Andy Pearson: [00:00:00] Risk is nobody carrying what you're doing, right? Risk is like we make something and it sucks and no one cares. For us, it's about bringing something really surprising to people that hopefully they never saw coming. And I think the idea behind Liquid Death and to get mushy for a second is just wanna bring joy to people's day.

We always talk about being the best thing that someone's gonna see that day, and that's really our goal every time we go out the door.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any Insights yet the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. On today's episode, we talk about reframing risk and doing scary stuff with Andy Pearson, VP of Creative at Liquid Death. Over the past 12 months, Andy and his team have unleashed a deluge of viral hits that have made them the envy of the marketing world.

Here are just some of their activations in no particular order. Death [00:01:00] dust powder, a limited edition hot fudge sundae flavor with Van Leeuwen ice cream, the Yeti Casket Cooler, the Freeze to Death Cold Plunge tank, a partnership with Burton to create an unrideable snowboard called the Death Trap, a contest where you could win a free L39 Arrow Jet called the Dehydrator, an eBay auction where they sold the side of their box for $500,000, which was the 10th most expensive auction in eBay's history and earned Liquid Death spot in Adweek's 20 groundbreaking campaigns that redefined Super Bowl advertising. Honestly, the list just keeps going. And keep in mind, these are activations from just the past 12 months. Clearly there's no shortage of ideas at Liquid Death, but what I wanted to know is how they get there, how do they consistently connect the dots between their brand and pop culture so effectively.

How do they decide which ideas are good enough for Liquid Death and what exactly is [00:02:00] Liquid Death logic? We cover a lot of ground in this conversation from ultra marathons to TikTok hacks to the power of improv, but we start with a simple question: What are some activations that are Andy's absolute favorites?

Andy Pearson: I really love the collaboration we did with Elf, the Corpse Paint. That was just such a fun one because it, on paper, it makes no sense for us to do something with a cosmetics brand. So when I look at stuff, it's usually, there's the Venn diagram of if these things are such bizarre bedfellows, there's a very small sliver in the middle where you can find the idea that makes sense. And so a lot of times the job is to figure out where's that little sliver, the Venn Diagram center. And that was one where after a couple conversations with them, I was just like, yeah, we should just make corpse paint. That seems like the obvious thing that Liquid Death would do.

And that one was, I would say, wildly successful. I think for both of us, we really knew that it ticked a [00:03:00] lot of boxes where we could make it this really fun parody commercial. But then beyond that, we understood it was this really great hack of TikTok. If we have all these influencers and all these different people with Corpse Paint and you're scrolling through your feed and suddenly you just have this face that you're not used to seeing in your feed from someone who just might be a beauty influencer, a standard beauty influencer, just doing a really standard tutorial showing how to get this look.

I think we had a sense that it would be fairly big, but it, it really took off. It got 12 million views in the first 24 hours or so, and it ended up spawning all this conversation on TikTok and response videos got millions and millions of views, just the responses back to the thing that we did. So I have a lot of love for that campaign, that one was really fun.

And then this other one is super random that most people haven't seen, but in my first month or so at Liquid Death, there was this guy on TikTok who towards the end of the pandemic, he had been drinking a can of liquid [00:04:00] death within 15 seconds every day or something. And it was coming up on the anniversary of that, and we were like, we should do something for this guy.

He's been doing it for so long. He's clearly a dedicated fan. That's all his feed was and we had no idea what to do. And finally, like a day or two before, I was just like, what's something that like only Liquid Death would do. And we know some people get Liquid Death tattoos, fans get Liquid Death tattoos. But what if for this one guy, Liquid Death got a fan tattoo and our CEO and founder Mike, he's got sleeves and everything.

And I was like, no CEO of any other company would just randomly get a tattoo of a random fan on the internet. But I think Mike might. So in around my first month or so, I was like “Hey, Mike, I've got an idea. I need you to get this guy's face tattooed on your body for this.” And he was just like, “Yeah, sure.”

So we threw it together and we took two [00:05:00] days, set up the appointment the next day he's there getting the tattoo. I love that because it was showing, it's kind of all about like how much fans are important to what we do and how what we do is very interactive with them. And now Mike has a tattoo of this random dude on his arm that every time I see it in like a meeting, it just makes me laugh.

