm only looking for Omrans. We are a brand that is in hyper growth mode. I'm not looking for 5% gain, I'm looking for double digit gain gains and I'm looking for even more than 20% gain every time. That's why I need signal. I don't need precise results because if you are at a point was like hey, I may get 5% but I need more clicks to understand if it's true. I don't care if it's 5%, let's move on. Right. Because 5% is not helping me now. If you have a 30% gain, you don't need a lot of data to get to 30% gain. You will get that very quickly. It's either working or it's not.
[16:00]
A
Yes.
[16:00]
B
So I'm only going for the home run, not for a single or double. Sorry for people that don't follow baseball, but I'm, I'm going, I'm, I'm swinging for the fences every single time.
[16:11]
A
So I have this framework that I always use that's it's basically a two by two and one axis is predictability and one axis is. Axis is magnitude. And too often marketers get trapped in the highly predictable low magnitude quadrant of that where it's like I'm going to, I know this works, I can predict it. So I'm just going to try to get a couple points better. You're basically here telling us that is the completely wrong way to think about it. You want to.
[16:36]
B
Oh yeah. I mean you want to be in
[16:38]
A
the highest Magnitude quadrant possible. You could care less about predictability in the short term. Yes, you want it to be predictable longer term, but what you actually care about is can I maximize my upside?
[16:49]
B
Correct. It's maximize the upside, big swing. Because if I will have time to think about the single digit growth when we are massive. Right.
[17:00]
A
So, right.
[17:01]
B
If you are, if you are a multi billion dollar company that has been around for 50 years, that the only goal is not to grow but to not lose market share, then yes, that's probably what you do. You're looking for those single digit growth. We are not that. And I assume most of the people listening that no podcast are not that.
[17:20]
A
Now everybody watching here, founders, they're marketers, they're in hypergrowth mode. And I think you gave us the right lens of focus, is that you only need, you only want to run tests that are really high upside tests. And the benefit of those is not only growth, but you get to clarity of results much faster. You get to statistical significance much faster. So it's this double whammy of growth and a learning loop that runs much faster.
[17:44]
B
And that's if you run a test and you are like four days in the test and the data is still not conclusive, that means that it will, it's the outcome will never be big. So just move on.
[17:56]
A
Correct. Okay, so we talked a little bit about I think like the math and equations and testing side of your media machine. Give us your take on how you think about channels. Here's my rough overview. The average marketer, they get bombarded with media salespeople and they kind of listen to some of those salespeople and then they do the obvious things like Facebook and Google. But how do you think about where you want to play when you're spending money and trying to build a brand that actually is going to drive sales?
[18:25]
B
When I look at platform, for me, it depends on again what stage I'm at and what I'm going to leverage it for. For example, let's start with the upper funnel, right? So awareness, when I look for a platform that gives me awareness, is ability to have high frequency. If I cannot drive high frequency, awareness won't work. You won't get aware of a new product of a new brand unless you get in front of someone several times per week. If the platform dictates the frequency without letting you play with it, you are in trouble. Perfect example, meta. Meta won't let you dictate your frequency. How can you do awareness without frequency? Especially in a meta environment of Facebook or an Instagram environment where you're bombarded with content. So if you are showing up only once a week, which most of the algo dads one to 1.5 times a week, and you're in the middle of a thousand pieces of content, nobody will remember you. Right. So in my opinion, social is not for awareness, period. But ctv, radio, podcasts, all those channels are really good for awareness. Right. And there are a lot of different reasons. Now if I look for consideration now, it's different. I look for someone that is going to let me optimize against what I said before, against a click out.
[19:51]
A
Yes.
[19:52]
B
And I need to be as close as I can to conversion because this is the next step. So an example there, meta may be good for that. Right. Because now I can have the algo optimized against a click, no problem. I can do retargeting, which is even amplifying your chance to click out. Now obviously also for me, the platforms that I love are the platform where people convert, which is Amazon.com, walmart.com, target.com those places are great. So now I need to have those platforms work because now there's, I can get people to consider the product but also convert. So for me, it's really looking at what is the platform good at based on what I need. Do I need conversion, do I need awareness? And if I need any of those, what are the levers that I need to control? If they don't let me control, then I won't touch it.
[20:46]
A
That is one of the best single breakdowns of how to think about where to play in advertising that I think I've ever heard. Because you rooted it in the outcomes and the goals you're trying to achieve. As a marketer, I think so many marketers are just like, oh, all my customers on Instagram, I'm just going to just spend some money there. Right. And that is like the complete wrong way to think about it. It's like you can reach your customers thousands of different ways. What are the best couple ways for the goals that you have and for the stage of the process? Because we're here talking about how you actually use media to drive revenue, which means you have to move people through the process, which inherently means you need different types of media formats and different types of creative to actually make that happen. And it strikes me that you all have actually built a really strong system with the type, type of equations. We went over the type of strategy around how we built our media buying. So the third part of that to Me is like the creative and the messaging that fits inside those. And it's really hard. And I think it's something that I, as a cmo have struggled with a ton over the years because it's like, oh, my CEO has an idea, my brand leader, like, you know, five different people have an idea and I'm like, I don't know what the right message is. Like, how do you figure that out?
[22:02]
B
Yeah, everybody wants to be a marketer. No matter what, even wants to be
[22:07]
A
a marketer until they have to run the website and all the terrible stuff that comes with being a marketer. Exactly.
[22:13]
B
Well, again, I think it's very similar to the answer that I gave around what platform I use. It's the same for the creatives. I think each stage of the funnel has its own creative. So if I go back to each stage of the funnel, from an awareness standpoint, the creative has to be about remembering the brand. Not remembering that he has zero sugar, not remembering that it's available at that very specific retailer, is to remember that we are liquid death and we are a healthy beverage company. And even if I have to do that, remembering that we are a beverage and we are called liquid death. So that's where also from a creative standpoint, you cannot have everything in a single creative. From where you are, how much you cost, what are the rtbs like? You cannot just plug it into all that. You need to have one focus. So when I think about what I'm going to run on ctv, I'm thinking about something that is going to capture your attention and remember our name. So for us, we picked our lane, which is comedy. Not an easy lane, but this is our lane.
[23:14]
A
Hard lane.
[23:16]
B
Exactly. So trying to be funny. And as we are funny, people will remember. And we do that through, I think, very creative campaign around people. That was like, that was crazy. That was fun. And now I remember the name. I remember that beverage company does some crazy ads now from there, now that you remember me, because the creative is strong from a remembering standpoint and I go with high frequency. So now people really remember. Now next time they see me, which is most likely for me on social or at the retailer, I need to basically link the brand name with the benefits of the product. So now I'm getting into completely different type of creatives. The creatives are not anymore about remembering my brand. Now it's about telling them why the product is healthy, why the product is affordable, where to find it. So now they can consider it and at that point they can click it. But If I try to turn a crazy creative funny into also telling them why the product is good and where they can buy it, it's not going to happen. Right. If I do those two, if they click on that and they land, but they probably won't buy right away. Now I need to follow them through a lot of different tactics and retargeting tactics. Now what do I say when I retarget them? Well, I probably not say the exact same thing I told them the first time around, why they clicked, because if they click and he didn't convert, why they didn't convert. So maybe now you start touching on very unique points so you get even more precise on what you touch. Now the next step is, which we do a lot, is people bought once but didn't repeat yet. So how do you target people that are lapsed? Right. And so at that point it's again a different messaging. And so you see how I categorize my type of creatives based again on the goal that I have and again for each one of them now I start doing a lot of different testing to see what really drives what I need.
[25:05]
A
Yeah, it really is just, it's like it's a grid of where the customer is in the journey, what the channels they're on and what the messaging they need per channel per stage of their journey to kind of help move them along and move them to the next. And I think most of the marketers I talk to think about this creative and media placement so much in isolation and they think about it as a campaign versus a system. Oh, I have this thing I want the world to know. I'm going to go run this big campaign versus no, I kind of know what my place in the world. I just need more people to believe it. And I got to build a system and march after that, day after day, month after month to get more and more people to know that.
