Liquid Death didn’t happen by accident. Mike Cessario went from skateboards and punk bands to building a beverage brand that treats marketing like entertainment, not homework, and he’s brutally honest about what actually moves the needle. With Jay Schwedelson, he breaks down packaging as the real moat, why they tested the brand before the product, and how to stay interesting when AI makes content cheap.

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Grab Liquid Death at your local store or online at www.liquiddeath.com, check out their sparkling lineup, and catch Mike at the upcoming Guru Conference for a deeper dive into their marketing playbook.

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Best Moments:

(02:45) From punk bands and agency life to launching a product so he could finally be the client

(05:04) Why water was the wedge - biggest category, boring brands, plastic everywhere, then a portfolio beyond plain water

(06:55) Most products are commodities - brand and aesthetics win hearts, not tiny functional differences

(08:40) The Facebook fakeout - 3M views and 80k followers before a single can existed, then used to raise money

(11:50) Entertainment first and small bets - nothing over 150k, in-house beats a 650k “at cost” bid

(13:40) Full-funnel media done right - broad awareness feeding precise mid-funnel and conversion work

(16:10) AI as cost saver, not taste maker - youth backlash is real and craft still matters

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Guru Conference - The World's Largest Virtual EMAIL MARKETING Conference - Nov 6-7!

Register here: www.GuruConference.com

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Check Out Jay's INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/jayschwedelson/

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Jay Schwedelson: We are back for do this, not that podcast, and we easily have the coolest guy or girl or human that we've ever had on the show. It's not even a question. So who do we got here? We got Mike Cesario, who's the founder, and CEO of Liquid Death Now. If you don't know what Liquid Death is, you're a nerd.

Jay Schwedelson: It's just that simple. Uh, so I'll tell you what it is for those of you who don't know, and if you do know then, then you're not a nerd. That's the litmus test. Liquid Death is one of the fastest growing beverage companies and brands of all time. I can't even believe this 'cause I feel like I've known Liquid Death forever.

Jay Schwedelson: The dude was a skateboarder, he was in punk bands, he was doing all this, everything you couldn't imagine. But then he did go in the agency, rowdy. He knew all this stuff and he created this monster of a community, of a brand of a thing. And we're gonna dig into all of it. So Mike, welcome to the show, man.

Mike Cessario: Thanks for.

Jay Schwedelson: Awesome. Alright. What did I get wrong? Is that, how did, how did this all happen? Uh, uh, how did Mike become, Mike? What, what did I mess up?

Mike Cessario: Yeah, I think you got it pre, pretty close. Um, yeah, I mean, I grew up outside, uh, Philadelphia and Delaware kind of area and uh, yeah, was playing in band since probably seventh or eighth grade. Uh, the, when I was in seventh grade, the Green Day Dookie album came out, and that was what, like was the pathway to punk rock and no effects and all of that, that.

Mike Cessario: I think kind of like shaped my path. And then being in a band, I was the guy that was silk screening the T-shirts and just, you know, making the, the album covers. 'cause I was the guy who could draw and all that. And, um, then eventually, yeah, I had a career in graphic design that led to advertising where it was more about conceptual things, making funny commercials, which then led to, you know, when YouTube and the internet was really becoming this hotspot for marketing, we started doing.

Mike Cessario: Viral ads on YouTube and, and the internet for, for companies. And we, we, we got pretty good at that. And then I launched Liquid Death. Um, it's sort of my way to get out of the advertising industry because I just like really wasn't happy there and kind of hated my life most of the time. Um, just because, you know.

Mike Cessario: Dealing with clients in like a services business. It's, it's not about what's good. It's about who's on the other side and what are they willing to buy or not buy or understand. And it just feels like you're constantly trying to convince people to do stuff that's good. And, and at the end of the day, like, you know, they're gonna do what they wanna do.

Mike Cessario: So my idea was, well, let me start my own product that I could be passionate about, and then I'm the client and I can kind of control. How the thing is marketed and market it in a way that I think brands should market in the modern day basically.

Jay Schwedelson: And when you looked around at the planet, okay, and you're like, where do, where can I, where can I make a difference or where can I have impact? Whatever. Uh, and you decide. How did you decide on, on Water to start with, I know you do a lot more than water now, but how'd you start on water?

Mike Cessario: Well, what, right before, or as I was coming up with the idea of liquid death, I was working for a small little nine person marketing agency in Chattanooga, Tennessee called, uh, OT actually. And we started doing some of the first funny, irreverent marketing for the organic industry. And, um. That I think opened up my eyes a bit to, yeah, why is it that stuff that's healthy or better for you is marketed in such a like quiet, boring kind of way?

