ブランドマーケティングの再定義
This is Reina Moro's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone. Welcome to The Creative Mindset,
a podcast about what the future holds at the intersection of creativity and technology.
I'm Reina Moro, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York, Tokyo, and Singapore.
Today's guest, Andy Pearson, is a VP of Creative at Liquid Death.
Liquid Death doesn't need an introduction at this point,
as it's become one of the fastest growing consumer brands of the last few decades.
In part one of my conversation with Andy,
we get into how he and his team are rewriting the rules of brand marketing
in the industry at large. If you haven't listened to it, please have a listen.
I met Andy in 2008, as he was graduating from school.
In this episode, we talk about the specifics of how we met,
and that will be a tell-tale about how he approaches marketing and life in general.
I think they are useful hints and insights that we can all learn from.
So, let's get started.
ユーモアの役割
On the point about humor, and I want to dig deeper a little bit,
I completely see the importance and effectiveness of humor
as a device to bring people together.
At the same time, the kind of humor that you create for Liquid Death and at Liquid Death,
and then the kind of humor that Liquid Death represents may not be for everybody, right?
So, for instance, I think it was a recent thing that I saw on your LinkedIn page
the casket that you did with the Yeti, the icebox casket, which I personally found funny.
Oh, man, this is sort of an unexpected, I didn't see it coming.
Was that found to be funny universally?
Was there any complaint about that?
And then if either that case or in other cases, and how do you know it's going to work?
Yeah, I mean, in that case, I mean, the casket cooler was universally loved.
We used to really shoot for like 50% love, 50% hate on the ideas.
But like when we did our Super Bowl spot years ago,
it was one of the first things that I got to do when I was here.
And you looked on Twitter after that dropped, and it was like,
50% people loved it, 50% of people hated it.
And that spot was basically, it was like a beer commercial,
but basically starring children because they were all just drinking water.
Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Which is funny because it was like, my response was always like,
it was literally the most innocent shoot I've ever been on.
It was like children drinking water and dancing.
But to your question about humor, I think people have much more capacity
for a broader range of humor than we give people credit for,
I think, especially as marketers.
There's such a tendency to be risk averse, right?
But my perspective is always like,
the riskiest thing you can do is to have nobody pay attention to what you're doing.
The riskiest thing is to pour millions into a campaign that sucks,
and it's going to run for five months, and you think it's hilarious.
And then your bar that you've made it is ad funny.
You know, our bar is actual funny.
And so it's like, people watch stand-up comedians,
people love Saturday Night Live or whatever program.
People have a capacity to not be scandalized by humor that pushes boundaries.
Humor usually does that.
I think it's just we're one of the few brands that's willing to
go to where genuine entertainment exists, right?
But to your point of like, how do you know it works?
We're very thoughtful about it.
And I think from the inside, the misperception is that
Liquid Death is so crazy.
They'll do anything.
There's no rules.
It's like, no, we have a very thoughtful approach to everything we're doing.
We're not just throwing stuff out to shock people.
The point is to, if you can be funny,
picking an audience to be funny for actually means you're going to be funny for a lot of people.
If you're trying to be funny to everybody, all the edges get rounded off.
You know, it becomes like a funny commercial that everyone can enjoy,
but we're willing to go to a place where other people are willing to go to that audience.
And surprisingly, there's a much bigger audience that wants to laugh at darker stuff or,
you know, love stand-up or that kind of style of humor than advertisers would think when they're
trying to be funny to everybody.
So that's kind of our approach in a way.
人々との関係性
Yeah.
So I think it was one of the comments that I noticed on your LinkedIn page that says something
to the extent, let me bring it up, because I was going to ask this question.
You said, stop making marketing and start making stuff people love instead.
So do you think that, is it you individually or your team as the decider of what you think
is genuinely funny?
And if you and a few people think that, okay, this is really funny, as opposed to we're
trying to sell more water or canned water, that's kind of a bar.
Is that really sort of, not to oversimplify the creative process, but is it kind of the
secret sauce?
I think we just try to be respectful of people that were invading their lives.
You know, I think like marketing in the way that most people approach is a very extractive
experience, right?
Yeah.
So it's like, I'm going to come to you, I'm going to interrupt the TV show you're watching
or the YouTube clip you were trying to see, and I'm going to tell you about something that
I think is important and then hope that you give me money for it, right?
So all we're trying to do is flip that and say like, hey, let's make something that's
genuinely entertaining.
Along the way, you're going to learn about something about us, but also we don't tend
マーケティングとクリエイティビティ
to do a lot of media.
