Mike Cessario
Founder & CEO, Liquid Death. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperatorLinkedIn ↗liquiddeath.com ↗
Mike Cessario is the founder and CEO of Liquid Death, a canned beverage company launched in 2019. Prior to founding the company, he worked as an advertising creative director at agencies including Crispin Porter + Bogusky and VaynerMedia, as well as Netflix.
3shows
3appearances
75statements
22resolved
19supported
3contradicted
86%fully supported
Everything Mike Cessario said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Cessario: Many people from big success stories just take credit for one genius
“How many times do you realize that like all the people that work on stuff, there's maybe one evil genius that's doing kind of everything and everybody else sort of takes the credit. Then you put them on their own. And it's like, cause I remember the first pres…”
Liquid Death outsells Monster's canned water 4-to-1 in a major southern chain
“And, you know, we just looked in a recent in a convenience store, a big chain in the south, and like, even at more money, Liquid Debt is out selling it like four to one.”
Cessario: Brand Is the Moat Because Giant Corporations Can't Create Brands
“Brand is the moat, and I think it's hard for people to wrap their head around what that means, but there's a lot of Sort of historical precedents to show that that's the case... It shows that giant companies are really bad at creating brands. Like they, there'…”
Truly beloved brands must accept being deeply hated by other consumers
“Like, I always say, it's like, if you, if there are people who truly love something, there has to be people who truly hate it. It is not possible to make something that Everybody loves. All it's possible is to make something that everybody doesn't really give …”
Liquid Death would never have survived a Coca-Cola focus group
“Like Liquid Death would have never made it through a focus group at Coca-Cola.”
Brand identity is a CPG startup's only true defensible moat
“But the brand is what you can truly own, and that really is your moat, more so than most brands think it is. They think their moat is an ingredient, or they think it's something else. It's not really. It's like anybody can replicate your formula It's your bran…”
Beverage competitors sabotage rivals by peeling inventory stickers off stockroom cases
“Beverage competitors were coming and pulling those stickers off their competitors' cases, so when the guy came over to try to scan it, he couldn't scan it. He's got a lot of shit to do. He's not gonna go all the way to the back and go print out new stuff. He's…”
Small social media content often consumes as many resources as major campaigns
“The reality is doing a little thing often takes as much time and headache and even budget sometimes is a big thing. And it's like, you have all these things to manage and it's sucking everybody's time up and You know, by design, most of it's not going to be li…”
Cessario: Liquid Death would have died in every traditional focus group
“Clinical focus groups, I don't think really work. Like you can learn a little bit from them, but it's, liquid death would have died in every focus group.”
Cessario: Liquid Death reached #1 flavored sparkling brand in convenience store channel
“And then by the end of last year, so that was like not even, maybe a year and a half of the, of that product being on the market, we were the number one flavored sparkling brand in total dollars in the entire convenience store channel.”
Cessario: Negative initial reactions often indicate true innovation
“When you kind of know you're on to something, when people sort of have a really emotional, even if negative reaction to it at first, you know that you're probably in good territory. The stuff when you come up with something and people you talk to say, oh yeah,…”
Cessario: Sponsored action sports athletes do not actually drink energy drinks
“The reality was, it was all bullshit. Like, these guys are actual athletes. Like, they have trainers. They will not be drinking this much caffeine and sugar.”
Cessario: Action sports entertainment used by Red Bull is a limited genre
“All we are doing is we just want to make legitimate entertainment, not marketing. And it's a tried and true Approach that Red Bull was very successful with, Monster was very successful with, where they blur the lines between an entertainment company and a beve…”
Cessario: The era of brands lasting 50 years is over
“Yeah, I mean, I do think that the era of brands lasting 50 years are no more. Because of the internet and technology.”
Liquid Death surpassed Aquafina's social following in just four months
“In four months, we have more social followers than Awkwafina.”
Traditional CPG investors struggle to value early digital brand traction
“When we talk to more investor types on the traditional CPG side, they don't typically understand the digital. Social world as strongly. So they didn't know how to value some of this stuff as much as maybe the tech world kind of did in the early days.”
Monster Energy's core buyers are truck drivers, not extreme action athletes
“The core monster customer who buys the most monster are not skateboarders and action sports athletes and all these people that. You see in their marketing, it's, you know overweight guy outside of Riverside who drives a truck or something like that.”
Cessario: Marketing is rapid communication, not high-level storytelling
“Marketing is not storytelling. Really? I think it's a lower form of it. So I think it's more about communication, I guess, which I think is a little different than storytelling.”
Marketing functional benefits like low calories fails to build brand affinity
“Then these other brands that are just marketing with functional benefits. Oh, less calories, less grams of sugar, better tasting, you know, all of those things, like they don't actually resonate brand affinity.”
Over-reliance on data testing is destroying modern advertising creativity
“I think a big part of it, and this is, you know, a guess, is the current, two things, the current state of data. People are trying to make too many decisions based on data, rather than insight of what's funny. It used to be like people in an agency were saying…”
Irrational fear of fringe social media outrage forces brands into boring marketing
“And then I think the other part of it is the current state of social media. The fact that if one person doesn't like your commercial, they can go make a bunch of noise on your brand social page about it, and now the brand is like, oh, two people said they hate…”
Liquid Death structures its marketing department like Saturday Night Live
“We think about our marketing team more like we are Saturday Night Live. You know, like, Saturday Night Live has a group of professional writers, comedians, who are writing these funny skits day in and day out. They have celebrity guests that come in. You have …”
Liquid Death spent only $100,000 producing its Super Bowl commercial
“Even the Superbowl commercial that we did, that was the beer commercial with the kids. I think all in, we spent a hundred grand on that commercial when other companies are spending millions of dollars.”
CPG branding fails in retail without dedicated in-store merchandising teams
“The marketing and brand makes people love the product, but that's just the beginning. Then it's like when you're in the store, when a store orders product, oh, we need more liquid debt. They order liquid debt. A distributor comes, drops cases off in the back o…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mike's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Founder & CEO, Liquid Death | 1 | 30 | 86% 12/14 | full record on Masters of Scale → |
 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Liquid Death | 1 | 27 | 75% 3/4 | full record on 20VC → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Liquid Death | 1 | 18 | 100% 4/4 | full record on How I Built This → |