An all-too-literal guillotine league. Chainsawed sandwiches. A moshpit diaper.

Those aren’t just random words jumbled together to test your reading comprehension—they’re the outcome of recent brand collaborations with Liquid Death.

The canned-beverage brand has been inking more than sports partnerships in the last year, striking deals with a bevvy of other big names, including Yahoo Sports (the guillotine league), Sheetz (chainsawed sandwiches), and Depends (moshpit diaper), all of which are shown off in splashy social posts.

“We hope to be one of the better things in your feed,” Dan Murphy, SVP of marketing for Liquid Death, told Marketing Brew.

While collaborations are nothing new, the strange humor that’s a feature of Liquid Death’s brand mashups certainly stands out. To understand what goes into partnering with Liquid Death, Marketing Brew caught up with Murphy to get a sense of the process.

“They see us a bit like a Saturday Night Live stage,” according to Murphy, who said that he has some 73 brands interested in partnering currently in his inbox. “We’re going to go into the Liquid Death world,” Murphy said of the reasoning he sees, “and we’re going to get exposed to this new audience.”

Continue reading here.—KM

Banking app Chime was founded to make banking and credit building easier for everyday people who tend to be “overlooked by the traditional banking system,” according to CMO Vineet Mehra. Amplifying the Chime brand relies on reaching those people, Mehra told Marketing Brew.

And what’s something many everyday people enjoy more than anything else?

“Sports,” Mehra said. “It’s where a lot of cultural trends start.”

For the past several years, Chime’s sport of choice has been basketball, one of the most zeitgeisty in the US. In 2020, the banking brand signed on as a jersey-patch sponsor of the Dallas Mavericks the same season the Mavs finished first in the Southwest division. Last year, the team made it all the way to the NBA Finals, further boosting brand awareness for Chime, according to Mehra.

Since then, Chime has doubled down on the Mavs. In May, it re-signed its sponsorship deal for about $33 million for an additional three years, and it also partnered with rookie Cooper Flagg. To truly generate awareness, though, Chime is going after more than even the sacred real estate of the jersey patch and the latest No. 1 draft pick. That’s why the brand’s approach to its sponsorships hinges on community initiatives, as well as a content strategy that’s all about “serializing social media” with athletes, Mehra said.

Read more here.—AM

With hilariously obvious product placement on Gossip Girl, a flavor created by 50 Cent, and a label mocking Paris Hilton, Vitaminwater had the early aughts on lock.

But now, it’s facing a quarter-life crisis.

Twenty-five years since Vitaminwater’s debut, and nearing two decades since the Coca-Cola Company bought its parent Glaceau, it’s at a crossroads as the beverage industry is flooded with new innovations, consumers seek low-sugar options, and kitschy labels don’t catch eyes like they once did.

“We took a step back for Vitaminwater, and thought, ‘We are iconic. We were relevant, but the landscape has changed,’” Vitaminwater Brand Director Amanda Harkins told Retail Brew. “We still look like what we did in 2000, and maybe that’s not where we should be when we think about the next 25 years ahead.”

The company aimed to revitalize the brand by conducting an audit on what makes a brand cool—and found some ways it could change from the inside out.

Continue reading on Retail Brew.—EC

Executive moves across the industry.

• Outfront Media, an out-of-home agency, appointed Nick Brien, formerly at ad platform Amobee, as its permanent CEO; Brien’s been leading the company on an interim basis since February.
• Wurl, an AppLovin-owned streaming company, named Dave Bernath as its new CEO as company head Ron Gutman retires.
• Duolingo’s global senior social media manager, Zaria Parvez, is exiting the company after five years, she announced on LinkedIn.