NEW YORK — While its advertising creative takes shots at artificial intelligence — specifically, the nearly universally despised data centers needed to run it — Liquid Death is not blind to the reality facing marketers: AI continues to reshape the advertising world, and organizations that adopt the technology are the ones that will succeed.
“It’s being able to stay lean and mean. As a fast growing company, that’s what matters. We want to be able to manage things efficiently, to not have to spend massive amount of dollars on non-working media,” Benoit Vatere, chief media and digital commerce officer at Liquid Death, said about AI during an Oct. 5 panel at Advertising Week New York.
AI allows Liquid Death, the billion-dollar beverage company known for its edgy marketing, to ingest, understand and act on data much faster than before. More importantly, it allows the challenger brand to move faster than competitors with larger organizations and their share of red tape.
To become an AI-native organization, Liquid Death works with Power Digital Marketing, a digital marketing agency that announced in August a proprietary AI ecosystem that unites an intelligence layer called Iris, operating system Omega and a creative intelligence layer called Creative Affinity. The system has changed how Liquid Death’s marketing team operates.
“Instead of going on Slack or writing my own queries or asking my team to post something, I can go in and have a sense of what's going on and be able to share that with my internal team so we can act fast,” Vatere said. “We optimize our campaign on a daily basis, especially on the retail media side. Things we used to look at on a twice-a-week or weekly basis, we look at on a daily basis now.”
Phases of AI
As part of the panel, Power Digital CEO Jeff Mason laid out three phrases of AI-driven organizations. AI-curious firms have democratized the use of frontier models like Claude and ChatGPT and added some structured and unstructured data to the model.
“That's where I think most brands are today, and frankly, that's not going to be enough to keep up with brands like Liquid Death,” Mason said.
Second are AI-assisted organizations that create their own intelligence layer: a bespoke model accessible to all employees that improves by learning how teams work and operate. Lastly, AI-native organizations build an orchestration layer on top of bespoke intelligence layers that allows work to be done inside their own custom application.
Power Digital’s Omega brings together the agency’s engineering with its clients’ data and processes. Liquid Death has produced 17 iterations of Omega in the last three weeks as it continues to fine-tune the system.
“In an AI-native world, you need to be developing applications that align to how your customers want to work, and think of ways you can invent better things to do that they already do today in a more automated way,” Mason said. “It's our obligation to constantly challenge even a brand like Liquid Death to think about things differently by leveraging AI in a way where it’s coming up with activations that even [Vatere and founder Mike Cessario] can't think of.”
Power Digital’s AI ecosystem has helped Liquid Death meet three imperatives: Team members on Vatere’s team are able to work in an AI-powered way on their own. The company can query and evaluate data from a revenue and media standpoint in an articulated way. Lastly, the platform allows Liquid Death to act and optimize quickly.
“On a pretty sizeable budget, how can I operate that with only two people internally? That's the goal,” Vatere said.
Become AI-native
For organizations looking to become AI-native, getting data together remains critical, as does challenging AI agents to ensure that outputs are accurate and pushing team members to use and improve AI systems every day, Vatere explained. Plus, in the age of AI, the days of using Excel to manage data are over.
“I don't want to see any spreadsheets anymore,” Vatere said. “Don't do all this time-consuming work. If there's something that can be automated or takes more than five minutes to do, do it once to train or to build some kind of automation.”
AI-native organizations are also moving away from frontier models, as they no longer provide a competitive advantage when every firm is using the same tools, Mason said. Building your own intelligence and orchestration layers is key.
“Start centralizing your data, contextualizing it, building it in a way where you can interact with it… because over time that becomes a moat and competitive advantage,” the executive said. “That becomes your own bespoke IP and your own bespoke intelligence, and that will grow over time.”