[25:43]
B
Correct. Like, you cannot have a campaign that has everything. Like I keep saying that, and that's, I think a big problem that I will blame Meta for that is making you believe that you can do the full funnel in a single ad unit.
[25:58]
A
Yes.
[25:59]
B
And then there's all those people that are trying to sound cool by saying, yeah, the funnel has collapsed, the funnel is shorter. Like the funnel will always exist. You need to start getting aware of the brand, you need to consider the brand and you need to buy the brand. Now can you make that happen? Maybe faster, maybe for some people, but you still. People are going to take a long time to go through those steps. So you need to basically split those tests, those steps. Sorry. So you can really get the right platform and the right creative to go through those stages.
[26:30]
A
And I think what's interesting about what you just walked us through is that I think when a lot of people think of cool brand Liquid Death or something similar, I think they imagine like glamorous video shoots and like long lengthy campaigns. What you just described is actually just very tedious and very thoughtful and it's, it's the collision point of data and taste and understanding your customer and what moves them. And yeah, there's some cool shoots, but that's like a small part of what actually it takes to sell something. And I think the average founder out there, especially listening, probably doesn't understand that right now.
[27:08]
B
No, I agree and I, and I think for the, for also the early stage it's something very important. I think I need to share here what you say is correct. You need to this very tedious and understanding. And yes, there is the cool glamour photo like video shoot with like celebrities and stuff that is happening and it's important but you need to have everything else. Now what I would say for early stage founder because I run into this issue over and over and over and Liquid Death didn't run into that issue because of the type of marketers that are Liquid Death is if you chase conversion from day one, you're gonna fail.
[27:46]
C
Yes.
[27:47]
B
Right. So if your only metric is CAC LTV ratio, you are gonna fail. Here's why. Because you have for your product, for your brand always what I call the golden core. You're always gonna have a certain amount of people that are gonna convert pretty fast on your product because they are those type of people that will engage fast. We'll want to test fast and not going to go in. Now this Golden Quartz has a certain size, a million dollar of revenue, three million dollar revenue, 500000 revenue. As you get out of this, there's no more scale people. At that point your CAC is going to start rising. You're going to go do your, your CAC to LTV ratio is going to go upside down. And now you're starting to say what am I doing? Oh, the meta algorithm is not working anymore. No, no, no. It's because the true people outside of this golden core are need a full funnel. And so what we did at Liquid Death that because of the type of creative people we had is from the very beginning we worked with awareness, we worked the awareness campaigns to know the brand. It was a lot of Virality on social. It was a lot of what we talk about, things that you will remember not about the benefits of the product, but about the brand. And that's a very uncomfortable thing to do because you cannot measure the dollar impact on this. But if you don't do that, you don't feed the top of the funnel. If you don't feed the top of the funnel, you have nobody to convert at the bottom. Right. So I would say do that.
[29:23]
A
I love the show Landman. If you watch Landman Taylor share.
[29:26]
B
I love it.
[29:27]
A
It's great. It's some of the best writing and directing out there. It's, it's, it's fantastic. But it reminds you. You're basically saying it's like, hey, I've and I'm trying to extract all the oil possible from this well and at some point the well is going to run dry.
[29:40]
B
Right.
[29:40]
A
And like that's going to be a fundamental problem and you can't do it. You feel like investing money on LTV to CAC and highly, highly converting media is a good way to not waste money. And the reality is it's counterintuitively false. It's actually you are wasting money because you would get a lot of that revenue anyway. And then you're afraid if you go spend awareness consideration dollars that you're wasting money. And the reality is that's actually how you're building a base and driving money. And it's, it's like really important paradox in marketing that I think most people don't understand.
[30:14]
B
Yeah. And that's why I'm trying to say that to, especially in the early stage, right, when you are very tight with cash and you have to be careful on how you spend and you have investors on your back telling you, oh, what was your roas? What was your cat? Right. That's going to lead to trouble very, very fast. And so I know it's uncomfortable, but pick your lane. Don't start with an ad on Meta that just tells buy my product because it's good. Start with ads that will get people to remember you.
[30:44]
A
And this is a good reminder that investors are good investors. They're not good marketers.
[30:47]
B
Exactly. And the other ones that believe are good marketers and are going to give you all the ideas.
[30:52]
A
As we're closing out here, Benoit, one of the things I want to know is you today, if you had a time machine and could go tell, tell yourself when you first started at liquid death, like what would be the couple of things you're like, you should just know this now, it'll save you so much time, pain, it'll help you grow faster. Like, what are the core lessons learned?
[31:11]
B
Retail. And I think I'll preface, it's for CPG guys, right? We are cpg. So what I'm going to say doesn't apply necessarily to non CPG folks, but retail media is key for CPG people. Right. Don't focus only on your D2C focus, not focus only on your Shopify revenue. Focus on what you can drive at Amazon, at Walmart, at Target. And the dollars that you spend there can really turn into massive growth. And so I wish I had paid more attention from day one in retail media and I'm really deep in it, but I wish I had done that before because there is a lot of, a lot of impact and a lot of growth there.
[31:57]
A
One of the themes of the show today that's kind of been unspoken that I want to make sure we cover before we close out today is the subtext of like marketers needing to give up control and that ad units are very fragmented, they're across all these platforms. Hey, you're going to sell a product like Liquid Death through Amazon, through target, not through liquiddeath.com for the most part. And most marketers I know, like, I need to get the visits to my website, I need people to look at my product pages. I want all the control. What advice do you give to marketers around this topic? Like, should they let go of control? How should they evolve?
[32:34]
B
Yeah, I think for me is like two things. You have to focus on where you think you can get score.
[32:42]
A
I love that.
[32:43]
B
Right. And that goes with the let go of control because again, same thing, you may be misled on where you think the scale is. You go where you have the most control, which is most likely your Shopify website. But this is not necessarily where you get the most scale. And where you get the most scale is more where you get the least amount of control. And that's where I think it's very important think about, can you take it to big revenue through that channel? Now people say, well, that's the first step. Yeah, that's the first step. But if you only think about the first step, you may not take the right first step. Right. So think where you want to go. And so when letting control go, that's where I would say that now, where I would say don't let the control go. It's on. When you buy media, there's a lot of problems right now with platforms that are trying to plug AI in. So they do it all for you, right? Especially for example, I will bring that one because that one is driving me crazy is this notion of throw as many creative as you can to Meta and Dialgo will figure it out. I don't want Meta to decide what creatives to get in front of each person. For me I will decide because again for me, consistency of creatives matters because what Meta sees is just one small fragment of the entire funnel. So if I let Meta play around with it, then it's going to completely distract my full funnel. So let control go on where you need to scale and the channels to distribute. Take control over where you buy and how you.
[34:23]
A
I love that. Because your incentives and Meta and all the other platforms, incentives are not always the same, right? They're sometimes aligned, but not always aligned. So you want control to make sure you're using them in the ways that are aligned. All right, well Benoit, you have given us, I think, a masterclass in how to think about buying and building media systems to drive real revenue. And to do that not at the expense of building a brand, but at the acceleration of building your brand, which is actually how you build a big and remarkable company. And I really deeply appreciate everything and thank you so much for being on marketing. It's the Great today.
[34:58]
B
Thanks for having me. That was fun.
[35:00]
C
Let me tell you about a great podcast, Demand Decoded. From the team at blend, a B2B website and demand generation agency, comes Demand Decoded, the podcast that breaks the mold of traditional B2B marketing tactics. Hosts Dan and Phil deliver actionable insights that transform your marketing into a revenue generating machine. Whether you're struggling with LinkedIn ads that aren't converting, want to understand the difference between lead generation and demand generation, or need to optimize your conversion rates, Demand Decoded gives you strategies that work today. Tune in for weekly episodes featuring expert analysis and hard earned tips that'll help you become a better B2B marketer. They recently did a great episode titled how to Fix the AI Inconsistency Problem Wrecking your Go to Market. Listen to Demand Decoded wherever you get your podcasts.
[35:49]
B
This data is wrong every freaking time.
[35:52]
A
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
[35:58]
C
Whoa.
[35:58]
B
I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot grow better.

