Liquid Death is all jokes and dark humor on the surface, but the canned water brand’s chief media and digital commerce officer, Benoit Vatere, takes measurement deadly seriously.
And that’s because Liquid Death, like all CPG brands, is dealing with one of the gnarliest problems in marketing: proving that media actually moves product off shelves.
Although Vatere has “digital commerce” in his title, he’ll be the first to admit that most CPG sales still happen at the register, not online – and it’s not like you can put a pixel on a tall boy of water.
For Liquid Death, measuring success means looking beyond channel-specific dashboards and trying to understand how the full media mix across formats and platforms is reflected in sales data. For example, who cares about return on ad spend if there’s no causal lift in the number of cans sold?
It’s not that Vatere straight-up ignores ROAS, but he believes there’s no point in considering it in isolation. It has to be connected to another metric in order to mean anything.
“I track it attached to the new-to-brand metric,” he says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks, “because, combined together, it’s a very good proxy into incrementality … [but] if it’s ROAS on its own, I don’t even pay attention. I don’t look at it at all.”
Vatere’s focus on incrementality also shapes how he thinks about loyalty. In CPG, most people bounce between multiple brands without thinking too hard about it, especially for something as basic as water.
People “are just not loyal” to CPG brands, Vatere says. In fact, he adds, most big soda companies generate more than 50% of their revenue from people who only buy a couple of times a year. That’s why Vatere says he cares more about marketing to light and lapsed customers than to Liquid Death’s smaller base of passionate existing fans.
The brand love is real – Liquid Death has people willing to get its logo tattooed on their bodies, and not a lot of brands can say that – but superfans aren’t what drive growth.
“In order to be a billion‑dollar brand,” Vatere says, “you need to get the people that are not that heavy and committed.”
Also in this episode: the delicate dance between paid and earned when your ad creative is so fun it generates its own headlines; Liquid Death’s partnership with performance marketing platform Ibotta to run always-on incrementality testing; and why agentic AI could turn grocery shopping into a three-way negotiation between people, brands and bots.
For more articles featuring Benoit Vatere, click here.
