Liquid Death’s secret to viral marketing: Hire comedians

“I hate the word viral,” said Dan Murphy, svp of marketing at the canned beverage brand Liquid Death. In his mind, it’s not precise enough.

Liquid Death, by all accounts, is a viral product. Its very concept is meant to make people laugh and share. The company is best known for its canned water products that appear like beer cans. And as it gained prominence, the viral campaigns continued — most recently, for example, Liquid Death ran a giveaway offering a lucky customer a fighter jet.

But what Murphy was focused on wasn’t virality but eliciting an organic response. “We needed people to walk down the beverage aisle and see a thing and stop,” he said.

Murphy spoke at last week’s Modern Retail Marketing Summit and dove into how the brand approaches its campaigns and is so successful at getting people to engage with it. This week’s Modern Retail Podcast is a live recording of the conversation. He shared many tips of the trade. For one, he said, “we’re entirely in-house.”

The other part that’s so important, Murphy said, was to hire people in comedy to create comedic campaigns.

“We don’t have people with traditional marketing backgrounds in the creative group,” he said. “It’s people that are Adult Swim writers and wrote for movies and wrote for The Onion.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

It’s all about getting people’s attention
“We needed viral packaging. I hate the word viral — it probably just means fast-growing or attention-getting or whatever. But we needed people to walk down the beverage aisle and see a thing and stop. What could it be called? How could it be designed that somebody had to stop, look at it, pick it up, maybe post it to social media for free? Similarly with the content we put into the world, we have super small budgets relative to anybody really in our space — a lot of the major players, for sure. So what idea can we put out there that press has to write about it? That people absolutely share it with their friends? And it’s not a new approach. I mean, Red Bull and Monster have been doing entertainment-first marketing since their origin. Their lane is action sports, we’ve just picked a different lane in comedy.”

Liquid Death’s approach to comedy
“There is a process to get to comedy. So here’s what it is: Hire people who do it. We don’t have people with traditional marketing backgrounds in the creative group. It’s people that are Adult Swim writers and wrote for movies and wrote for The Onion. How do they work? We set up a writer’s room. Guess what they’re not doing: filling out time sheets and looking at some kind of job board to figure out their next task. We cater to people with that mind. We have a comic ambassador team that I helped us start a few years back. I grew up in a comedy club. My mom has run one for 30-plus years at this point. So it’s a team of headliner comics — we’re about 12 right now — national touring headliner comics, and we toss scripts to them for punch-up. We ask them for flavor names when we’re naming a thing. So it’s like: you go to real funny people and then you can get the comedy.”

Content-led performance marketing
“That’s been a massive evolution for us this year, as to really leaning into what people would traditionally call performance. But I do think, in the chicken or egg debate, there is a starting point. And I do think it’s brand and content. You know the old notion of… the ‘Hello, it’s 102 in Dallas today by Liquid Death’ banner ad doesn’t work. But if you can weave that into content that we know is sticky, that people will share — like, the audio starts and we throw up that big fat Liquid Death SKU that’s on BOGO at Harris Teeter. And we know the person is there, and then we just quickly get them into the content. We conclude with that. We’re seeing tremendous results. So we’re not at all shy to get into performance. In fact, we do quite a lot of it. But we just think it has to be content-led.”