Mike Cessario: Whereas beer is really funny. Candy is really funny. Soda, fast food, all that stuff is funny and irreverent. Why can't healthy things market in that same sort of entertaining? Funny, fun way. And um, yeah, I think that's ultimately then what led me to water. And I started thinking about, okay, well what's the healthiest possible thing you could drink?

Mike Cessario: And it's pretty much water. And then, you know, as you started going down, you know, the homework path, okay, let's do some homework on water. And it's like. Oh wow. Bottled water just passed carbonated soft drinks for the biggest beverage category. It's like, okay. Wow. Huge category. Then it's like, look at all the brands.

Mike Cessario: They're all exactly the same, and it's like, oh wait, they're all in plastic bottles, so. All of a sudden started becoming a better and better angle to kind of start, at least by going into water. Now we've since evolved and we've made a lot of other things, and plain water is actually a much, much, much smaller portion of our sales than it's ever been and will be going forward.

Mike Cessario: But yeah, that was kind of where we started.

Jay Schwedelson: So for all the listeners out there, maybe they work on a, in a boring B2B category or a consumer category, and they're like, well, well, I wanna break through as well. And, and don't take this the wrong way. I'm sure your water is the healthiest in the world, or who knows what. But when I look at like, you know, Avion, if it's from the Alps or this, I don't even know what the hell's going on.

Jay Schwedelson: Really it comes down to I like liquid death because I feel cool. When I hold it, it's the packaging that really, and the vibe that gets me going. Is that at the, is that at the core of how you found success? Do you think that this idea of the packaging, whether it's a service product or a consumer product, or a business product, is that at the core of how you break through now?

Mike Cessario: I think it's essentially what you're saying is mostly true and I would say it's mostly true for any category of product. 'cause I think what people underestimate is almost every product category is a commodity. The, the, the differences between them are. Molecular in a lot of cases, and no one's really picking one brand over the other purely because of some small functional benefit or difference brand packaging.

Mike Cessario: All these emotional reasons that are not really rational reasons are why people choose things. It's like, why is Nike shoes better than Adidas? They don't make commercials. Talking about, we use 794 stitches per shoe, and Adidas only uses 527. It. It's like it's. They're, they're about their brand and their idea where they just assume, most people believe that most shoes from a quality standpoint are probably pretty similar, but it's like, why do I want to give my money to this company?

Mike Cessario: Why do I feel like this brand fits me better, um, than, than another? And then obviously aesthetics are big too. Oh, this looks cooler. This is more aesthetically pleasing or cooler to me than, than this one is. And that's completely subjective. Everybody has a different point of view on, on what they think is cool or, or, or interesting looking.

Mike Cessario: So yeah, I, I would say that packaging and brand matters more than most people realize in a majority of product categories.

Jay Schwedelson: And isn't it, uh, do I have this right? That like when you started, you put something out, I don't know, on Facebook or something like that before you even had a product to like see if it would gain traction. I mean. That right there shows you, it's not really about the product necessarily.

Mike Cessario: Yeah. I mean, and that was more, I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs or people that want to be entrepreneurs who will say, Hey, I have this great idea. And then they're like, let me go pitch my idea to people with money. And people with money are like. We don't wanna invest in an idea, we wanna invest in a business.

Mike Cessario: So how about you go figure out how to start your idea and generate some kind of money or traction or something, then come to us, um, because you've de-risked it a little bit. So knowing that, I was like, okay, I have this idea for a brand and it's kind of a crazy idea for a brand. Um, so let me figure out a way to just test it first.

Mike Cessario: Um, and just see how people react to it. 'cause I think. Big companies and I, I used to work, you know, as an agency in, in the agencies for these big companies, you know, they wanna use things like focus groups. We've got this clinical environment where you're asking people their opinions on things and people don't behave normally in clinical environments.

Mike Cessario: There's some stuff you can glean from that, but not how funny your commercial is or what they think of it. It's like you need to find a way to test it. Almost in market where you're getting people like they, their real reaction to it. Um, so that's kinda what we did with the Facebook page. And yeah, like, you know, after about eight months of having the page up, the video had 3 million plus views.

Mike Cessario: The page had 80,000 followers, which was more than Aquafina. Uh, we had like hundreds of comments of people saying. How do I get this? Or I'm a distributor, can I talk to a salesperson? And then I use all that traction to then actually go raise real money to make it real.

Jay Schwedelson: You know what's amazing about Liquid Death is that in a lot of ways, companies are now trying to have a media component to their business to fuel their businesses. In a lot of ways, you're a media company, whether you call yourselves one or not, because you're putting out all this content that people just.

