Of Course America Fell for Liquid Death

When you think about it, the business of bottled water is pretty odd. What other industry produces billions in revenue selling something that almost everyone in America—with some notable and appalling exceptions—can get basically for free? Almost every brand claims in one way or another to be the purest or best-tasting or most luxurious, but very little distinguishes Poland Spring from Aquafina or Dasani or Evian. And then there is Liquid Death. The company sells its water in tallboy cans branded with its over-the-top name, more over-the-top melting-skull logo, and even more over-the-top slogan: “Murder your thirst.”

Liquid Death feels more like an absurd stunt than a real company, but it’s no joke. You can find its products on the shelves at Target, 7-Eleven, Walmart, and Whole Foods. After the great success of its plain canned water, it has branched out into iced tea and seltzer, with flavors such as Mango Chainsaw, Berry It Alive, and Dead Billionaire (its take on an Arnold Palmer). On Monday, Bloomberg reported that the company is now valued at $1.4 billion, double the valuation it received in late 2022. That would make it more than one-tenth the size of the entire no- and low-alcohol-beverage industry. All of this for canned water (and some edgily named teas).

But not really. Liquid Death is not a water company so much as a brand that happens to sell water. To the extent the company is selling anything, it’s selling metal, in both senses of the word: its literal aluminum cans, which it frames as part of its environmentally motivated “Death to Plastic” campaign, and its heavy-metal, punk-rock style. Idiosyncratic as all of this might seem, the company’s strategy is not a departure from modern branding. If anything, it is the perfect distillation.

Liquid Death isn’t just an excuse for marketing. Metal cans probably do beat plastic bottles, environmentally speaking, but both are much worse than just drinking tap water. You can nurse a can of Liquid Death at a party, and most people will probably mistake it for a beer. But there are lots of canned nonalcoholic drink options. Even the company’s CEO, Mike Cessario, has acknowledged that the water is mostly beside the point: He worked in advertising for years before realizing that if he was ever going to get to make the kinds of ads he wanted to make, he’d have to create his own product first. “If you have a valuable brand,” he told Bloomberg this week, “it means that people have a reason to care about you beyond the small functional difference” between Liquid Death’s water and any other company’s.

That’s how you end up with a company that makes double-entendre-laced videos featuring porn stars and that partners with Fortnite, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, and Steve-O, of MTV’s Jackass. On Instagram and TikTok, it is the third-most-followed beverage, behind only Red Bull and Monster; Liquid Death takes social-media comments trashing the product and turns them into songs with names such as “Rather Cut My Own D**k Off” and absurd taste-test commercials in which contestants are made, in one instance, to lick sweat off a man’s back.  

All of this, in one way or another, is about building the brand, because the brand is what’s important; the brand is all there is. Plenty of companies sell branded T-shirts or hoodies, but Liquid Death has gone all in. It offers dozens of different T-shirt and hoodie designs, plus beach chairs and watches and neon signs and trading cards and casket-shaped flasks and boxer briefs.

Liquid Death, Cessario likes to say, is by no means unique in its focus on marketing. “Like every truly large valuable brand,” he told The Washington Post last year, “it is all marketing and brand because the reason people choose things 98 percent of the time is not rational. It’s emotional.”He has a point. And in recent years, marketing has become ever more untethered from the underlying products. As I previously wrote, many companies have begun deploying meta-advertisements: advertisements that are about advertisements or refer explicitly to the fact that they’re advertisements.

Think of CeraVe’s Super Bowl commercial in which Michael Cera pitches an ad featuring him at his awkward, creepy best to a boardroom full of horrified executives. Or the State Farm commercial that also aired during the Super Bowl, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger struggles to enunciate the word neighbor while playing “Agent State Farm” in an ad within the ad. Think of the Wayfair commercials in which characters say things like “Are we in a Wayfair commercial?” or the Mountain Dew commercials in which celebrities decked out in biohazard-green Mountain Dew gear discuss “how obvious product placement is.”

The appeal of these ads is that they make no appeal at all—at least no traditional appeal, no appeal having to do with the product they’re ostensibly selling. They wink at the viewer. They say: We know that you know what we’re trying to do here, so we’re just gonna cut the crap and be straight with you. They flatter the viewer, make them feel like they’re in on the joke. The marketing strategy is to renounce marketing strategies. As with most advertising, it’s hard to know for sure whether this actually works, but companies seem to think it does; after all, more and more of them are sinking millions into meta-ads.

You can think of Liquid Death as the apotheosis of meta-advertising. It doesn’t just say Forget the product for a moment while you watch this ad. It dispenses with the product entirely. The advertisement is the product. What Liquid Death is selling is not so much purified water as purified marketing, marketing that has shed its product—the soul without the body. The company writes the principle straight into its manifesto: “We’re just a funny beverage company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do,” it reads. “Our evil mission is to make people laugh and get more of them to drink more healthy beverages more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution.”

It’s easy to dismiss Liquid Death as a silly one-off gimmick, but the truth is that many of us routinely fall for just this sort of appeal. The same thing is happening when we respond to the Visible phone service Super Bowl commercial in which Jason Alexander rehashes his “Yada yada” bit from Seinfeld and declares, “I’m in an ad right now.” And how could it not? Marketing is virtually inescapable. Brands are clamoring for our attention at every moment. It’s nice to feel, for a moment, like we’re not being advertised to—like Liquid Death is just a good bit and not, as it now is, a billion-dollar business.