Summary6 min read

Podcast Summary: Marketing Against The Grain

Episode: How Liquid Death Turned Going Viral Into Millions in Sales

Host: HubSpot Media (Kipp Bodnar & Kieran Flanagan)
Guest: Benoit Vatar, Chief Media & Digital Commerce Officer, Liquid Death
Date: August 4, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode dives into how Liquid Death transcended viral marketing to create a robust, data-driven, full-funnel media system that delivers real revenue. Benoit Vatar shares the untold story behind Liquid Death's growth engine: methodical media buying, creative testing, and measuring what actually drives sales rather than just viral moments. The episode provides practical frameworks for marketers, uncovers creative strategies and measurement pitfalls, and deconstructs the myth that creative coolness alone drives hyper-growth in crowded markets.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Benoit’s Origin & Liquid Death’s Early Growth Story

Benoit’s path to Liquid Death was non-linear; he was a founder and built ad tech, not a classic CPG marketer. His tech platform for measuring creator sales impact in retail got him in front of Liquid Death early (01:50).
He became Liquid Death’s Chief Media Officer after evolving from tech advisor to system architect.

Quote:
"I'm not a CPG guy. I'm a founder, I'm a startup guy. I build ad tech platforms because I never had what I wanted to buy media the way I wanted." (01:55, B)

2. Distribution Over Creative “Cool Factor”

Distribution, not just brand creative, is the true engine:

"Distribution is undefeated. You have to figure out distribution at a reasonable cost or you don't have a business." (03:13, A)
Systematic full-funnel media mapping is essential in competitive categories.

3. Media Audit & Full-Funnel Approach

Benoit’s first step: audit all marketing spend by funnel stage, categorize spending, and look for stage imbalances.
Early focus was on signal over perfection in measurement. ROAS is a starting point, but can be misleading without understanding incrementality.
Incrementality ("new to brand" buyers) is a critical metric:

"If the ROAS is high and the percentage of new to brand is high, that means it is probably very incremental." (06:40, B)
Avoid only optimizing for the easiest metrics (ROAS); they’re often wrong and highly saturated. (08:03, A)

Memorable Segment:
"The platform will tell you, 'You spent $1, you made $3.' The problem is those $3 Meta says they drove might've happened anyway." (05:30, B)

4. Creative Equations & Measurement Evolution

Benoit now focuses on "incremental ROAS"—measuring true new sales generated by advertising, using regional split tests for quicker signals (10:00).
- Example: Spend in NYC, hold back in LA, and attribute sales lift accordingly.
Testing is constant—don’t wait for perfect MMM analytics; use directional signals for faster growth loops.

"I don't need perfect, I need signals—strength of the signals is what matters." (05:00, B)

5. Only Swing for Home Runs

Benoit only prioritizes high-upside, double-digit-impact tests; small 5% lifts are ignored in hyper-growth mode.

"I'm only looking for home runs… I'm swinging for the fences every single time." (15:17, B)
This enables faster learning loops and more clarity on what drives big growth.