So I have a lot of heart for that campaign. Not that many people saw it. It was when we were still really small, but I kind of love the heart of that story. 

Chris Kocek: Oh, I've seen it, I've featured it. When I talk to people, I say, this is dedication. I didn't know it was a two day turnaround.

Andy Pearson: We were like, “what are we gonna do?” And it was like very last minute. I was like, “I don't know, get a tattoo.” I think desperation sometimes breeds the best ideas and yeah, I love that thing. 

Chris Kocek: So I heard you say that “what's something only Liquid Death would do?” And you hear that a lot when brands are trying to come up with their positioning.

We're the only blank who blanks because of these reasons. But it sounds like you're using that filter [00:06:00] on your advertising or on the creative work that you guys put out there. 

Andy Pearson: Yeah, and I think that something that only Liquid Death would do is really important because sometimes we'll have ideas. Then we're like, “oh, that's a cool idea.”

And then we're like, “yeah, but it feels like somebody else could do it.” It feels like another beverage brand or somebody else. It doesn't hue close enough to our worldview or our sensibilities or something. So it has to be like 100% us or it's not worth doing from our standpoint. So I think the process is not that difficult or unique. I think it's more the approach to the work itself. We talk a lot about being more like a writer's room than like a creative department. We just literally all get on a call and jam, throw out stupid ideas for like an hour, and sometimes we hit on something and we're like, “cool, we got it, we got five things we love.” Sometimes we'll take two of those sessions to get where we want to go, but it's really not that much [00:07:00] more time expended than an hour or two before we then take that to the wider group and it's very unpolished. I think the idea should be able to make you laugh in a single sentence, it doesn't need this huge explanation, right? 

I often find that it's more about uncovering the right idea than figuring out what we could possibly do, because in any situation, I believe for us, there's like a right thing for us to do, and all we're trying to do is find that thing because I've come to understand Liquid Death as a character more than anything else.

So when I talk about writer's room, it's almost more like we're sitting there saying “okay, well, what would the character of Liquid Death do if we had a partnership with Elf?” Or if we were gonna launch a flavor called Hot Fudge Sundae, or whatever the thing is that's in front of us. It's more like what would the character, this character, rather than this brand, would it do in this situation? And so I think by making it [00:08:00] about what would Liquid Death do, it makes it an objective thing rather than a subjective thing. So after we work for an hour or two, we bring it to our wider marketing group and our CEO and founder, then it's okay, what is the thing that Liquid Death would do? And then we all go, yeah, that's the thing.

It allows us to work so much faster than I think a standard marketing department normally could, you know what I mean? 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. It almost sounds like actors, when they talk about prepping for a role, they say, okay, I'm getting into the headspace of this character. And then if there's a line in the script or they're working on a scene, they say, I don't believe the character would actually say that.

Andy Pearson: Right. 

Chris Kocek: Or do that. And so it almost sounds like by defining the Liquid Death character or persona, of who Liquid Death is, you create your guardrails for yourselves. 

Andy Pearson: Yeah. And what I like about what you're saying there too, is if you're an actor in that space, in the head space, and you can also improv, right?

You can turn on the camera [00:09:00] and you go, or you rehears the scene and you're in character allowing to do that. So again, for us, a lot of times it's, it's almost like improv where we're reacting really quickly to things, and I think like speed and agility are very underrated values, and I think especially as a really super high growth startup, that's something that from the very beginning we've known is super important for what we do.

Chris Kocek: Do you guys even perceive what you do as risky or is risk not even a thing in your mind? 

Andy Pearson: Risk is nobody carrying what you're doing, right? Risk is like we make something and it sucks and no one cares. When I look back at the stuff that we've done, the riskiest things are the things that going into it, I was kind of like, yeah, I feel only okay about this.

That's a risky idea to me, an idea that feels only okay. I don't think we ever talk about the idea of risk for us, it's about bringing something really surprising to [00:10:00] people that hopefully they never saw coming. And I think the idea behind Liquid Death in, to get mushy for a second, is I just wanna bring joy to people's day.

We always talk about being the best thing that someone's gonna see that day, and that's really our goal every time we go out the door and I think that's kind of a really nice thing to do that I don't think most marketers are considering their end consumer in that sense, right? It's essentially an extractive relationship.