We've actually really grown a lot just based on organic content.
You know, again, instead of having someone's day getting interrupted by this thing, you're
trying to watch something else and now you're forced to watch this ad.
It's like, let's just make something that people genuinely want to follow us or share
it or seek it out because the thing is that good to begin with.
I think of Liquid Death has a bunch of products, right?
Yeah.
We have the beverages we make, we have great merch, but also like the marketing is that
you can pay for things in different ways, right?
You can pay for things with money, but you can pay for things with time, spending your
time doing something or sharing it with someone.
These are all like value exchanges, which is all that product is.
It's like something that exists that someone else is going to trade you for something,
and so as like head of creative, I have to make sure that the product, the marketing,
the product that I'm responsible for is the best product we can put out every day.
It's not just like something that hits all the copy points and then has like a CTA at
the end with a logo slap, right?
Yeah.
So yeah, it's just a different perspective.
I think it's, again, it's like treating people who receive it with more respect than just
going to them with our hands out asking for money, which, you know, 95% of advertising
can tend to be.
Right.
So what is creativity to you?
An artful way to solve a problem, in particular, in a really surprising way.
But that's, I guess that's at least like my kind of form of creativity.
That's not for everybody, but that's the way I experience it.
No, that's a good way to articulate it.
In a way, similar mental place in terms of what you're doing and then the kind of approach
that you have.
I remember you very distinctly because you and your team did a cookie sale to the Future
Lions competition to earn your way from Atlanta, Georgia to Cannes, France to pay for your flight.
Yeah.
And that was in addition to the work that you submitted, you know, your team won the
award, but at the same time, you had to find your way to Cannes.
But you guys had a really clever campaign to earn your way there and then deservedly
so you made your way there.
And I think that's where we met for the first time.
Yeah, it was us.
And then another team at the Creative Circus won.
So Cool had two out of the five that year.
Right.
We got the email that was, hey, congratulations, you guys won one of the five Future Lions.
I think we got like a follow up email the next day or something.
And it was something like, hey, we just wanted to know if you're going to be in Cannes next
week to pick this up in person.
We're like, what?
I Google Cannes because we didn't even like, I was such a young student.
We had no idea what was going on.
And I Google Cannes.
Oh, no, Cannes is in France.
And so we had to, we're like, how are we going to get to France in a week or whatever the
time was?
Yeah.
That's where the bake sale came from.
The bake sale.
Right.
Yeah.
We basically, we calculated everything.
We needed $6,000 for plane tickets, you know, another $2,000 for hotels or somewhere to
stay and another food.
It sort of rolled up to about $10,000 that we needed essentially tomorrow.
I was, for some reason, went back to like 80s movies.
You know, they're always in 80s movies.
They're trying to like save the fraternity house or whatever it is.
And so I was like, well, they throw keggers.
Yeah, that's not going to work.
I don't think we're going to make money.
Car washes.
And then for some reason, I was like bake sales.
I was like, if we just sell $500 cookies, we only have to sell like 20 cookies.
That was sort of the whole idea.
We launched this website overnight that was called Cookies for Can.
Yeah.
We're selling $500 cookies and we send it out to everybody.
And the next day we got contacted by Leo Burnett, Chicago, asking if they could buy
a dozen cookies.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
And then we actually replied to the email that asked if, um, AKQA asking if we're going to
pick them up in person.
And we're like, well, it depends.
Are you guys hungry for cookies?
And then just sent a link to the website.
And then AKQA bought, I think, two cookies.
Yeah, we probably did.
Yeah.
Yes.
So within about 24 hours, we had raised all the $10,000.
Wow.
Yeah.
That was really cool.
Cause it was, it's funny.
Cause I look back on that now, there's kind of a very direct line to some of the stuff
that we're doing with Liquid Debt.
Yes.
And kind of a similar style of thinking I was starting then.
And then, you know, it was the first successful ad I ever made.
I was just a student.
So I'd never made.
Right.
An ad that had actually made money or had any real effect.
So that was great.
And then, like I said, when we went to Cannes, I mean, we had a, we arrived there and we
already had a great story and we were the.
Yeah.
Cookie kids and all that stuff.
So that whole experience really set off my whole career and was really like the start
of where I was lucky enough to end up later.
And it's, you know, you can kind of put all the pieces together and discover how I ended
up at Liquid Debt way down the road eventually.
Excellent.
Wow.
So that was 16 years ago.
What would you say the turning point in your career was?