6. Channel Selection Rethink

Choose media channels based on what they can do best at which funnel stage.
- Awareness: Channels with controllable high frequency (CTV, radio, podcasts). Social (Meta) is not for awareness due to frequency limits.
- Consideration: Platforms that allow optimization for clicks and conversion—retail media is key (Amazon, Walmart, Target).
- Conversion: Leverage channels closest to point of sale.

Quote:
"Social is not for awareness, period… Awareness needs high frequency and most social platforms can't deliver that." (18:24, B)

7. Creative Tailoring and Testing

Different funnel stages require different creatives:
- Awareness: Creative should focus on brand recall ("We are Liquid Death and we are a healthy beverage company").
- Consideration: Detail product benefits and paths to purchase.
- Conversion/Retention: Use messaging tuned to purchase objections and repeat buying.
- Don’t combine everything into one asset.
"You cannot have everything in a single creative... Each stage of the funnel has its own creative." (22:12, B)
Liquid Death’s creative lane is comedy—a deliberate choice to be memorable in awareness.

8. Don’t Chase CAC/LTV From Day One

Chasing immediate CAC/LTV optimization leads to burnout of your "golden core" customers, then CAC soars and growth stalls.
- Instead, invest in brand and top-of-funnel awareness and trust virality to feed conversion over time.
"If you chase conversion from day one, you're gonna fail… You have to feed the top of the funnel, or you'll have nobody to convert at the bottom." (27:47, B)
Early stage marketers must get uncomfortable with “unmeasurable” awareness activities to scale beyond their early customer base.

9. Retail Media is Critical for CPG

Most growth and scale for CPG will happen via retail platforms, not DTC sites (31:10).
- Focus on Amazon/Walmart/Target digital media for scalability.

Quote:
"Retail media is key for CPG people. Focus on driving growth at Amazon, Walmart, Target—not just Shopify." (31:10, B)

10. Letting Go of Control for Scale

Marketers must relinquish some control (e.g., not optimizing solely for their own website) to achieve scale on big platforms.
- Greatest reach comes where you have least direct control.
Retain control over how you buy and measure—don’t let platforms’ algorithms dictate end-to-end creative or mix.

"Let control go where you need scale. Take control over where you buy and how you buy." (32:43, B)

Notable Quotes & Moments (With Timestamps)

On incrementality problem:

"If you base all your buying on ROAS, it's a big issue... those high returns are actually fake because they're not incremental." (05:00, B)
On data:

"I don't need perfect, I need signals." (05:00, B)
On creative discipline:

"Each stage of the funnel has its own creative... You cannot have everything in a single creative." (22:15, B)
On testing:

"I'm only looking for home runs... I'm swinging for the fences every single time." (15:19, B)
On platform control:

"I don't want Meta to decide what creatives get in front of each person... For me, consistency of creatives matters." (33:36, B)
On full-funnel myth:

"There's all those people that are trying to sound cool by saying, 'the funnel has collapsed.' The funnel will always exist." (25:58, B)
On scaling via retail:

"Retail media is key for CPG... dollars you spend there turn into massive growth." (31:10, B)

Timestamps for Important Segments

[01:47] Benoit’s origin and path to Liquid Death
[04:37] The media audit: mapping marketing spend by funnel stage
[06:40] Measuring incrementality: ROAS + new to brand metric
[10:00] How to execute incrementality experiments regionally
[15:17] Only prioritizing big, high-upside tests
[18:24] Awareness channels vs. conversion channels explained
[22:12] Why one creative can’t do everything (creative mapped to funnel)
[27:47] Pitfalls of chasing CAC/LTV from launch; importance of top-of-funnel
[31:10] The power of retail media for CPG growth
[32:43] Letting go of control to achieve scale; platform-vs.-creative control

Tone & Language

The tone is candid, direct, and practical—a blend of hard-won founder wisdom with a data-driven, systems mindset. Benoit consistently emphasizes the difference between conventional wisdom and the actionable (and sometimes uncomfortable) truths he’s learned at the cutting edge of growth-focused marketing.

Final Takeaways

Even viral brands only win when they master disciplined, experimental distribution systems—not just creative coolness.
Optimize media for real business outcomes: new customers, incrementality, and scalable channels like retail media.
Always tailor creative to the stage of the customer journey, and run only tests worth the effort ('swing for home runs').
Let go of micro-control to achieve macro-scale, but never outsource your measurement strategy or creative consistency to platforms.

For further resources and actionable frameworks, refer to the links and QR codes as mentioned in the episode description.

