Why Liquid Death’s chief media officer pays special attention to the upper funnel

Ad Age is interviewing in-house media execs for their thoughts on trends, best practices and gripes they have with the industry. Below, the first edition of this recurring series. One might expect brand media execs to relish an era when the industry seemingly values media more than creativity. This, however, is not true for Benoit Vatere, chief media officer at Liquid Death. According to Vatere, upper-funnel brand-building creative is getting overlooked by marketers, particularly for direct-to-consumer brands that are hyper-focused on performance. In the process, they’re making conversion much harder as they reshape the marketing funnel, Vatere said. “We stopped thinking about those other steps in the funnel, and I’m reading on LinkedIn or in the press some people saying ‘We started thinking about our upper funnel and I think it’s working,‘” he said. “No shit it’s working.” Liquid Death has built its brand on viral awareness campaigns and over-the-top partnerships, giving Vatere good reason to preach the value of creativity. However, at the end of the day, he’s just as interested in conversion as every other marketer, he said. Below, more from Vatere on the importance of full-funnel marketing and how the industry can learn from where he believes DTC marketers have erred. Join Ad Age for the Data-Driven Marketing Playbook on May 22 This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. You posted some thoughts about marketers ignoring the top of the funnel. Can you break down your argument? DTC brands are driving people into their new funnel, which is a very short funnel. And what I’ve seen across a ton of brands, especially DTC brands, is that it’s all in service of reducing their customer acquisition cost by increasing their conversion rate. If I need to convert someone, it’s not going to be with a single ad that is going to do all of the work. It will not give you awareness of a product, then make you consider the product and then convert. You cannot do that with a single impression on a single ad unit. If you go back to what marketing is all about, it’s about first making people aware of our brand and products, then showing the benefits of our product or whatever it is that will get them to consider buying, then after that you show how to buy and why you should be buying. We completely stopped thinking about those two other steps at the top of the funnel. Why have we? It’s driven by platforms that educate people, like the Metas of the world, to think about your cost per acquisition (CPA, a metric that measures the cost of a conversion). So you try to lower your CPA and if it’s not low enough, you’re freaking out. It’s also driven by how you attribute sales, and people are attributing sales mostly to the last click. It’s also because of marketers’ business models. You give a CFO the ability to measure the return on your dollars, and guess what? Without any understanding of media, they’ll say, ‘You spent $1 and made two here, so spend more here. You spent $1 million elsewhere, but you can’t tell me it drove anything, so stop spending there.’ But the reality is that both contribute to the sale. Ultimately, the point is that what you convert is actually driven by your upper funnel. And it’s about to get really hard because if you have less people to convert because your upper funnel is not there, your cost of acquisition goes even higher as you’re fighting for a smaller pool of consumers. Your overall margins on your product are going to start getting very thin. When someone puts a 40% or 50% tariff on that product, it’s even harder. It’s a spiral of death. What’s the solution? I’ve seen some people start to focus on their upper funnel. It’s scary because it’s outside of your comfort zone, and it’s not easy to report because your entire infrastructure is built for financial optimization. If you suddenly spend half a million dollars on your upper funnel and can’t measure it immediately, people start freaking out. But this is what you have to do and it works if you do it right. How has Liquid Death approached this problem? This company has been built on the upper funnel because it’s all about awareness, viral moments and entertainment. Now we’ve been building a whole funnel all the way to the cash register. People will see a wild ad and figure out we sell water. Then it’s my goal to get in front of those folks and tell them they won’t believe it’s not soda and push them to their favorite place to buy because we sell with retailers, not on our website. Let’s talk about Amazon, which you’ve expressed excitement about. I can build a full-funnel just on Amazon. I can serve an ad through Prime Video and then serve a different message to them around a unique flavor on the website, getting them to buy while staying in the ecosystem, which is pretty wild. You could imagine the efficiency of your media dollars. You can also now more easily measure your upper funnel because you can see your overall spend from top to bottom. There are different platforms out there, like The Trade Desk, that try to pair media inventory with retailer conversion data. But making everything work together is difficult because you have media inventory in one place and sales data coming from a retailer, and each retailer has a different data set and different ways to report. Of course, as a business, it’s still not the best idea to go all in on Amazon, despite how easy it might be to have everything in one spot. You want to diversify. What does your advertising on Amazon look like? I’m actually buying inventory on Fox because we have access throughout the year because of our Super Bowl ad. I can buy that through Amazon’s demand-side platform. The ads we run there are just our broadcast ads. We also have static assets with our ‘don’t be scared, it’s just water’ tagline and those are the main assets we run. Upfront and NewFront season is approaching. What are the presentations and meetings you’re looking forward to? It’s really about audience for us. We have to make sure we go broad so we don’t overindex on very specific folks. This year, we’re talking a lot more to younger women. New moms, like Kylie Kelcie (the star of Liquid Death’s recent Kegs for Pregs campaign), are a good example. Where can I talk to those new moms? That’s the kind of question I’m thinking about. Is thinking about branching out to new audiences and the platforms you can reach them on a new thing for you? Kind of. This year is really about massive scale. We’re talking about folks who are buying Liquid Death three times per year versus the people buying 20 times per year. Scale comes from those buyers, so we’re looking for places where we can find them. We love our hardcore fans, but if we want to go big, we have to go beyond them.

Why Liquid Death’s chief media officer pays special attention to the upper funnel

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