フリーランスの旅
I think it was probably around 2013, 14, something.
I forget which year it was.
My wife, who has been freelance for a number of years at that point, she convinced me that
I should quit my job and we should go before we had kids go travel the world together.
For a year, just like retire for a year.
Because it was like, we're going to be anchored down at some point when we have kids in the
future.
So before that happens, while we still have some mobility, let's just quit.
Let's leave our apartment and just go travel the world and see what happens.
And yeah, we sublet our apartment in Santa Monica and put everything into a backpack
and bought a one-way plane ticket.
And we just took off to initially New Zealand and then ended up in Southeast Asia going to
Cambodia and Vietnam and Laos and Malaysia and then later to Europe and just traveling
for basically a full year.
Oh, wow.
And so we started freelancing for agencies and brands back in the United States, but
from a coffee shop in Vietnam.
It was amazing because we'd work four days a month and it would cover our entire month
of travel, essentially.
We had the money that we didn't necessarily need to work because especially in that area,
it's relatively cheap to get around.
But it was really nice to kind of ground us during travel.
We actually needed like a day off a week from all the craziness of traveling to just sit
somewhere and use our brains.
But through that process, freelancing, getting to see inside of a lot of places, seeing how
agencies worked, seeing where the models felt really broken to us, it gave me a lot of perspective
that I hadn't previously gotten.
Sure.
That whole experience for those several years was a real chance for me to break out and
look at things very clear-eyed and decide that you could do them differently if you
ウルトラマラソンの精神
just chose to.
We're so busy all the time in this industry.
We don't afford ourselves a lot of time.
The clarity to sit back and try to do it differently sometimes.
Mm-hmm.
This is a little bit off script and more specific to you and how you are as an individual.
There's a couple of questions following that.
How do you switch your mind when you're feeling down?
I don't feel down that often, to be totally frank.
Why do you think you have that kind of mentality?
I'm a runner, I do ultra marathons, and so I get up stupid early in the morning.
I think I saw a post from you on LinkedIn or something recently that you are running
in the morning.
Yeah.
Ultras are basically intentionally putting yourself into very difficult, very painful,
awful conditions by choice, seeing how you react under duress, under very adverse conditions,
and actually kind of growing through that process.
Every ultra marathon, you kind of go inward in that and you learn about yourself.
And then also part of that, it's like if I get up in the morning and I go run to the
top of a mountain for my training run in the morning, and you see the sunrise on top of
a mountain, you've both done something very hard and you've done something really fulfilling
and something that no one really else is doing because you're alone on the trails.
I think if you do that in the morning, then nothing else in the rest of your day is really
going to phase you because you've had a painful experience, a beautiful experience, and a
solitary experience all before the day has even begun.
And so I think that training on an almost daily basis really grounds me in not letting
things get to me.
And then being able to look at situations in a sort of objective, detached way, and I
mean that in a positive sense.
So I think that's probably part of whatever that is.
I know that you are a very avid runner doing ultra marathons, but are you training for a
race anytime soon?
Yeah, actually Tahoe 200, which is a 200-mile race on trails around Lake Tahoe.
So to do a 200-mile race, how many hours does it take to finish the race?
Uh, for me, it'll probably, I would hope around 70 to 80 hours, maybe.
So three, three and a half days.
Yeah.
So then you stop overnight and then you keep running.
Don't really stop overnight.
You stop.
You don't.
There's aid stations along the way.
So every, you know, 10 to 20 miles, there might be a place to get food and water.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I would only sleep maybe for an hour each day at some point, um, just to kind of
reset the body, but there's no, there's no like, there's, it's not overnight sleeping
or anything.
It's like, you know, you just pull in on the side of the trail and sleep on a rock for
30 minutes to hopefully make the hallucinations go away enough to keep running.
Oh man.
Yeah.
It's, uh, it's pretty extreme.
Yeah.
But why did you still running?
Like extremely?
Uh, it's because I had a very extreme job, honestly.
It was when I was at Crispin Porter Bogusky in Boulder, Colorado.
Yes.
And Crispin at the time, you know, this, I mean, had, but for people who don't had a
reputation as a sweatshop, we just worked crazy hours where I was working, you know,
78 hour weeks.
I would only go to bed, be in the office until 11 o'clock every night.
I remember my first five months.
I didn't have a single day off, including weekends.
It was a really intense atmosphere that we were all under.
I also, on top of that, I identified that I wasn't the funniest creative or the most
talented, but I understood that I could work harder than anybody else.
