Gather up some well-worn advertising tropes in the beer category, and the result may include at least a few of the following images: amber waves of grain, kissed by the sun, male bonding, manual labor, communal end-of-day tippling.
Beer me, indeed.
With just weeks until Super Bowl 58, Liquid Death previews a parade of clichés that might appear during that massive media showcase, jabbing “Big Beer” in the eye with a new campaign tied to Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child of Fire.
The brand continues its trend of flipping commercial concepts on their heads and thumbing its nose at polite society with a 30-second spot intertwining the canned water product with the hit Netflix movie.
The ad—developed by Liquid Death’s in-house team and directed by Eli Snyder, Rebel Moon’s second-unit director and son of filmmaker Zack Snyder—centers on villains from the futuristic thriller as the principal characters.
In scenes dripping with sarcasm, a familiar-sounding voiceover champions the brutal aggressors in the movie’s interstellar David versus Goliath battle: “Here’s to you, the real heroes of the heartland—the workers, the doers, the ones who take pride in their craft.”
The narration unfolds as the commercial’s stars attack, terrorize and humiliate “a bunch of ungrateful space farmers” in a place that looks like the formerly peaceful agrarian planet of Veldt.
Oh, the irony
Eli Snyder called the work “a parody of a pandering ad campaign” from beer behemoths that “let us meld the world of Rebel Moon with the distinct brand identity of Liquid Death.”
The spot features original footage, but it used crew members, scenery, props and costumes from the big-budget Rebel Moon shoot, also recruiting several actors from the film.
“Leveraging the real environments used in the film allowed us to maximize the irony of Imperium soldiers celebrating a ‘hard day’s work’ with an ice cold can of Liquid Death,” Eli Snyder told Adweek.
The ending tagline underlines the Imperium’s fascist attitude: “Liquid Death—mandatory beverage of the Motherworld.”
The campaign aims to hype the existing film on the streaming service while promoting Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver, coming April 19.
New horizons
The effort is one of the ways that Liquid Death is expanding beyond its core marketing territory—with roots in skater, metalhead, comedy and music culture—and venturing further into mainstream areas with connections to the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, Fortnite and Martha Stewart.
“We’re always interested in finding new corners of pop culture where we can bring humor and satire in unexpected ways,” Andy Pearson, Liquid Death’s vice president of creative, told Adweek. “Anyone who’s willing to have a little fun with us is somewhere we like to be.”
It’s not the first time Liquid Death has partnered with a Zack Snyder project, having launched a 30-minute zombie-themed infomercial for Army of the Dead, which also aired on Netflix. The skippable preroll ad on YouTube posted a 7% completion rate, better than benchmarks and the brand’s typical short-form ads.
