Creative Growth

Maybe we all need a little more sex and rage in our marketing lives?

There are few people who are as committed to truly different creative as Hamid Saify, the CMO at Lucky Energy (and former SVP, Digital Retail at Liquid Death).

While he’s been involved in some memorable creative, it was Lucky’s recent billboard at Coachella that we wanted to talk about. If you haven’t seen it, the billboard isn’t one most people would miss. 

This, it seems, is sort of the story of Hamid’s recent run, so we asked him about growing through standout creative—something that seems more unique by the day, as everyone seems intent on growing through optimizing for the algorithm. 

A lot of younger brands, when they announce themselves to the market, don’t buy a very expensive billboard that's pretty prime real estate with cars basically in a parking lot for hours at a time.

That’s sort of a deviation from the norm, which is a bit of your career story. Why make an announcement like that?

I think this is a struggle for a lot of Brands who are relying on digital channels kind of solely as distribution early on. Whether it's DTC or Amazon, it’s that you just get into this handcuffed thing on chasing like ROAS and CPAs and it's like anything that doesn't necessarily always do that gets pulled and there's no place for them.

Even early days at Liquid Death, so much of brand and growth were woven together, right? So we didn't succeed just because we had really great performance creative; we succeeded because we were obviously building a brand simultaneously. 

For what I'm doing at Lucky, everything has to feel like it has the ability to touch a couple of different channels.

With the Coachella thing, we weren't going to have the pure, sheer physical presence at the festival and do these massive pop-ups like Poppi. We had to just figure out a more, like, raw and organic way of getting in so first it was like, how do we get to the people? 

It's the desert and it's random and it's weird and there's always weird personal injury attorney ads and there's always insane things. So we just wanted to have a really provocative moment that did a couple of things. You're one announcing the brand, but it’s also, like, this fun way to give back, because it had a utility to it. So if you call the number, it was like this phone sex operator kind of a voice that answered it. But we would text you and tell you where you could go pick up Lucky Energy around Coachella. And then it became a thing that had some press worthiness to it.

One of the interesting things about out of home now—just to riff on this for a second—is the amount that this becomes some form of UGC and social content. And the distribution is spread through Social. Is that a license, then, to go bigger, go bolder, be more provocative?

You can get a lot out of it in both the digital world and the real world, as well.

At the end of day, it has to be attention-grabbing enough where people will give a shit about it. And I think that's the tough thing, even for out of home. A lot of DTC brands do wrap trucks, but they tend to take those on as very straight brand plays, right? It's a product benefit or a brand message or whatever and those are all great.

I think there will be moments where we play things a little bit more straight or product-led, but, at of the day, I think for me—and we've done several out of home stuff since I've taken on—it just has to get people to not see it as just wallpaper in the world.

If you search the brand—it used to be called lucky f*ck energy—you would see nothing but porn results.

We’ve put a duct tape sticker over the “f*ck” on the can now, so it's still in the room with us and we still have the energy in the DNA of that and if you were to search for us, that’s still the case.

So, our first out of home was a wheatpasting in New York, where we did this social commentary that was more about ‘Why is this four letter word so hard to swallow, but there's nudity everywhere. And so we took some famous pieces of art and we put duct tape that covered our f*ck and we put duct tape over like the nipples and the genitals on the art.

It has to feel more interesting or entertaining than just a conventional out of home thing would be.

If you're to talk to somebody about ‘I want to do more of this type of thing, but I'm afraid that I'm going to miss this measurement gap,’ what do they start doing to actually understand and have a pulse on whether they're kind of hitting the nerve or not.

When we run performance creative, there's some creative that we just know is going to be way better at cost-pers and ROAS, right, and that tends to be like funnier UGC or product benefits or the standard hook system of objection, solution, all that stuff, right?

We’ve built out a pretty good library of things like that that work.

And then there's objectives for other things that are more like experiment laboratory kind of elements where it's not always the same kind of KPIs that it's holding it up to. It's more, like, how do we weave in things like engagement and engagement rate? What impact does that have on lowering CPMs? What impact does that have over time as just telling the brand story that eventually could convert someone on a more product benefits type of an ad or it could convert someone with an ad that's more entertainment focus and less product.

So for example, no, we just launched two series of ads on meta where I just call it ‘sex and rage.’

Sex is used a lot to sell things and it has historically been, but I think with Gen Z and just evolution of humanity like using sex on its own device to sell is probably not going to work. I say that knowing that there's plenty of creators who make a ton of money and do brand deals like selling sex. But, for us, it's like if we want to do sex the way that I did it is we make you aware that you're being sold to using sex.

So, you have an engagement element to it. We made the girl in the Bikini really, really small. And the only way you could see it is to zoom in and check it out.

Those ads, while they didn't have the best ROAS, for one week, week two, they got a lot of commentary with people taking sides on it. Same thing with our rage ads, which are more about people who thought we're a dumb brand and you should never buy from us.

It's, like, if you're just gonna run the stuff that works you're basically like Blackberry just waiting to have your lunch taken by Apple. You’re just a sitting target.

You have to bucket these things out in different ways and have different kpis for them and then measure them to the best of your ability and what you have in terms of ad manager reporting or third party reporting or Google Analytics reporting or other platforms on what signals that’s throwing.

Do you see a lift in brand search on Amazon? Do you see a lowering of CPMS and all that?

I mean there's plenty written on this that  when you are targeting, it's only half a percent or 1% of people in that targeting audience are actually wanting to buy your product at any given point in time. 

It can be less than that, right? And the way that I think about it is we’re not trying to build here to just win the algorithm, because I think it just waters down into really bad creative work when you do that.

There's an element of just classic brand building, but also trying to create something that's like a classic brand that lives outside of the pressures around winning algorithms. Because brands who just try to win algorithms, whether it's performance creative or organic content or whatever, it's like you're just doing one type of a workout that nets results for one type of a function.

And so we'll do some stuff that's lovable for the algorithm , but I want to create an everlasting brand that people really fall in love with and have some loyalty beyond reason. I think those kinds of things require deviation from just the standard stuff that you kind of just do to win the day. 

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