Liquid Death’s CMO: Stop Chasing ROAS—Incrementality Is the Real Killer for CPG Brands

The Incrementality Obsession at Liquid Death

Liquid Death built its brand on irreverent humor and heavy metal aesthetics, but behind the dark comedy lies a deadly serious approach to marketing measurement. Benoit Vatere, the canned water company’s chief media and digital commerce officer, is tackling what he calls one of the gnarliest problems in consumer packaged goods: proving that ad dollars actually make product fly off shelves. Unlike e-commerce, most CPG transactions still happen at a physical register, where a tallboy of water can’t carry a tracking pixel.

Vatere’s answer is to stop obsessing over return on ad spend in isolation. Instead, he insists on pairing ROAS with a new-to-brand metric—the share of purchases coming from customers who hadn’t bought the brand before. “Combined together, it’s a very good proxy into incrementality,” he explained on an episode of AdExchanger Talks. “If it’s ROAS on its own, I don’t even pay attention. I don’t look at it at all.”

That logic has led Liquid Death to restructure how it views customer loyalty. The brand boasts superfans who get its logo tattooed, but Vatere argues that for a CPG brand chasing a billion-dollar valuation, the real money lies with light and lapsed buyers. Big soda companies generate more than half of their revenue from people who buy only a few times a year, he noted. So instead of pouring media dollars into nurturing the already-obsessed, Liquid Death is designing campaigns and measurement systems aimed at bringing in the occasional drinker.

To put its incrementality thesis to the test, the brand has partnered with performance marketing platform Ibotta for always-on testing. The goal: continuously verify that every media dollar is causing incremental cans to be sold, not just preaching to the converted. Vatere sees this as a permanent fixture, not a one-off experiment.

Why CPG Loyalty Is a Mirage—and What Works Instead

Pairing ROAS with New-to-Brand as a Proxy for Incrementality

Vatere’s refusal to look at ROAS alone is more than a contrarian streak. It addresses a structural blind spot in CPG marketing: the bulk of sales happen offline, and digital dashboards can easily overstate the impact of digital ads by attributing purchases that would have happened anyway. By anchoring ad performance to the rate at which the brand attracts genuinely new customers, Liquid Death creates a simple, actionable signal of whether media spend is expanding its buyer base. This approach doesn’t require a pixel on every can—it relies on matching media exposure to loyalty-card or retail scanner data, a method Ibotta’s platform helps automate.

The Light Buyer Opportunity: Why Superfans Aren’t Enough

Vatere’s data point—that large soda brands earn more than half of their revenue from infrequent purchasers—shatters the myth that intensity of brand love drives mass-market growth. For a challenger like Liquid Death, which still needs to cross from cult brand to household name, chasing the minority who would get a tattoo is a recipe for staying niche. The strategic shift to light buyers means altering creative, media placement, and even the definition of success. Campaigns are judged not by engagement rates but by how many new households scan a can over a given period, a metric that ties directly to incremental volume.

Ibotta and Always-On Testing

Liquid Death’s partnership with Ibotta moves incrementality testing from periodic studies to a continuous feedback loop. Instead of running isolated lift studies, the brand can measure whether a given channel, creative, or promotion pulls in first-time buyers every week. This real-time calibration lets Vatere’s team reallocate budgets quickly, killing spend that fails the new-to-brand threshold and doubling down on what works. It also gives the brand the raw data to negotiate with retailers, showing exactly how much incremental demand its media brings into specific chains.

Preparing for an AI-Negotiated Shopping Cart

Looking further ahead, Vatere raised the prospect of agentic AI transforming grocery shopping into a three-way negotiation between consumers, brands, and bots. If AI assistants start making routine replenishment decisions, CPG marketers lose the direct line to shoppers that packaging and shelf placement offer today. The only durable advantage would be a constant stream of verified incremental sales data that proves a brand’s value. Liquid Death’s measurement apparatus, built around incrementality rather than short-term ROAS, could become a strategic moat if that future materializes.

How to Measure What Actually Moves Cans Off Shelves

For CPG marketers and digital commerce leaders:

• Never evaluate campaigns on ROAS in isolation—always pair it with a new-to-brand or incremental buyer metric to separate causal lift from correlation.
• Build always-on incrementality testing through retail-data platforms like Ibotta, rather than relying on episodic studies. Continuous feedback allows rapid budget reallocation toward channels that actually expand the buyer base.
• Redirect a material share of media budget from highly loyal customers to light and lapsed buyers. The data from large soda companies shows that infrequent purchasers drive the majority of category revenue, a pattern that likely holds for water and lifestyle beverages.
• Monitor the development of agentic AI in grocery shopping. Begin stress-testing your measurement framework to see if it can demonstrate incremental value to an algorithm rather than a human shopper, preparing for a future where bots handle routine reorders.