Loading summary

Transcript67 lines

[00:00]
A
On the show today, we have an incredible guest I want to welcome, Bino Vatar. He is the Chief Media Officer and Digital Commerce Officer at Liquid Death and he is the best person I have ever met when it comes to talking about advertising and how you use advertising to generate real revenue. He's built a full funnel media system. He has unique creative equations that fuel that system and he has a real methodical process for how creative and messaging maps to that system. And we're going to break down all of those for you on today's show. And he, he told me something that there is a certain metric that if you as a marketer follow it, you are destined to fail. And the reality is most marketers follow that metric. And so we're going to tell you what that metric is. We're going to tell you how to avoid failure and how to think about your marketing spend in completely new and actionable ways. Benoit, we are so excited to have you on the show today. So Benoit, I think the story of Liquid Death in marketing circles has been told a ton of and people know the skull, they know kind of the origin story of Mike and how that all came to be. I think there's an untold story around Liquid Death that's way more important that no one knows or understands. And that's the fact that you actually have figured out how to build remarkable systems and creative to actually drive sales. It's not just like you didn't sell all these products because you're cool. Obviously being cool helped. But you have to do real marketing over and over again to actually penetrate such a crowded market like you're in. And so maybe just to kick us off, give us your origin story, like how the heck did you get to Liquid Death? What was like the first thing you worked on? And then from there I want to go into kind of the systems and everything that we're going to cover on the show today.
[01:47]
B
So yeah, you're completely right. We've been talking over and over about our amazing creative machine, Liquid Death, but we've built a lot from that angle all the way down to yourself. So from my origin story and how I got to liquidates, it's actually a very, I would say non linear way to get there. I'm not a CGC guy exactly. I'm not a CPG guys. I'm a founder, I'm a startup guy. I build a lot of ad tech platforms over the years because I always, from a media standpoint, never had really what I wanted to buy media properly and to Buy actually media the way I want, which we're going to talk about, going from awareness all the way down to conversion. And so the last platform that I built was a rebate redemption platform for measurement, meaning I wanted to measure the impact of creators on social, in retail sales, brick and mortar retail. So I built an attribution platform, which at the same time got me in front of Liquid Death in the very early days, before actually even the water was in the can with Mike Cesario, our CEO and founder. And over the years as I was building, we always kept in touch, became friends, and I was always here to kind of exchange ideas on the media side. And then it came from exchanging ideas on the media side to becoming an official advisor and then also allowing me to really build a platform that we leverage within liquid debt that I was building. And then from there we went from doing this to, hey, you need to come in full time to run the show when it comes to media and acquisition. And that's how I joined as a, as a chief media officer a little bit over two years ago. Now.
[03:33]
A
First of all, I think that's just such a cool story around like creating situation. Just because you were out building, trying to solve a problem you had experienced firsthand, you knew a bunch of other brands were experiencing. People, by the way, still really experiencing that problem. But I imagine you took all of what you learned and you brought that into liquid death. And that was probably the foundation of the early systems. Because I think when it comes to liquid death, people talk about the creative, the design, the esthetic, they don't talk about the distribution. And to me, like one of my mantras in life is distribution is undefeated. Like, you have to figure out distribution at a reasonable cost that works for your business or you don't have a business. And it seems like to me, like that's that at the, the core DNA of who you are is you're trying to figure out distribution and build systems for distribution. So you come into Liquid Death, you kind of have this background, like, how do you get started? How, like, how do you actually figure out what media to buy? How do you figure out if it's working or not? These are questions that everybody watching this is struggling with. And so I want to like hear how it started and kind of how it's evolved to where it is now.
[04:37]
B
For me, first order of business was to understand where the money was spent and at what stage of the funnel. So I came in with my full funnel approach from day one and now I started to categorize of that spend. So first I understand where we spend, how we spend, at what stage of the funnel. Categorize the whole thing. Now you start understanding, hey, we may spend too much on one stage, not enough on the other stage. Now, in parallel, I had to also understand if it was working or not, right? So measurement was another thing. Obviously the first measurement that you have access to is measurement on platform, like on the Amazon platform, on Meta, you name it. It's not perfect, but it is a signal. And by the way, that's been always my mantra in what I work with. I don't need perfect, I need signals. Yes, yes, search for perfection. This is important, I think, for the right metric, the right confidence level, you will never get it or it's going to take forever to get it. And by the time you get it, it's over, right? So signals, strengths of the signals is what matter. And I was looking for that from now that I categorize my media mix what is working, what is not working. First I got in the platform and understanding. And a lot of people in media pay attention to roas, right? Because you are, especially in the early days, you want to understand if, when you spend money, do you get money in return? If I spend $1, do I make $3 or 2 or 50 cents? Right? And people start making decisions on that. This is a big issue. If you do that, here is why. Yes, you want money return on your investment, but the other metrics that you need to pay attention to, because I can, as a media buyer, drive very high return, but those high returns are actually fake. What I mean by that is they are not incremental. That means that the platform will tell you, Meta will tell you. You spend $1, you made three. The problem is those $3 that you made that Meta says they were driving because someone clicked on an ad of you. An ad would have happened without the ad as well. So you need to understand the incrementality of your spend. Now, this is a big word in media, incrementality. And there's a lot of people talking about it and there's a lot of platform being built. For me, the best signal of incrementality is I'm acquiring new people to the brand, right? So the new to brand metric was very important as I was categorizing the efficiency of my media because I couldn't run incremental tests on previous data. It was going to take me months, an mmm of two years. Those kind of things that big brands do, that will never get me where I need to be within the next couple of weeks. So when I start mapping roas with new to brand, I understand if the roas is high and the percentage of new to brand is high, that means that it is probably very incremental. So now I can just triage my spends based on that filter. Now after that, as I start, I understand where I spend, I understand the mixed by funnel stage, and I understand do I have some kind of incrementality or not. So that was the, that was the beginning.
[07:53]
A
That was the beginning. There's two key lessons there for anybody watching in what you just said. The first is you wanted to move spend full funnel and you needed, you wanted to audit spend and make sure the spend was full funnel. When people think about brand dollars or creative dollars, most consumer companies are just at the top of the funnel. Most B2B companies are just at the bottom of the funnel and very few are very full funnel. So that's, I think having a full funnel media approach is something any company, regardless of how small or big you are, can do. The second thing that I think is even more important is when you talked about the roas plus new customers, we covered a lot on today's show. You probably have some questions. We are giving you free additional resources to answer any of those. You can scan that QR code or click the link in the description below and go get everything you need. I've got a book coming out in September called Loop. One of the core points in that book is this idea of creative equations that the marketers that win measure their marketing very differently and measure it very creatively. And if you just measure the easiest thing to measure, one, it's probably wrong like roas, and two, it's highly competitive, it's highly saturated. Everybody's doing stuff around the easiest stuff to measure, which means you're paying way more for it than you should. And so you gave us one creative equation. Are there other like creative equations that you've used over the years that you felt like really unlocked growth for the brand and unlock sales?