As a marketer, we're gonna come to you, we're gonna tell you what we want you to buy, we're gonna tell you why you should believe us, and then also we're gonna keep coming back. We're gonna have this media buy where we keep hammering you until we grind you down, and we've totally flipped that where we wanna give something that people genuinely love. It's connected to our brand, maybe they learn something along the way, but that sense of giving somebody something, making something really entertainment from the get go is really core to what we're doing. 

Chris Kocek: I think I read somewhere that Mike said [00:11:00] that you guys aren't competing with other water brands.

You're competing with everybody who is making great content that you wanna watch, so you're basically competing for mind share to some extent.

Andy Pearson: Our references are, we're not like, “oh, there's this cool ad that they did this.” It's more like, “oh, there's this really funny joke in a Tom Segura standup.” Or, “hey, here's a really crazy video from old school adult swim days.”

It's always entertainment, it's not other marketing. And so we have to also deliver something that is gonna make you wanna watch it. And I think that frame of reference is what people are often missing, is like making a really good ad, and what we just wanna do is make a really good idea or a really good thing, and then when it becomes an ad, oh wow, it also does really well because it was intended to work on its own before ever became a quote unquote ad.

Chris Kocek: I love the way that you just reframed risk, which is, most people think of risk as “uh oh, what are people gonna think of us?” [00:12:00] And you're basically saying, our biggest risk is that they don't think of us.

So being boring, that's risky. Just comparing yourselves to somebody else that's risky. You've gotta do something that surprises, delights and gets on people's radar 'cause there's, frankly, there's a lot of good stuff out there

Andy Pearson: I think the perception on the outside is like, “oh, you guys will do anything.”

We have things that we know we won't do. When we build stuff, we know what we're doing, we know where not to go. We're very conscious of the decisions we make, and it's not, to like, just be the wildest thing that you see on the internet or how crazy can we go? They're very specific decisions we're always making.

Chris Kocek: I wanna return to this area of where you won't go, at some point, but I wanted to talk for a second about, on LinkedIn you have this post where you talk about ambition and humility and doing scary stuff. And you actually wrote, I haven't made all my life decisions in spite of them scaring [00:13:00] me.

I've made them because they scare me. And so I wanted to go back in time for a second and just see what is a really scary thing that you did early on in your career, long before Liquid Death that really scared you but you did it anyway. 

Andy Pearson: Yeah. I would say maybe the best example was when I was in Deutsche LA

I had been there for about three years and my wife had been freelance for a number of years and she came to me with this idea. We were at this wedding in North Carolina, we were watching all the couples that were like dealing with their children, hungover, the day after the wedding, and she was like I think you should just quit your job and we should just go travel for a year before we have to like ever deal with all that stuff that we're watching these people deal with right now.

And I've always needed to be really plugged in at a place that's what gets me amped and so, yeah, I quit Deutsche, [00:14:00] left on very good terms, loved all the people there, but I was just like, “hey, let's take a year off before we have kids and just travel the world and see what happens.” So we subletted our apartment in Santa Monica. We just put everything in a backpack, including a laptop and bought like a one-way ticket around the globe basically and just made it up as we went along. And I was like, “I know through that process, something is gonna fall out of this thing. I don't know what, but something is gonna connect.” And she and I ended up freelancing from like literally coffee shops in Vietnam and Cambodia and all over the world just doing work back for stateside companies and it was amazing. It was like we would work one day a week and it would cover all our expenses for that entire week that we were traveling. And out of that, we ended up getting connected to Humanaut out of Chattanooga, Tennessee which is actually where our founder Mike was at prior to us. [00:15:00] It was a really scary leap but through that freelance process, I got connected to Mike, our CEO, and a number of years later, he just text me outta the blue and he is like, “hey, what are you doing?” I am doing this Liquid Death thing and I need a little help and it feels like we were always on the same page, so you could do that whole butterfly effect thing.

But that really ended up ultimately leading me to Liquid Death. So even just coming to Liquid Death at the time was a bit of a risk. We were just starting off and you, you know, it was this kind of crazy brand that everyone thought was gonna fail. And ultimately my decision on that was like, if I don't take the job, I never want to see a can of Liquid Death ever again in my life.

