Liquid Death's Secret to Viral Marketing: Hire Comedians

“I hate the word viral,” says Dan Murphy, SVP of marketing at beverage can brand Liquid Death. In his opinion, it's not precise enough.

Liquid Death is, by all accounts, a viral product. The concept itself is designed to make people laugh and encourage sharing. The company is best known for its water cans that look like beer cans. And as the company gained popularity, the viral campaigns continued – most recently, for example, Liquid Death gave away a fighter jet to one lucky customer.

Murphy's main focus, however, was not virality, but a natural response. “We wanted people to walk through the beverage section, see something and stop,” he said.

Murphy spoke at the Modern Retail Marketing Summit last week and discussed how the brand approaches its campaigns and its success in engaging people. This week's Modern Retail Podcast is a live recording of the conversation. He shared plenty of industry advice. For one, he said, “We're completely in-house.”

The other very important part, Murphy said, is hiring people from the comedy industry to develop comedic campaigns.

“We don't have people with traditional marketing backgrounds in our creative group,” he said. “It's people who are writers for Adult Swim and have written for movies and for The Onion.”

Here are some highlights from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

It's about getting people's attention
“We needed viral packaging. I hate the word viral – it probably just means fast-growing or attention-grabbing or whatever. But we needed people to walk through the drinks aisle, see something and stop. What could you call it? How could you make it so that someone would have to stop, look at it, pick it up and maybe post it on social media for free? It's similar with the content we put out there: we have very small budgets compared to everyone else in our space – a lot of the big players, for sure. So what idea can we put out there that the press needs to write about? That people are dying to share with their friends? And this is not a new approach. I mean, Red Bull and Monster have been doing entertainment-first marketing since they were founded. Their focus is action sports, we just decided to have a different focus in comedy.”

Liquid Death's approach to comedy
“There's a process to getting into comedy. And this is what it looks like: Hire people who can do it. We don't have people with traditional marketing backgrounds on the creative group. It's people who are writers for Adult Swim and have written for movies and for The Onion. How do they work? We've set up a writers' room. Guess what they don't do: Fill out timesheets and look on some kind of job board to see what their next job is. We cater to people with that mindset. We have a team of comic ambassadors that I helped us start a few years ago. I grew up in a comedy club. My mom has been running one for over 30 years now. So it's a team of top comedians — there's about 12 of us right now — who are on national tours, and we throw scripts at them so they can whip them up. We ask them for flavor names when we name something. So it's like this: You go to really funny people and then you get the comedy.”

Content-driven performance marketing
“That's been a huge evolution for us this year, to really focus on what people would traditionally call performance. But I think in the chicken and egg debate, there's a starting point. And I think it's brand and content. You know the old notion of … the banner ad, 'Hi, it's 102 in Dallas today from Liquid Death,' that doesn't work. But if you can tie that into content that we know will stick and that people will share — like when the audio starts and we display this 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 to the content. That's where we wrap up. We see tremendous results. So we don't shy away from addressing performance at all. In fact, we do quite a bit of it. But we just think it has to be content-led.”