Jay Schwedelson: Love to consume and when it comes to your content, it does feel so over the top. Oh wow. That really breaks through it all. But is there like, uh, like a science to it? Do you have like a con, like do you have a whole content strategy? Like we have these seven versions and then we do this and we wait to see this much traction?

Jay Schwedelson: Like is there like a whole process to what comes to be what we see out liquid death?

Mike Cessario: As, as much as there can be. I mean, I think we do think of ourselves as an entertainment first. An entertainment first approach to marketing. Like we are there, we want to entertain people in service of our brand. Um, we don't wanna just pump a sales me, like a boring sales message at, at people. Um, and if you think about the way entertainment is created, there's not a perfect science to it.

Mike Cessario: I mean, you look at, I, I brought up this analogy a ton of times before, but. If you look at comedians, like even the most famous, you know, veteran comedians, the Bill Burs, the Jerry Seinfelds of the world, they still don't know what jokes are gonna land. They have to go shop their material around at small clubs for the better part of a year to then put together their 60 minute sort of standup special that everyone ultimately ends up seeing.

Mike Cessario: Um, not like we take that kind of approach, but it just goes to show. You don't always know what's gonna work or not work, and you've gotta build a little bit of a framework so that you're never investing too too much into one thing that you just hope is gonna go really well. So we kind of operate on this idea of small bets where, you know, I mean we're, you know, we're a getting to be a decent size company and we don't really spend.

Mike Cessario: More than 150 K on any one commercial or asset that we produce. Um, which for really small companies can, can be a lot. But you start, I mean we had a production company 'cause we, we were getting so busy. We have our own internal production company that we call Death Machine. But we were so busy we said, Hey, let's maybe just go get an outside production company to maybe handle this one quick little idea for us.

Mike Cessario: 'cause we just don't have the bandwidth right now. They came back with their bid. They said, Hey, we're gonna do it for you basically at cost. 'cause we just want this on our reel so we can have like a cool liquid death thing on our reel. They came back, it was like $650,000. Well guys, so then we just said, you know, we're gonna do it ourselves.

Mike Cessario: We'll just like have people double up a little bit of time. And we did it ourselves for 125. So it enables us to do a do a lot of things and if one thing doesn't totally work, it's not the end of the day. And if something does really work, the ROI isn't safe.

Jay Schwedelson: And, and you're looking at it from a, uh, a circulation standpoint, right? It's not like, oh, we did this cool video and our sales went up in the Denver market by X, Y, and Z. It's more of, it continues to build the awareness of the overall brand.

Mike Cessario: Yeah, and we have a, a, a very sophisticated media strategy. We have a, a chief media officer. His name's, he's like basically a genius and. We, we really think about how the message is getting to people and when it's like we have a, a strategy of, hey, we've got top of funnel, which is really important. It's where most brands probably lack focus.

Mike Cessario: Then it gets down into more mid funnel where you get into that performance media kind of realm and then ultimate down to conversion. But if you're only focusing on the lower part of the funnel, you start running out of people and it gets really expensive. Trying to convert those people in into customers.

Mike Cessario: Whereas if you can invest in the top of funnel, huge, broad awareness and reach through a combination of television, media buys, connected tv, organic, social, paid, social influencers, all of that, then you have more people coming into the funnel where you can then start targeting those people that saw that ad with.

Mike Cessario: A product specific message, whether maybe they're on uh Instagram or maybe they're on Amazon, or maybe they're watching a connected TV spot, and we're literally targeting them because we have the data that knows they buy sparkling water at Kroger and we can target that person on their television set when they're streaming and hit them with a very product specific.

Mike Cessario: And you might have to hit those people 3, 4, 5 times before they actually end up converting into a customer. So that's kind of how we think about the whole mix as it comes down.

Jay Schwedelson: I think it's so important whether you're even a direct to consumer marketer, a, a business to business marketer, I don't think enough people are thinking of providing, you know, value and good stuff to create that big top of funnel. 'cause to your point, they're just chasing people that are in market, and that's a very hard thing to chase, to even know if they are in market or if they care about you.

Jay Schwedelson: So I think that's, that, that's super valuable. But along those lines, uh, in terms of content and all, you know, AI. You know, the one thing about your content is that, uh, if you rewind a few years ago and you said, make somebody whose head's falling off or whatever crazy thing, and you know, you, your team would be able to pull that off and figure out how to make that look right and whatever.