I was like, if I don't take it, 'cause I know how great it can be. I'm gonna be so angry every time I see Liquid Death out in the world. And that was my decision, I was like, then that means I have to take it, I have to see what that's all about. So yeah, everything's been about like the thing that I didn't want to do is the thing that it means I need to do.

Chris Kocek: You seem to have a fairly high threshold [00:16:00] for being uncomfortable. Most people run away from the uncomfortable feeling, right, but you're just like, if it makes me feel this uncomfortable, I guess I need to do it. 

Andy Pearson: It means I'll learn something and I like that you say uncomfortable 'cause I do ultra marathons in my spare time and you wanna learn what discomfort is like, go run a hundred miles in the mountains in a day, and that's my whole life, is courting discomfort and trying to learn from that kind of cauldron of awfulness, like what kind of stuff will come out of that. 

Chris Kocek: We're gonna circle back around to your ultra marathoning experience, but you mentioned earlier you know that it needs to be 100% Liquid Death, what would be 100% us? Is there a question or a set of questions that you like to ask during the creative ideation process to poke holes in something and say “I don't know if that's a hundred percent, that's 90% us, but you know what? These guys over here, they could do something like that.”

Andy Pearson: The number one is what's the dumbest thing we could do?

Or [00:17:00] like I said earlier, it's like, what would Liquid Death do? I think that's always a, a good one that kind of gets us there. And then sometimes it's like, what's something that a shitty brand would do? Or like a, a normal brand, right? What's the conventional approach to doing this thing? And then that obviously in turn becomes like, okay, then how would we make that our Liquid Death thing. So the best example of that probably was when we were launching flavored sparkling water, it was our first time we'd stepped out from doing just pure water, sparkling water and so it was a big deal and we sat down to try to figure out what we should do. We were gonna write a brief or something, and we just started talking. We're like “how do brands talk about flavor and how do you prove like it's a good flavor?” Like brands are always trying to prove that you have the best flavor, but what does that even mean? That's such a dumb, subjective thing. It's like “now more flavorful” or “best flavor” or whatever. There's no way to prove that. But [00:18:00] yet that's what everyone does. And so we're like, how do people try to prove that? And these taste tests will show, well, people talk about how much they love it in like a blind taste test. So that just really quickly spiraled into what if we just did a taste test, but we put our sparkling, our flavored sparkling water against things that are really gross, but also really expensive.

And so if we have a can for $1.99 and you have beluga caviar mixed into water for $750. Like, we're gonna win that blind taste test every single time, right? That was a really good example of just like, what's the conventional wisdom around here and then what is like the crazy Liquid Death logic that we can put on top of that?

Because that's also what I love about the stuff we do is when I talk about what's the dumbest thing we can do, sometimes we'll be like, all right, that is objectively the dumbest thing we could do here. But then my follow up question to that is always like, okay, how do we inject logic into that? So how do you take something that feels [00:19:00] insanely stupid and then make a really excellent logical case for the thing. Those are the ideas that I love because there's this like very highbrow-lowbrow tension always happening on like, we're gonna tell you at the beginning about this dumb thing and then by the end of this video or email or whatever you get from us, the thing that you initially thought was really stupid, we've now somehow convinced you is, really, a really good idea.

It's a really weird, pleasurable experience to be taken along for that ride, that on the back end, you're like, “yes, now I agree, this dumb thing is a really great idea.” I think it's respecting people a little bit more. It's giving them some interactive experience with the marketing or with the thing itself.

Can we convince you of something that, again, feels dumb, but we're gonna make it sound super smart. So like, blind Taste Test is a great example of that. The Yeti cooler we just did, that's a casket cooler, it looks like there's a real casket, like dumb idea [00:20:00] but we're gonna make an ad that presents it as if it's a really smart thing and so those are the ideas that I love. It's not just like the dumb, for dumb sake, it's the dumb for smart sake, I think. 

Chris Kocek: I think that there's an unpredictability to what you guys do. What are they gonna do next? Where are they gonna go with this? I recently saw the movie The Substance with Demi Moore and crazy movie.