[09:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's the one that actually I'm paying a lot of attention on right now, which is the true incrementality. And there is a lot, especially in those days and probably a lot of listeners have heard a lot of, for example, TikTok shop or like social school. It's social commerce. And I'm very curious about the impact of social commerce on true sales. And you can see that maybe from social commerce that for me is mostly a discovery tool. More than it is a scalable tool. What is the impact on the scalable sales? Retail sales, let's say on Amazon.com or walmart.com on target.com we are by the way, a brand that doesn't sell D2C. Right. We don't sell directly to customer on our website. So that's why I'm not talking about it. We only sell on retailer website. But what I'm paying a lot of attention in talking about this, you know, equation, I'm looking at what I call now incremental roas, right. And so that means that this incremental rise and this is where it gets a little bit more technical and you need models and platforms. But there's a school of thought right now where we can get that data pretty quickly because models move or better.
[10:28]
A
Yes.
[10:29]
B
And I can understand if my incrementality is true or not. And so the incrementality and maybe to try to simplify, please, for the audience is I look at a region, two regions, right. Like let's say LA and New York. And let's say they are very similar in terms of shoppers. For me, I'm going to spend money in New York and not spend money in la. And I'm going to see if my sales go up in New York and don't go up in in la. And if it does, that means that what I did in New York works because if I didn't do it in LA and he did if and he didn't move, then that means that yes, it worked. So that's a very simple. If people are very deep in incrementality on the audience, they'll say what is he talking about? But this is kind of the fundamentals, right?
[11:11]
A
Yeah.
[11:11]
B
Is there incrementality in sales with the media that you spend? So that's something that I pay a lot of attention that I'm trying to actually simplify because out there there's a lot of complexity around that a lot of takes forever to do. How can we shorten the cycle to test? How can we get the data fast? But I'm looking at the incrementality that goes beyond what we talk about new to brand and roas like true incrementality.
[11:37]
A
When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, do you know if you're showing up or not? At HubSpot, we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in AI search. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Go check out HubSpot AEO. You can trial it for free and it's going to help you understand how you're showing up in AI search and how you can show up even more. Yeah, so I think you're making a couple points here that are really important. One that like innovations in data science and AI is making the ability to do these tests easier and faster and which is really changing advertising and media buying at its heart. The second thing you're basically saying is there's lots of different ways something can be incremental, right? And you can look at incremental one channel versus the other, one region versus the other. The actual important part is actually setting up the experiment and having a thesis to know what am I actually trying to figure out. And even if you have thousands of dollars, you still can do small incrementality experiments to unlock insights, right?
[12:49]
B
Correct, correct. And I think that goes along with the other thing that I do a lot, which is testing. I test all the time, not just for incrementality, but for any metrics that matters. Right. So for example, another one that is very important for me in the consideration stage, which is the mid funnel, meaning people discover your product and are intrigued and want to try the product. For me it's the efficiency of driving from someone that see your ad to go to your pdp, right, your product page on the retailer, right on the dot com. And this efficiency can be measured by click through rate. Yeah, but click through rate can be misleading and maybe I'm going to go into too much details, but I think it's important for.
[13:36]
A
No, no, we want all the details here.
[13:39]
B
So click through rate is important. But if you have a good click through rate on a high cpm, it still drives a pretty expensive cost per click, which leads to a pretty expensive cost to get someone to your product page view. So click through rate is not the only metric. It's click through Rate CPM which gets you to your cost per click. Now there's even more than that is cost per click usually is correlated with the cost to get people to go to the product page view. Because if you click, usually you land on the product page view. But in the current world, especially when you're on social or any platforms, you have some kind of a loop happening. There's a pop up window that says you're leaving the site. There's a lot of that could happen that you don't Necessarily aware that will get people to click but don't land on your product page. So you need to measure that as well. So that's why I look at the cost per product page view and that I test a lot to get to the most efficient metric here. And that takes a lot because again the levers, there are a lot of different levers. So my lever is the click through rate. I need to test my click through rate. My lever is the CPM because also if I have a high click through rate on the low CPM now I'm golden. And I need to also measure if there's any kind of drop off from the click to the product page. Right. So I spend a lot of time testing all those different levers.
[15:07]
A
And when you test those levers, are you getting small gains, big gains? Like how do you know what tests to run? And if they're really all these tests are worth it.
[15:17]
B
I'm only looking at big gains.
[15:19]
A
Yes. I love this.
[15:21]
B
I'm only looking for Omrans. We are a brand that is in hyper growth mode. I'm not looking for 5% gain, I'm looking for double digit gain gains and I'm looking for even more than 20% gain every time. That's why I need signal. I don't need precise results because if you are at a point was like hey, I may get 5% but I need more clicks to understand if it's true. I don't care if it's 5%, let's move on. Right. Because 5% is not helping me now. If you have a 30% gain, you don't need a lot of data to get to 30% gain. You will get that very quickly. It's either working or it's not.
[16:00]
A
Yes.
[16:00]
B
So I'm only going for the home run, not for a single or double. Sorry for people that don't follow baseball, but I'm, I'm going, I'm, I'm swinging for the fences every single time.
[16:11]
A
So I have this framework that I always use that's it's basically a two by two and one axis is predictability and one axis is. Axis is magnitude. And too often marketers get trapped in the highly predictable low magnitude quadrant of that where it's like I'm going to, I know this works, I can predict it. So I'm just going to try to get a couple points better. You're basically here telling us that is the completely wrong way to think about it. You want to.
[16:36]
B
Oh yeah. I mean you want to be in
[16:38]
A
the highest Magnitude quadrant possible. You could care less about predictability in the short term. Yes, you want it to be predictable longer term, but what you actually care about is can I maximize my upside?
[16:49]
B
Correct. It's maximize the upside, big swing. Because if I will have time to think about the single digit growth when we are massive. Right.
[17:00]
A
So, right.
[17:01]
B
If you are, if you are a multi billion dollar company that has been around for 50 years, that the only goal is not to grow but to not lose market share, then yes, that's probably what you do. You're looking for those single digit growth. We are not that. And I assume most of the people listening that no podcast are not that.
[17:20]
A
Now everybody watching here, founders, they're marketers, they're in hypergrowth mode. And I think you gave us the right lens of focus, is that you only need, you only want to run tests that are really high upside tests. And the benefit of those is not only growth, but you get to clarity of results much faster. You get to statistical significance much faster. So it's this double whammy of growth and a learning loop that runs much faster.
[17:44]
B
And that's if you run a test and you are like four days in the test and the data is still not conclusive, that means that it will, it's the outcome will never be big. So just move on.
[17:56]
A
