November 19, 2025
Liquid Death’s Chief Media Officer Benoit Vatere and Ibotta’s Founder and CEO Bryan Leach teamed up at Brandweek 2025 to reveal how performance marketing is enhancing value and growth for the CPG industry. In this fireside chat, they discussed how in-flight data and AI are transforming the grocery aisle into a dynamic battleground where brands are winning by delivering the right offer to the right shopper at exactly the right moment.
Check out the full video and read the highlights below.*
Q: What unique challenges does the in-store presence of CPG products like Liquid Death create when trying to establish credible and clear ROI measurement, compared to the signals available in the digital world?
Vatere: One of the biggest challenges [is that] we do not have a sales signal [in] real time. We do everything we can to drive people into the store and remember and buy our brand. But how do we measure impact? There’s this famous word that I cannot stand — the ROAS word — that basically means nothing. I can drive ROAS all day long. Then incrementality comes in and you can really only measure incrementality if you get the sales signal from the retailer, which is another problem — and it's also very delayed. So how do you really build your campaigns, your full media mix, to lead to performance? And how do we measure that as close to real time as possible so we can decide to invest less or invest more? That is really the challenge.
Q: How is the shift to the "outcomes era," where machine learning tests thousands of hypotheses against clear goals like incremental sales and household growth, changing the traditional, slower brand management mindset in the CPG industry?
Vatere: That's the beauty of digital — the ability to leverage AI tools to be able to have a lot of scenarios that you want to test and then get the results in return. Having tools that allow [us] to do that is what [will make] our media buying a lot more efficient… and will make us a lot better down the road.
Q: What's the advantage of being able to tailor a promotion based on an individual's propensity to buy your product?
Vatere: I don't want to put a promotion in front of someone that was about to buy regardless. [I want] the ability to decide first — is it an incremental buyer, shopper, or household, or not?
That's what I'm trying to solve, and I think we're solving [that] right now with this tool that you built. That makes me feel a lot better now when we put dollars to invest. And not just me — we all talk to [our] CFOs, right? And it's always challenging to talk to CFOs when it comes to investing media dollars.
…[With LiveLift™], you can have a good discussion with your CFO because you can really [say], “hey, we're investing in promotion, we're investing in media. But by the way, it's on an incremental basis.” So this discussion with the CFO has never been easier.
Q: How important is third-party validation for performance measurement versus relying on vendor claims?
Vatere: This is a must. You cannot have anybody grading their own homework. Circana is a big one because they syndicate all this data, so they are a true third party. They are not the retailer. They are not the media buyer. They are giving us all that sales data that you need to have a very granular [view]. It is very important to have that.
Q: How is the CPG industry shifting its promotion strategy from delayed, ROAS-focused reporting to a digital performance marketing mindset that prioritizes in-flight, incremental measurement?
Vatere: We need to stop talking about ROAS and measure our lower funnel properly. Yes, you can show amazing ROAS and that's going to make everybody feel good during a meeting, but your top line and bottom line are not going to look good. It's not easy, but you need to hold a standard around measuring incremental sales.
With a tool like [LiveLift] you can… That's changing the way we are thinking now when we're investing our dollars on the lower funnel.
*This is an edited transcript of a verbal conversation and is not a verbatim record. It has been prepared for informational purposes only and only some passages are written here. The text may have been modified to improve clarity, grammar, and sentence structure, and some non-essential elements have been omitted. For a precise and complete record, please refer to the original audio.