If you're looking for unpredictability, you'll walk out being like, wow, that director did not compromise on their vision, not one inch. But I think because we've seen so many stories, we've seen so many things that we're looking, always, for that unpredictable twist and you guys do that again and again, so successfully.

And so one of the things I was wondering is you have a Dead Talk, which is a spoof of TED Talks where you encourage people to question everything, and you talk about the power of looking for questions rather than looking for answers. Can you elaborate on that?

Andy Pearson: I think we're often [00:21:00] looking for answers or looking for smart ways to do things, and I think by taking this kind of naive approach, it opens us up to so many more possibilities than we normally have access to, right? It's the beginner's mindset, and so questions like, “what's the dumbest thing we can do?” What that really is is saying “what would be such an unsuccessful idea that no one is going to even go there.” Right? What if we actively tried to fail? What if we tried to do the dumbest thing? And then to my point about like logic, what if we can actually then build a case for that stupid thing?

So I think like asking the right questions help us to unlock places that we haven't been willing to go yet, because our mind's not gonna naturally get there. And again, if we're talking best practices and trying to be successful, we're only gaining access to the top 10% of ideas [00:22:00] that we think will be good, versus we're leaving all this other amazing stuff on the table that's all sitting below it.

And so that's really what I mean, I guess, by asking questions because it allows you to sit and stew in the murky depths of creative ideas that most people won't allow themselves to entertain. 

Chris Kocek: You mentioned earlier the sort of writer's room approach and something just clicked for me as you were talking about, when I think about what you guys have done, the casket, the Euro Club, all these different things. They feel like skits that come out of almost either an improv troupe or an SNL type environment. And that seems totally by design, is that right? 

Andy Pearson: Yeah. We talk a lot about SNL, I think even the product itself, Liquid Death, it feels like something that could have been an SNL commercial, but then you walk into your target and you're like, “oh my God, it's real.” Kind of a mind bending experience for people in a lot of ways. I think, as a brand, that's the DNA of the fun of it. [00:23:00] Something as healthy as water is now branded to look very unhealthy and be called Liquid Death. 

Chris Kocek: I often reference you when I'm giving workshops about insights and one of the things that you guys have done an exceptional job of doing is you turn hate into something great.

You took a lot of real negative comments from people and you've turned them into The Greatest Hates Volumes One, Two, and Three. I believe you got like a cease and desist letter around the Armless Palmer. You turned that into, what was it called? Dead billionaire. Is that something that you guys are thinking several steps ahead, or you get the cease and desist letter, you grab everybody together and say, all right, let's figure out how we're gonna handle this?

Andy Pearson: It's a bit like improv in some ways where it's like, “oh, this thing is happening, what would Liquid Death do in this situation?” We would just act like this is the greatest thing in the world, that all these people are leaving us all these comments on our page, and let's just turn that into ads. So we're just gonna go ahead and keep spinning 'em up.

That's what I mean is like [00:24:00] the brand should be interactive because the product, like I said, there's this kind of cognitive dissonance between, “oh, it's water, but it feels like beer in my hand.” You're very actively participating in it. Like even the sparkling waters are carbonated about at the level of a beer.

Actually, when you drink it, it actually feels like you're drinking a beer more than like a sparkling water and that's all by design. So the product itself, in a lot of ways is interactive. So the marketing around it should feel like it's very interactive and reactive as well. But the one thing I'll say that I think brands get wrong is like, reactive marketing tends to be like, “oh, there's this holiday coming up and it's National Donut Day, so we're gonna do like a national donut day post,” or whatever it is.

And so that's people trying to like glom onto some kind of relevance that's happening in the world that like, honestly, most everyone doesn't know that thing. And so when you see all the brands post that's National Donut Day, you're like, “oh, I guess [00:25:00] it's National Donut Day because these 10 brands told me it was, but I don't give a shit about it.”

And I think what we're trying to do is make these really surprising interactions. That's the fun interactivity between us and our fans or people that drink Liquid Death. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. I mean, you're not just trying to glom onto the culture, you guys are trying to create the culture. 

Andy Pearson: Yeah, exactly. That's why we don't do holiday campaigns, or we don't drop like an Earth Day campaign because we're talking about death to plastic all the other days of the year and everyone else is gonna talk about Earth Day around Earth Day. 

