Liquid Death’s ads take shots at the data centers AI runs on, but the billion-dollar beverage brand is rebuilding its marketing operation around the technology. Benoit Vatere, its chief media and digital commerce officer, told an Advertising Week New York panel on Oct. 5, 2026 that the aim is to stay “lean and mean” and avoid pouring money into non-working media. “On a pretty sizeable budget, how can I operate that with only two people internally? That’s the goal,” he said.
The machinery comes from agency Power Digital Marketing, which in August 2026 announced a proprietary AI ecosystem: an intelligence layer called Iris, an operating system called Omega, plus Creative Affinity, a creative intelligence layer. Vatere now checks performance himself instead of writing queries or asking his team on Slack, and retail media campaigns once reviewed weekly or twice a week are optimized daily. Liquid Death went through 17 iterations of Omega in about three weeks, as of early October 2026, while tuning the system.
Jeff Mason, Power Digital’s CEO, described three phases. AI-curious companies give staff frontier models like Claude and ChatGPT with some data attached, which he said is where most brands are and “not going to be enough to keep up with brands like Liquid Death.” AI-assisted companies build their own intelligence layer that learns how teams work. AI-native companies add an orchestration layer on top, so work happens inside their own custom applications. Mason argued frontier models stop being an edge once every firm uses them, while centralized, contextualized data becomes “your own bespoke IP.”
“I don’t want to see any spreadsheets anymore,” Vatere said. His rule for anything automatable, or any task over five minutes: do it once, to train a system or build an automation.
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