Liquid Death Moved the Money Down. The reason it gave is not the reason it works.

The brand is putting the majority of its 2027 media into retail networks and says awareness is no longer the problem. Its own tracking puts the widest gap at the awareness step, and what the money buys is a measurement.

The 2027 plan is on its third draft and somebody reads a line off their phone. A beverage brand everybody in the room admires has said out loud, at a conference, that retail media will be the majority of its spend next year. Not a slice. More than half. The room treats it as information, which it is, and then treats it as a template, which is where the trouble starts.

The brand is Liquid Death and the executive is Benoit Vatere, its chief media officer. He is among the more credible people in the category on this subject, and the move is defensible. The reason he gave is the part that will get repeated, and the part that does not survive contact with his own record.

That reasoning, as relayed: consideration happens as close to conversion as you can get, retail media is what in-store display used to be, and awareness is no longer the problem. On that account the money moves down because the top of the funnel is finished.

Six months earlier, the same man argued the other direction

In April 2026, talking to AdExchanger about how Liquid Death decides which tactics to kill, Vatere described the opposite direction of travel. He was explaining why he invests in bottom-of-funnel measurement, and his explanation was not that the bottom is where demand gets made.

"If I have a tight net at the bottom, I can feel a lot more confident pushing hard at the top."

Benoit Vatere, Chief Media Officer, Liquid Death — AdExchanger, April 8, 2026

Both statements can be true at once, and they are compatible in one way only — which changes what the decision is. If the net at the bottom licenses the spending at the top, money moving into retail media is money buying visibility into results. A brand that copies the share without building the net has bought the cost and none of the license.

Checking "awareness is no longer the problem"

Liquid Death's awareness in the United States moved from 26 percent to 34 percent across a year on Tracksuit's brand tracking, reaching 46 percent among 18-to-34s. Three percent of bottled-water drinkers name it as a preference.

Thirty-four percent is large for a brand founded in 2019. It is not a solved awareness problem: two thirds of the market has not heard of it.

The conversion between the steps says more. Liquid Death turns 41 percent of its awareness into consideration, against a competitor-set average of 50. Fiji converts 57. From consideration to preference it runs 21 percent against an average of 25.

So the step from awareness into consideration — the one the stated reason treats as finished — is where the brand trails its category by the widest margin. Nine points there. Four points at the step nearest conversion. The money is moving away from the weaker half of the funnel, not toward it.

The strongest counter-reading supports the move exactly as stated. A brand converting attention into purchase below its category average has a bottom-of-funnel problem, retail media sits on the bottom of the funnel, and spending there is spending on the leak. That argument holds. It is not the argument that was made. The argument that was made is that the top is done.

What he has actually been optimizing for

Read across his public statements for the twelve months before the Groceryshop remark and one problem keeps showing up. It is never funnel position.

Every row is about the ability to see and to move — an executive buying the capacity to run a controlled test on a short cycle, in a category where he has said there is no loyalty to coast on. That capacity currently exists in retail media networks with closed-loop sales data.

That makes the 2027 decision legible in a way the stated reason does not. He is concentrating budget where he can measure. Called a funnel reallocation, it is arguable. Called a measurement decision, it is close to obvious.

Deep, not wide — against a market going the other way

The second half of the Groceryshop remark got less attention. He is going deep with the big networks rather than wide, because splitting a budget across twenty of them dilutes the impact while the work per network stays the same.

The market is doing the reverse. In the February 2026 Skai and Stratably survey of 166 retail media advertisers, brands reported working with six networks on average and expected eleven by year end. Fifteen percent reported strong confidence in their measurement. Fifty-six percent named limited analytics capacity as the main obstacle to measuring incrementality. In NIQ's July 2026 analysis, 67 percent of chief marketing officers planned to increase retail media investment; 53 percent believed their networks measured adequately.

Those figures belong in the same sentence. Doubling the number of counterparties while five advertisers in six cannot confidently measure one of them is a decision to buy more of what you cannot read. Vatere's binding constraint is analytics capacity per network, and his answer is fewer networks. That reasoning does not depend on his awareness being solved, his brand being famous, or his category behaving like bottled water.

What this evidence cannot say

Four limits sit on everything above.

The 2027 figure is an intention, not a disclosure. It was said in a podcast conversation and relayed by one of that show's hosts. There is no published split and no trade-press account of the figure as of this writing. Read it as what he says he will do.

The brand-tracking figures come from a company that sells brand tracking, and the public write-up carries no sample size, field dates or methodology. The direction is probably right; the nine-point gap is not a precise quantity.

Nobody outside the company knows the current split, so there is no telling whether this is a large move or a small one described well.

The best evidence on brand-versus-activation weighting predates the channel. Binet and Field's analysis of 996 IPA case studies from 1980 to 2016 found 60 percent to brand building and 40 to activation as the profit-maximizing average, shifting toward 50/50 online, and in no sector analyzed did activation outperform brand building. Retail media did not exist in that databank — which makes the field's most-cited guidance a reason for care here rather than a rule.

Vatere is probably making the right call. He has said for a year that he will not spend where he cannot see, and retail media is where a beverage brand can currently see most clearly. Concentrating there, with a measurement platform attached and a monthly willingness to move the money again, is a coherent position reached from a stated constraint.

The reason he gave is a funnel argument, and funnel arguments travel better than measurement arguments. One sounds like strategy and the other sounds like plumbing. The brand that copies the share next year will take the sentence about consideration happening close to conversion, cut the upper-funnel work that produced the attention it has been converting, and keep buying across eleven networks because the eleven were already in the plan. The decision will have been copied. The thing that made it work will not.

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