Chris Kocek: So you mentioned being a long distance runner. Do you feel like there's any interesting overlaps between long distance running and building a brand? 

Andy Pearson: If I were to try to make some connections, like I am right now, I would say you have to be very adaptive to what's going on, I think especially when you're doing like a hundred miler, 200 milers, you can have a really good plan and then you can go out and, and all go to shit. So I think having the ability [00:26:00] to adapt to what's in front of you is something that is pretty useful. Also, this is gonna sound weird, a lot of long distance running is about using a most minimal effort to conserve what you're doing. You're trying to have the most efficient stride, you're trying to not push, you know that this is a long game. You don't run up an uphill, a 2000 foot climb, you're gonna power hike that as fast as you can, but you're not gonna blow up that thing because that's never gonna work. 

There's just a lot of unnecessary energy expended on stuff that really doesn't matter. The end consumer, the person on the other end of the video is never, ever gonna know that happened. All those conversations, all those meetings, all those decks, all that stuff is just superfluous stuff to make us feel like we're doing a good job.

And so I think that's been a big part in being at Liquid Death because our founder, Mike, also is an ad creative and a lot of what we do is in reaction against stuff that we think [00:27:00] was done wrong in places that we've been before, things that we've seen as incorrect. So for us, it's really nice to be able to build a place and build processes and a brand around negating all the stuff that we don't think is necessary. There's so much less energy that can be expended if you take a moment to step back and look at it really skeptically and objectively and I think that's a really important thing that I hope for everybody in this industry, that we learn to untangle ourselves from unnecessary processes and unnecessary things that are keeping us working till 11 o'clock or working weekends or spinning on stuff, or having to put decks together of a hundred pages to bring to a client and having to do a 40 page strategy set up on the front end. And there's all these things that we do because we think we should do them, not because we actually should.

Chris Kocek: Have you read the book Born to Run by chance? 

Andy Pearson: Born to Run is what got me in this [00:28:00] whole mess, to be honest. I was living in Boulder, I was working at Crispin and I was working crazy hours. My first five months there, I didn't have a single day off, including weekends and. I remember seeing the author Christopher McDougall on the Daily Show randomly.

It was like I randomly flipped on the TV one night and he was on talking about it. I was like, “oh, that's crazy, people run like 50 miles or a hundred miles.” I'd always kind of liked running and I'd always wanted to get serious at some point. And so I just picked up the book. That book is all, sounds like you've read it, but it's all about the origin of the joy, of pure running and I don't know, like a species level of running.

And yeah, it hit me at a time where I was like, that sounds crazy. Meanwhile, I'm working like 80 hour weeks or whatever. And what it did when I started getting into it is it provided this equal and opposite insanity. So it was like, I work this insane job, but if I go off and I run this insane amount of [00:29:00] miles every weekend, then like they balance each other out.

And it was this really crazy way to negate the other thing. And so even when I would be pulling all-nighters at Crispin. I'd be like, well, it's just good training for my hundred miler in a couple months. And then when I'd be running a hundred miles, I was like, this is good training for my job that I'm gonna have to stay up all night to do.

So they had this like weird, symbiotic relationship in a strange way, but to do the opposite.

Chris Kocek: It's a symbiotic, paradoxical relationship and it sounds like the beginning of Liquid Death logic. 

Andy Pearson: Yeah, totally. Yeah, something very stupid that I'm gonna try to, after the fact, make it sound super smart and intentional.

Chris Kocek: That's funny. Alright, we're at our speed round, we're almost at the end. What was your favorite subject in school 

Andy Pearson: Music. I was a band nerd. We had a really great program in my high school and so I got to take, like, musical composition and analysis and all kinds of cool classes that I feel really lucky to have [00:30:00] taken.

It was a really deep dive for two years into all kinds of everything, music, and it's helped me in my career 'cause now I can really understand how music works and give feedback on things. 

Chris Kocek: And what instrument or instruments did you play? 

Andy Pearson: I played baritone horn, which if you know what that, it's like a small tuba. It looks like a tuba that got shrunk down by about 50%, but it was, still, like bigger than I was. 

Chris Kocek: It's a very mainstream instrument in most rock bands. 

Andy Pearson: Yeah, there was a couple years where I was holding out hope to start a ska band. I was in high school when like ska was cool, but clearly being in a ska band would not have made me relevant.