Correct. Okay, so we talked a little bit about I think like the math and equations and testing side of your media machine. Give us your take on how you think about channels. Here's my rough overview. The average marketer, they get bombarded with media salespeople and they kind of listen to some of those salespeople and then they do the obvious things like Facebook and Google. But how do you think about where you want to play when you're spending money and trying to build a brand that actually is going to drive sales?
[18:25]
B
When I look at platform, for me, it depends on again what stage I'm at and what I'm going to leverage it for. For example, let's start with the upper funnel, right? So awareness, when I look for a platform that gives me awareness, is ability to have high frequency. If I cannot drive high frequency, awareness won't work. You won't get aware of a new product of a new brand unless you get in front of someone several times per week. If the platform dictates the frequency without letting you play with it, you are in trouble. Perfect example, meta. Meta won't let you dictate your frequency. How can you do awareness without frequency? Especially in a meta environment of Facebook or an Instagram environment where you're bombarded with content. So if you are showing up only once a week, which most of the algo dads one to 1.5 times a week, and you're in the middle of a thousand pieces of content, nobody will remember you. Right. So in my opinion, social is not for awareness, period. But ctv, radio, podcasts, all those channels are really good for awareness. Right. And there are a lot of different reasons. Now if I look for consideration now, it's different. I look for someone that is going to let me optimize against what I said before, against a click out.
[19:51]
A
Yes.
[19:52]
B
And I need to be as close as I can to conversion because this is the next step. So an example there, meta may be good for that. Right. Because now I can have the algo optimized against a click, no problem. I can do retargeting, which is even amplifying your chance to click out. Now obviously also for me, the platforms that I love are the platform where people convert, which is Amazon.com, walmart.com, target.com those places are great. So now I need to have those platforms work because now there's, I can get people to consider the product but also convert. So for me, it's really looking at what is the platform good at based on what I need. Do I need conversion, do I need awareness? And if I need any of those, what are the levers that I need to control? If they don't let me control, then I won't touch it.
[20:46]
A
That is one of the best single breakdowns of how to think about where to play in advertising that I think I've ever heard. Because you rooted it in the outcomes and the goals you're trying to achieve. As a marketer, I think so many marketers are just like, oh, all my customers on Instagram, I'm just going to just spend some money there. Right. And that is like the complete wrong way to think about it. It's like you can reach your customers thousands of different ways. What are the best couple ways for the goals that you have and for the stage of the process? Because we're here talking about how you actually use media to drive revenue, which means you have to move people through the process, which inherently means you need different types of media formats and different types of creative to actually make that happen. And it strikes me that you all have actually built a really strong system with the type, type of equations. We went over the type of strategy around how we built our media buying. So the third part of that to Me is like the creative and the messaging that fits inside those. And it's really hard. And I think it's something that I, as a cmo have struggled with a ton over the years because it's like, oh, my CEO has an idea, my brand leader, like, you know, five different people have an idea and I'm like, I don't know what the right message is. Like, how do you figure that out?
[22:02]
B
Yeah, everybody wants to be a marketer. No matter what, even wants to be
[22:07]
A
a marketer until they have to run the website and all the terrible stuff that comes with being a marketer. Exactly.
[22:13]
B
Well, again, I think it's very similar to the answer that I gave around what platform I use. It's the same for the creatives. I think each stage of the funnel has its own creative. So if I go back to each stage of the funnel, from an awareness standpoint, the creative has to be about remembering the brand. Not remembering that he has zero sugar, not remembering that it's available at that very specific retailer, is to remember that we are liquid death and we are a healthy beverage company. And even if I have to do that, remembering that we are a beverage and we are called liquid death. So that's where also from a creative standpoint, you cannot have everything in a single creative. From where you are, how much you cost, what are the rtbs like? You cannot just plug it into all that. You need to have one focus. So when I think about what I'm going to run on ctv, I'm thinking about something that is going to capture your attention and remember our name. So for us, we picked our lane, which is comedy. Not an easy lane, but this is our lane.
[23:14]
A
Hard lane.
[23:16]
B
Exactly. So trying to be funny. And as we are funny, people will remember. And we do that through, I think, very creative campaign around people. That was like, that was crazy. That was fun. And now I remember the name. I remember that beverage company does some crazy ads now from there, now that you remember me, because the creative is strong from a remembering standpoint and I go with high frequency. So now people really remember. Now next time they see me, which is most likely for me on social or at the retailer, I need to basically link the brand name with the benefits of the product. So now I'm getting into completely different type of creatives. The creatives are not anymore about remembering my brand. Now it's about telling them why the product is healthy, why the product is affordable, where to find it. So now they can consider it and at that point they can click it. But If I try to turn a crazy creative funny into also telling them why the product is good and where they can buy it, it's not going to happen. Right. If I do those two, if they click on that and they land, but they probably won't buy right away. Now I need to follow them through a lot of different tactics and retargeting tactics. Now what do I say when I retarget them? Well, I probably not say the exact same thing I told them the first time around, why they clicked, because if they click and he didn't convert, why they didn't convert. So maybe now you start touching on very unique points so you get even more precise on what you touch. Now the next step is, which we do a lot, is people bought once but didn't repeat yet. So how do you target people that are lapsed? Right. And so at that point it's again a different messaging. And so you see how I categorize my type of creatives based again on the goal that I have and again for each one of them now I start doing a lot of different testing to see what really drives what I need.
[25:05]
A
Yeah, it really is just, it's like it's a grid of where the customer is in the journey, what the channels they're on and what the messaging they need per channel per stage of their journey to kind of help move them along and move them to the next. And I think most of the marketers I talk to think about this creative and media placement so much in isolation and they think about it as a campaign versus a system. Oh, I have this thing I want the world to know. I'm going to go run this big campaign versus no, I kind of know what my place in the world. I just need more people to believe it. And I got to build a system and march after that, day after day, month after month to get more and more people to know that.
[25:43]
B
Correct. Like, you cannot have a campaign that has everything. Like I keep saying that, and that's, I think a big problem that I will blame Meta for that is making you believe that you can do the full funnel in a single ad unit.
[25:58]
A
Yes.
[25:59]
B
And then there's all those people that are trying to sound cool by saying, yeah, the funnel has collapsed, the funnel is shorter. Like the funnel will always exist. You need to start getting aware of the brand, you need to consider the brand and you need to buy the brand. Now can you make that happen? Maybe faster, maybe for some people, but you still. People are going to take a long time to go through those steps. So you need to basically split those tests, those steps. Sorry. So you can really get the right platform and the right creative to go through those stages.
[26:30]
A
And I think what's interesting about what you just walked us through is that I think when a lot of people think of cool brand Liquid Death or something similar, I think they imagine like glamorous video shoots and like long lengthy campaigns. What you just described is actually just very tedious and very thoughtful and it's, it's the collision point of data and taste and understanding your customer and what moves them. And yeah, there's some cool shoots, but that's like a small part of what actually it takes to sell something. And I think the average founder out there, especially listening, probably doesn't understand that right now.