Jay Schwedelson: But now with ai, you could go and, you know, say, Hey, make this crazy video and it could look not as good as one of yours, but, you know, in the realm of it all. So how does do you, do you stay up at night saying, how is Liquid Death gonna stand out from a content and brand standpoint in this age of, it's so easy to create this stuff.

Mike Cessario: I, I think it's gonna be very easy because at the end of the day, AI is just. A cost saving tool. You know, AI's not gonna tell you what's gonna make people laugh and there's so much nuance in what makes people laugh. Um, and ultimately as long we're always gonna be starting with professional, funny people that are creating all these kinds of ideas.

Mike Cessario: And even then, it's hard to land on something that actually. Ends up, you know, moving the needle and, and doing what it's gonna do because it's, you know, entertainment is hard. It's why there's so few hit TV shows or so few people that actually become famous influencers with millions of, of followers. So that's always gonna be there and.

Mike Cessario: We're also able to already produce content for pretty cheaply in the grand scheme of things. Like we don't need to be able, and we can control every aspect of it where yes, AI works, but you have a little bit of limitation on exactly what you can control. And sure, you might end up spending so much time then trying to perfect every little detail the way you want.

Mike Cessario: That now the time investment you're making is starting to offset some of the cost. Um. And I think there's the o The other thing that people aren't thinking about is like the cultural elements of what's happening with things like, uh, there is an AI backlash among young people on social media like Mr.

Mike Cessario: Beast famously, um, Mr. Beast famously cannot u he stopped using his AI thumbnail generator because he got so much flack from people saying, how are you using AI and all of that. Um, we put one AI static image at the beginning of a video that we did just because it was an old image of this model that we, there was impossible to track down to get a release from.

Mike Cessario: So we said, Hey, let's just. Use a piece of AI to create something that's kind of similar looking. It's only a static image For two seconds, put it in the spot. On TikTok, there was like 350 comments. 300 of the comments were, what the fuck? You're using ai? How dare you do you know? So it's not just that easy, right?

Mike Cessario: Like I think there's a lot of different things that happen. And primarily I think AI is gonna be most valuable for companies and people who don't really have any. Sort of creative or production knowledge capabilities like background, any of that. It's like you can go in with nothing and get something that's like, okay, pretty easily.

Mike Cessario: But actually getting to great with it, that is still almost equally as hard if not harder than just doing it the normal way.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. I love the backlash by young people on all things

Mike Cessario: Yeah.

Jay Schwedelson: media and all. I mean, I bring it on. Let's have extreme backlash. Alright, so one more thing. I'm just. Okay, so Mike, you wake up tomorrow and it's another parallel universe and liquid death doesn't exist. You got like a thousand dollars to start or launch a brand or do whatever you're one of those small companies just talked about or what?

Mike Cessario: I, I'm not sure I understand the question. What, what would

Mike Cessario: Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. Uh, I mean, I, I do think the beverage industry is an interesting one. Like, I, I like the idea of creating physical products because something that people can hold, you know, have while they're having fun and all these things. It's like. And I just like the idea that of like making real things and not just making digital stuff that can literally be deleted, you know, in, in an instant.

Mike Cessario: Um, now I think the challenges of the beverage industry beyond just creating a brand are insane and not anything that I thought it would, it would be before doing it, where you've gotta go through distributors and the distributors like. They're borderline the mafia and like you have retail buyers that they control what's on the shelf.

Mike Cessario: If this buyer doesn't think that liquid death is cool, it doesn't matter if it's cool, you don't, you'll never be on the shelf. Right? And you've got the Cokes and the Pepsis of the world that buy shelf space. And you know, as a small brand in beverage, it's really, really hard to kind of, um. Be successful.

Mike Cessario: 'cause there's so many things sort of stacked against you. But if you can kind of figure it out and you've got a cool brand and you've got something that people will actually care about and like, and want to talk about, I mean, you can create so much value, um, unlike a lot of other I think, industries, which is, which is interesting.

Jay Schwedelson: Well, you have crushed it. And for all the listeners that are out there, uh, Mike is gonna be speaking. At Guru Conference, he's gonna break down some of the marketing strategies that they're doing at Liquid Death, which is incredible. It's just in a few weeks. And if you are a nerd, like I talked about earlier, go to anywhere, get liquid death and just walk around holding it, you instantly are 40% cooler.

Jay Schwedelson: It's a fact when you carry around, uh, a liquid death can, sparkling by the way, is a blowing up category for them. Uh, so it's all big things. You can go to liquid death.com. Mike, uh, can't thank you enough for doing this, man. Really appreciate you.

Mike Cessario: No thanks for having me on.