The invitation was unusual, even by the standards of a conference panel where the customary ask is for a business card or a LinkedIn connection.
Benoit Vatere, the chief media and digital commerce officer at Liquid Death, the canned water brand that has built a following partly by seeming not to care whether you buy its product, closed a session at Advertising Week New York by asking the audience to do precisely that — immediately, at full price, and then again the next day during Amazon's Prime Day promotion.
The request was not entirely a joke.
Mr. Vatere had been watching his revenue dip that morning as shoppers filled their Amazon carts in anticipation of the sale. The problem, he explained, is that many of those shoppers are existing customers who would have paid full price anyway. Selling them discounted cans costs him money he would rather spend acquiring people who have never tried the brand. (What he wants from Prime Day, in other words, is new fans, not old ones with good timing.)
The panel, billed as a discussion of artificial intelligence and growth, had brought Mr. Vatere together with executives from Power Digital Marketing, the agency that built a custom intelligence platform for Liquid Death called Omega. Jeff Mason, the agency's chief executive, described a progression from "AI curious" — where everyone queries a chatbot and gets generic drafts — to "AI native," where the work itself happens inside an application shaped by both agency and client.
Mr. Vatere said he has been through 17 iterations in three weeks. He now receives a daily Slack summary of what is rising, what is falling, and where to adjust. Retail media campaigns that once took a week to review are optimized daily. Amazon analysis that required two weeks now takes two hours.
His goal, he said, is to run a sizeable budget with two people in-house. The platform, he added, is "an individual that doesn't sleep."
Still, Mr. Vatere cautioned against accepting whatever the machine recommends. The best check, for now, remains someone experienced enough to ask whether the suggestion makes sense. He likened the process to driving a car hard to find its limits.
Last year, he admitted, the team "missed a ton." This year felt better. He would know in a couple of days — after the sale he had just asked the audience to ignore.
Original story published in The Drum: "Liquid Death wants your money. Just not on Prime Day | The Drum"