The video begins with two girls lying in bed staring at a magazine photo featuring a fictional death metal-style character named “Glothar”. Then, in a supernatural move, Grothar jumps out of the magazine and enters the room, where he helps the girls decorate their faces with “corpse paint.”
It ends with an absurd twist. The mother of one of the girls came into the room with a tray of “vegan ghost blood.” She stopped when she saw Grothal. “I haven't seen him in about 15 years,” she says. The camera pans to her daughter, decked out in black and white face paint. “Mom,” she says, listening to sentimental music. Then she turns to Grothar. “father?”
The 55-second ad, which has been viewed more than 50,000 times on YouTube since its release on March 26, is the latest in a line of quirky content from Liquid Death, a canned water company that's taking a different approach to marketing.
The company's marketing team views Liquid Death as an entertainment brand first, but also as a brand that also sells consumer packaged goods.
“Ninety-nine percent of humans don't really want to be marketed to. Marketing usually disrupts your day,” said Andy Pearson, vice president of creative at Liquid Death. “The premise of Liquid Death is, can we literally be the most fun and cheerful brand on the planet?”
Interesting, not preachy
Liquid Death started promoting the brand with $2,000 worth of Facebook ads in 2017, but it was actually founded in 2018 and started selling cans in January 2019. The brand's unique, no-nonsense brand voice resonated and was quickly communicated to customers. The company's valuation as of March was $1.4 billion.
Part of the appeal, Pearson believes, is the novelty of water being sold in metal cans rather than plastic bottles. “Death to Plastics” is one of Liquid Death's slogans, but the company is careful about how it expresses its environmental mission, he said.
“Liquid Death isn't preachy,” said Dan Murphy, Liquid Death's vice president of marketing. “We're not necessarily going to hit you over the head or shame you if you touch a piece of plastic. We're just offering you this fun alternative.”
That spirit is evident in our recent collaboration with Elf on limited edition Corpse Paints. The ad itself had amassed 6.8 billion earned media impressions by the morning of April 5, according to statistics provided by the company, and in addition to the video spot, brands will post videos of themselves applying corpse paint to their faces. We partnered with influencers to drink Liquid Death. (Liquid Death declined to share the budget for the project, which was produced by its in-house production division Death Machine.)
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Influencer-turned-actress Julia Fox was photographed walking her dog in New York City wearing corpse paint and posted a photo of herself in makeup on Instagram.
Murphy said the goal is to flood social media with makeup and increase awareness. “A lot of people who follow that makeup world saw the feed that day, and they got the feed. [post]It was weird,” Murphy said of the influencer's video. “And then 10 minutes later, they got another attack. And now this is starting to get really weird. And they got a third, and it turned into someone's feed. It’s a different reality that we almost use it as a channel for this kind of marketing,” Murphy said.
“It's almost a strange piece of art,” Pearson added.
Brands that are exciting now
Murphy and Pearson agreed that Liquid Death probably wouldn't have worked before social media because so much of the brand's strategy depends on whether the content goes viral. That is the company's strength. Liquid Death's marketing team understands the rhythm of the news cycle, Pearson said.
“Our work lives one day, makes you laugh, and then you can move on with your life and never have to hear from us again,” Pearson said. “This is a completely different approach than a large, comprehensive 360 campaign that lasts two to six months, with the pressure to actually deliver results. We're going to take all the money that would have been spent on these big, heavy productions, and we're going to take it and make more stuff faster and make more entertainment for the long term. can be provided.”
Liquid Death uses what Murphy described as a proprietary algorithm to measure the success of its content on social media, analyzing the quality and content of comments, number of shares to friends, saves for rewatch, and more. To do. And it also relies on simpler things.
Before anything is released, teams ask themselves two questions. “Did that make us laugh?” Murphy said. “Is that something we can share?”