[27:08]
B
No, I agree and I, and I think for the, for also the early stage it's something very important. I think I need to share here what you say is correct. You need to this very tedious and understanding. And yes, there is the cool glamour photo like video shoot with like celebrities and stuff that is happening and it's important but you need to have everything else. Now what I would say for early stage founder because I run into this issue over and over and over and Liquid Death didn't run into that issue because of the type of marketers that are Liquid Death is if you chase conversion from day one, you're gonna fail.
[27:46]
C
Yes.
[27:47]
B
Right. So if your only metric is CAC LTV ratio, you are gonna fail. Here's why. Because you have for your product, for your brand always what I call the golden core. You're always gonna have a certain amount of people that are gonna convert pretty fast on your product because they are those type of people that will engage fast. We'll want to test fast and not going to go in. Now this Golden Quartz has a certain size, a million dollar of revenue, three million dollar revenue, 500000 revenue. As you get out of this, there's no more scale people. At that point your CAC is going to start rising. You're going to go do your, your CAC to LTV ratio is going to go upside down. And now you're starting to say what am I doing? Oh, the meta algorithm is not working anymore. No, no, no. It's because the true people outside of this golden core are need a full funnel. And so what we did at Liquid Death that because of the type of creative people we had is from the very beginning we worked with awareness, we worked the awareness campaigns to know the brand. It was a lot of Virality on social. It was a lot of what we talk about, things that you will remember not about the benefits of the product, but about the brand. And that's a very uncomfortable thing to do because you cannot measure the dollar impact on this. But if you don't do that, you don't feed the top of the funnel. If you don't feed the top of the funnel, you have nobody to convert at the bottom. Right. So I would say do that.
[29:23]
A
I love the show Landman. If you watch Landman Taylor share.
[29:26]
B
I love it.
[29:27]
A
It's great. It's some of the best writing and directing out there. It's, it's, it's fantastic. But it reminds you. You're basically saying it's like, hey, I've and I'm trying to extract all the oil possible from this well and at some point the well is going to run dry.
[29:40]
B
Right.
[29:40]
A
And like that's going to be a fundamental problem and you can't do it. You feel like investing money on LTV to CAC and highly, highly converting media is a good way to not waste money. And the reality is it's counterintuitively false. It's actually you are wasting money because you would get a lot of that revenue anyway. And then you're afraid if you go spend awareness consideration dollars that you're wasting money. And the reality is that's actually how you're building a base and driving money. And it's, it's like really important paradox in marketing that I think most people don't understand.
[30:14]
B
Yeah. And that's why I'm trying to say that to, especially in the early stage, right, when you are very tight with cash and you have to be careful on how you spend and you have investors on your back telling you, oh, what was your roas? What was your cat? Right. That's going to lead to trouble very, very fast. And so I know it's uncomfortable, but pick your lane. Don't start with an ad on Meta that just tells buy my product because it's good. Start with ads that will get people to remember you.
[30:44]
A
And this is a good reminder that investors are good investors. They're not good marketers.
[30:47]
B
Exactly. And the other ones that believe are good marketers and are going to give you all the ideas.
[30:52]
A
As we're closing out here, Benoit, one of the things I want to know is you today, if you had a time machine and could go tell, tell yourself when you first started at liquid death, like what would be the couple of things you're like, you should just know this now, it'll save you so much time, pain, it'll help you grow faster. Like, what are the core lessons learned?
[31:11]
B
Retail. And I think I'll preface, it's for CPG guys, right? We are cpg. So what I'm going to say doesn't apply necessarily to non CPG folks, but retail media is key for CPG people. Right. Don't focus only on your D2C focus, not focus only on your Shopify revenue. Focus on what you can drive at Amazon, at Walmart, at Target. And the dollars that you spend there can really turn into massive growth. And so I wish I had paid more attention from day one in retail media and I'm really deep in it, but I wish I had done that before because there is a lot of, a lot of impact and a lot of growth there.
[31:57]
A
One of the themes of the show today that's kind of been unspoken that I want to make sure we cover before we close out today is the subtext of like marketers needing to give up control and that ad units are very fragmented, they're across all these platforms. Hey, you're going to sell a product like Liquid Death through Amazon, through target, not through liquiddeath.com for the most part. And most marketers I know, like, I need to get the visits to my website, I need people to look at my product pages. I want all the control. What advice do you give to marketers around this topic? Like, should they let go of control? How should they evolve?
[32:34]
B
Yeah, I think for me is like two things. You have to focus on where you think you can get score.
[32:42]
A
I love that.
[32:43]
B
Right. And that goes with the let go of control because again, same thing, you may be misled on where you think the scale is. You go where you have the most control, which is most likely your Shopify website. But this is not necessarily where you get the most scale. And where you get the most scale is more where you get the least amount of control. And that's where I think it's very important think about, can you take it to big revenue through that channel? Now people say, well, that's the first step. Yeah, that's the first step. But if you only think about the first step, you may not take the right first step. Right. So think where you want to go. And so when letting control go, that's where I would say that now, where I would say don't let the control go. It's on. When you buy media, there's a lot of problems right now with platforms that are trying to plug AI in. So they do it all for you, right? Especially for example, I will bring that one because that one is driving me crazy is this notion of throw as many creative as you can to Meta and Dialgo will figure it out. I don't want Meta to decide what creatives to get in front of each person. For me I will decide because again for me, consistency of creatives matters because what Meta sees is just one small fragment of the entire funnel. So if I let Meta play around with it, then it's going to completely distract my full funnel. So let control go on where you need to scale and the channels to distribute. Take control over where you buy and how you.
[34:23]
A
I love that. Because your incentives and Meta and all the other platforms, incentives are not always the same, right? They're sometimes aligned, but not always aligned. So you want control to make sure you're using them in the ways that are aligned. All right, well Benoit, you have given us, I think, a masterclass in how to think about buying and building media systems to drive real revenue. And to do that not at the expense of building a brand, but at the acceleration of building your brand, which is actually how you build a big and remarkable company. And I really deeply appreciate everything and thank you so much for being on marketing. It's the Great today.
[34:58]
B
Thanks for having me. That was fun.
[35:00]
C
Let me tell you about a great podcast, Demand Decoded. From the team at blend, a B2B website and demand generation agency, comes Demand Decoded, the podcast that breaks the mold of traditional B2B marketing tactics. Hosts Dan and Phil deliver actionable insights that transform your marketing into a revenue generating machine. Whether you're struggling with LinkedIn ads that aren't converting, want to understand the difference between lead generation and demand generation, or need to optimize your conversion rates, Demand Decoded gives you strategies that work today. Tune in for weekly episodes featuring expert analysis and hard earned tips that'll help you become a better B2B marketer. They recently did a great episode titled how to Fix the AI Inconsistency Problem Wrecking your Go to Market. Listen to Demand Decoded wherever you get your podcasts.
[35:49]
B
This data is wrong every freaking time.
[35:52]
A
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
[35:58]
C
Whoa.
[35:58]
B
I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot grow better.