Nov 10, 2025

Real-time data means real-time results This post was created in partnership with Ibotta Real-time data and AI are transforming the grocery aisle. How? Brands must deliver the right offer to the right shopper at exactly the right moment to drive incremental sales and boost brand loyalty. During a Brandweek 2025 session co-hosted with Ibotta, Bryan Leach, founder and CEO at Ibotta, and Benoit Vatere, chief media officer at Liquid Death, discussed how performance marketing is enhancing value and growth for the CPG industry. A new solution for CPG brand challenges Leach opened the discussion by sharing Ibotta’s recent announcement of the launch of LiveLift, the first performance marketing platform for the CPG industry. The set of solutions allows Ibotta’s partners to measure the ROI of a digital promotion. Leach said the solution helps the CPG brand challenge of knowing whether a digital promotion drove incremental sales or just subsidized people who were already buying the product. “In the past, the challenge has been that it’s hard to know whether or not a digital promotion really drove incremental sales or just subsidized people who were already buying your product, and what the cost per incremental dollar is,” Leach explained. “With LiveLift, marketers can use digital performance marketing to set targets and create a rolling measurement, and then optimize while the campaign is in flight.” Vatere has been piloting LiveLift for the last six months at Liquid Death. He agreed with Leach that measuring incrementality is a challenge. “You can really measure incrementality only if you get the sell signal from the retailer, which is another problem, and it’s also very delayed,” Vatere said. “So, how do you build your campaigns, your full media mix to lead to performance?” Controlling variables, measurement, and ROAS Consumers who are already about to buy Liquid Death don’t need a temporary price reduction (TPR) or promotion dollars. Consumers who’ve never tried Liquid Death might. But it’s difficult to distinguish between those two, Vatere said. “Our north star is around household penetration. We know that TPR and promotion are big drivers for people to try the product. Now we need to get that promotion in front of the people who never bought us, not people who know about us already,” Vatere shared. And that’s a big challenge when you do that in store.” Leach mentioned that in digital media, measurement is usually done with lift studies and matched audiences, but the principles have never been used in the promotion space. When companies try to compare sales in one period of time to a later period, there are a lot of variables at play. “We’re trying to control for variables, so you can make a claim about what caused what sales,” Leach said. Vatere remarked that the industry needs to stop talking about ROAS and instead work toward performance. “ROAS was made for media buyers and media agencies to look good in front of the brand.” Brands need to hold the standard for measuring incremental sales. “Let’s add an ‘I’ in front of ROAS. Let’s talk about incremental ROAS. Let’s talk about those costs per incremental dollars,” he said. Growing incremental sales, reducing the sales cycle Another challenge Liquid Death and other CPG brands face is selling a product in many different environments and trying to get a perspective on incremental sales across channels. “You need some data that looks at in-store purchases as well as online purchases for millions of consumers to model what those incremental sales are,” Leach explained. LiveLift tackles that incremental sales challenge, Vatere shared. “With the tool, you guys get the signal from the sales on the Ibotta side, and now I don’t have to rely on Walmart telling me if a sale occurs. You know that sale occurred because you are in there. That’s part of why you can get it in real time, and you cannot get it anywhere else,” he said. With the LiveLift pilot, Vatere saw results for Liquid Death: It was profitable both for incremental and for valuation, and it also reduced the sales cycle, or the time in between trips, quite a bit. “So, for me, that was a double win there,” Vatere said. “It was fully incremental, but also talking about retention, it was a growth of the buy rate, which we’re always looking for.”