仕事とライフバランスについての探求
And that was going to be how I was going to get ahead was just by putting more work in.
And through that process, I would inherit, I would, I could at least catch up with the
people that could do it more effortlessly.
If I put in a lot of effort, what I think I was doing was going headfirst into something
that was as extreme as my job, but in a totally opposite way.
Right.
It was like, this job is so crazy.
I'm going to find something that is literally the opposite.
I'm going to be in nature by myself for six to seven hours on a weekend morning, just
running through the mountains.
And it was like very extreme reaction to my very extreme job.
I think they both kind of canceled each other out.
It really helped center me by doing this other extreme thing.
Okay.
Do you think it was a good thing?
Would you tell yourself or would you tell younger creatives to work as hard as you did,
you know, 80, 90, 100 hours a week?
For me, it was good.
You would?
Like I said, I knew that I was going to get ahead.
It was already crazy, but I knew that goal, the key to me succeeding was going to be me
having to try a lot.
Yeah.
I know other people are telling you, you have to find a work-life balance, but as a young
person, fuck that.
You have to work as hard as you can.
Go hard like that.
If you really want to do this, that's going to be the thing that's going to be your biggest
teacher.
It's not sustainable.
You're going to have to find a way to extricate yourself from that kind of thinking later on.
But as a young creative, you only learn by doing as much as you can.
What's your superpower?
I think like you said, it's like willing to work harder than anyone else.
There's also this flip side of that is that you have to be efficient.
You learn to be more efficient.
And I think like, especially with ultra running, it's about efficiency, especially now at Liquid
Death.
It's like part of the superpower is realizing the stuff that doesn't matter and how we can
do it better.
And I think a lot of my career has been me wanting to make everything better by throwing
out the way that is generally accepted and then trying to create a new way to do it.
That's not a succinct superpower, but it's like the want to not do things the way that
don't make sense.
I guess it's sort of like a creative objectivity in a weird sort of way.
コメディーの重要性
Excellent.
So that was part two of my conversation with Andy Pearson, the VP of Creative at Liquid
Death.
And as you've heard, an avid extreme runner.
So here are my three key takeaways from this conversation with Andy.
Takeaway number one, take comedy seriously.
Takeaway number two, the power of time off.
And takeaway number three, do it to the max.
So key takeaway number one, take comedy seriously.
Comedy is a great device to engage people, but in the context of professional marketing
and brand marketing, it's not an easy thing for a brand to embrace.
If you've come across any of marketing initiatives or a piece of content from Liquid Death, you
can sense that it's genuinely funny, humorous, playful, and unexpected.
And that is because Andy and his team, or he pushes his team to take comedy seriously.
So taking comedy seriously, I know it is easier said than done, but the reason why a brand
like Liquid Death is resonating with a pretty large group of audience is because he approaches
comedy seriously.
休暇の力
Point number two, the power of time off.
It is a concept that I think a lot of people talk about, and it's something that I flirted
with many, many years ago, but the work and life got in the way.
And I realize I'm making an excuse, but I was never able to take a significant amount
of time off from work to be able to travel, to see things.
But this was something that I didn't know about Andy at all.
And he says, him, to see the world differently and be able to take a little bit of distance
and take a little bit of break from the day to day and approach his work with a fresh
point of view.
And finally, the last point, do it to the max.
What I realized was naturally, Andy, as an individual, and both in his professional life
as well as a personal life, has the tendency to do things to the max.
So for instance, as I introduced the way he and I met 16 years ago, he and at the time,
his team members decided to sell these Girl Scout and Boy Scout cookies to a girl scout
cookies, not at $5, $10, but $1,500 a piece in order to make the payment to travel to
Cannes, France.
So that's an early sign of Andy committing to an idea and doing to the max.
Another thing, and this is more on a personal level, he's now running these extreme running
races that take multiple days to complete.
And again, that's a way of him doing something to the max to get the most out of whatever
he's doing.
And then that's also being reflected in his professional work and at the company that he's
working for and the brand that he is committing himself and quote unquote, doing to the max
to engage the audience in unexpected and humorous ways.
So just to summarize, that's three key takeaways from my conversation with Andy were, number
one, take comedy seriously.
Number two, the power of time off.
And number three, do it to the max.
If you're listening to this on Spotify, there's a Q&A field.
So please do send us your questions and comments.
And if you like our podcast, please give us a five-star rating.
We'll be so grateful.
I'm Reiner Moro, and this is The Creative Mindset.
See you next time.