Chris Kocek: What's a recent good book or could be a TV show or a movie that you've seen recently that made you think that was amazing? 

Andy Pearson: My friend, Arlo Jacobs is a director and he's got this movie that he screened for me and a couple other people called the Voyage Out. It's a documentary, it's [00:31:00] not released yet. He's working on getting distribution, but it's just an incredible, it doesn't even feel like a documentary. It's about three people on an elk hunt in the wilderness in Idaho, and. It's really this meditation on like death in a lot of senses in our relationship with animals, in our, the way we source food, but also in a really visceral human level. And there's sort of a lot of campfire conversations that are intertwined with them actually out in the hunt.

And it's really, it's an amazing film of a shot on 16 millimeter film. It's gorgeous and I really hope someone picks this thing up 'cause it's a remarkable film. Really cool. Well, I was like bawling my eyes out during it.

Chris Kocek: Is there a brand whose work you really admire or that you think to yourself? I wish I'd come up with that.

Andy Pearson: I think there are brands that I feel like are peers to what we're doing or have similar mentalities, so I think, like Mischief is a brand. Those guys just do really interesting [00:32:00] experiments. I think that's really fun to watch the ideas that come out of them. 

I think Cards Against Humanity has had a little bit of that in the past too. They bought part of the space on the southern border for the Wall. I think both of those brands, and I think what we do too, blends commerce and art and I think that's kind of what I really love about those guys. 

Chris Kocek: And what's one of the most interesting jobs you had before you got into this racket of advertising that has helped you?

Andy Pearson: None. I was a terrible waiter. I was like so glad I was bad at it. I was like, great, because I don't wanna, I could see other people that were lifers and I was like, that's not what I want. Yeah, I like waited tables at a wing joint in college and stock shelves at Staples and like really awful jobs and so I guess it was motivation to not do that.

Chris Kocek: That's fair. That's fair. And then finally, what's a piece of advice that someone gave you? Could be from a parent, a teacher, a previous boss, or maybe even [00:33:00] something from a fortune cookie, that you still think about to this day 

Andy Pearson: I would say, I hate quotes, but the one that I remember, and I don't know how it came to me, but when I was in ad school and portfolio school, I remember hearing the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Business is a lot about luck, especially in career, especially as you're starting off your career. It's all about being in the right place, right time, you meet somebody at something, it's total luck. But if I can work really hard to engineer luck, then I'm giving myself more chances to be luckier and I think I really took that to heart, especially earlier on when it meant I had to have more luck to succeed.

But I still think that mentality is really key because even in the stuff that we do now, we put out so much work all the time in Liquid Death, and that's by design because we don't know what's gonna hit. We've gotten pretty good at it. We have a pretty good understanding of what works now and what doesn't, but [00:34:00] we wanna work as fast and as cheaply as possible, work hard in that sense to get more stuff out because that's gonna give us a better chance of having more stuff hit. So the less you do when you do these big integrated campaigns, that's gonna run for three months and we've sunk millions and millions of dollars into all this stuff, and there's all this pressure, that thing better do great. Versus if we do something really fast and spend little bits of money on it and we put more of those out there, those have way more chances of hitting hard than this other big bloated thing. And so I think that's probably a similar expression of that same mentality in a way.

Chris Kocek: Andy, I know you're doing a ton of work over there. You're working hard, but you guys make it look effortless, so thank you so much for taking the time with us today. 

Andy Pearson: Yeah, thanks for having me. These were, this was really fun.

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, [00:35:00] Andy Pearson, VP of Creative at Liquid Death. If you want to connect with Andy, you can find him on LinkedIn, or you might even find him out on the trail if you're looking for even more ideas and “Aha!” moments, be sure to check out the light bulb newsletter@chriskocek.com/newsletter.

Every Thursday, I share three “Aha!” moments that are guaranteed to inspire your next project, creative briefing or campaign. Or check out my latest book Any Insights Yet, connect the dots, create new categories, transform your business. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with friends, family, clients, colleagues, even your enemies.

Special thanks to Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios for producing this episode and thank you to Megan Palmer for additional editing and production support. Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions and asking “what if?” more [00:36:00] often.