America is going back to the movies, and so are brands. This week, two bottled water companies are making cinematic debuts with new marketing campaigns, each using the movies to drive home brand stories about sustainability.
Liquid Death Stars in Dead Till Death
Horror movies have been made about killer cars, killer dolls and killer bongs. Now, killer cans of water have finally entered the inanimate object slasher canon.
For its latest marketing campaign, canned water brand Liquid Death has produced its first narrative film, Dead Till Death, which premiered online this weekend with a $9 per ticket livestream event and will begin streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Google TV next month. The 43-minute short was co-written and directed by Will Carsola (Adult Swim’s Mr. Pickle) and produced by Neighborhood Film Co. (Netflix’s Concrete Cowboy).
Billing itself as “A Tale of Savagery and Sustainability,” Dead Till Death features a familiar scary movie plot: a group of twenty-somethings leave the city for a weekend getaway in the woods, only to find themselves hunted down one by one by lethal cans of Liquid Death water. In addition to promoting the brand, the film also highlights the company’s sustainability mission by working facts about plastic pollution into the plot.
According to Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario, also one of the film’s executive producers, Dead Till Death is intended to increase brand awareness but also to open a revenue stream through merchandise and ticket sales that will help finance the film. The movie’s tongue-in-cheek tone, similar to viral hits like Sharknado, is meant to encourage viewers to share it with friends.
“Marketing is basically an awareness game,” Cessario said. “The people who are best at it, it’s like they know how to day trade attention. They find the most efficient way from a cost perspective to reach as many eyeballs as possible. And most traditional media platforms like television or out of home billboards, they’re not cost efficient. The amount of money you pay per eyeball is really high.”
This isn’t Liquid Death’s first move in showbusiness: In May, the company closed a $15 million Series C round that included investment from Live Nation Entertainment, which said it will carry the brand as the exclusive water at over 120 U.S. venues and festivals. Liquid Death also partnered with Netflix that month to promote the release of zombie film Army of the Dead by producing “No Brainer” headgear — a foam novelty hat that can hold cans and promises to protect the wearer from zombie attacks. That campaign also featured a comedic 30 minute infomercial promoting the hat, movie and water.
While it’s all in service of the CPG business, Cessario said Liquid Death will continue to embrace entertainment as a means of growing its audience and noted that no form of entertainment — be it film, music or Broadway musical — is off limits.
“People are never going to pay to watch a regular commercial; in fact, people pay to not watch commercials,” Cessario said. “But companies like Red Bull and Monster, they figured out that entertainment model where it was like ‘if we film action sports people with RED cameras doing cool tricks, that’s entertainment.’ And it’s entertainment that people actually would seek out and want to watch on their own. It’s not like every single person has to be chugging the product during every trick, it doesn’t have to be so heavy handed.”
FIJI Water Gets New Score from Hans Zimmer
Invoking some Academy pedigree, FIJI Water announced today that it has partnered with Oscar winning film composer Hans Zimmer for a new digital and TV marketing campaign.
For the promotion, Zimmer — who has scored films like Inception, Black Rain, Gladiator and The Dark Knight over a 30-plus year Hollywood career — composed four 15-second songs for FIJI Water, each representing a step in the natural water cycle. In a behind the scenes video, Zimmer discusses the thought process behind each composition, which are individually titled “Clouds,” “Rain,” “Rock,” and “Aquifer.”
The campaign, built around the slogan “It’s Not Just Water,” will showcase FIJI’s latest packaging refresh, which enlarges the brand’s signature hibiscus flower logo among other tweaks. The new packaging is available nationwide in all bottle sizes. The company is also in the process of transitioning its packaging to 100% rPET bottles, beginning next year with its best-selling 500mL size.
As consumers increasingly seek out sustainable beverages, the campaign invokes images of unpolluted nature. In the video, Zimmer highlights the “purity” of Fiji water and emphasizes that “there are few places on this planet where you can find” water untouched by humans. The ads tie into Fiji’s slogan that their water is “Untouched By Man until you unscrew the cap.”
“We’ve created the perfect storm through this campaign, elevated by the musical wonder of Hans Zimmer, to showcase that Earth’s Finest Water exists from a sustainable source in Fiji,” said FIJI SVP of Marketing Clarence Chia in a press release. “We know that consumers are actively looking for electrolytes, minerals, and a balanced pH in their water, all of which nature has perfected throughout hundreds of years. This is why ‘it’s not just water, it’s FIJI Water.’”
The campaign videos will be run on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Linear Cable and on streaming platforms such as Hulu, Pluto and Tubi. The campaign also includes print and digital ads.