Although the bottled water industry is a multibillion-dollar industry, it’s hard to think of a more commoditized product. You might be able to name some brands – Fiji, Aquafina, Evian – but could you rattle off their campaign lines?
Then there’s Liquid Death, which hacked its way into a saturated beverage industry by appealing to eco- and health-conscious Millennials.
Its campaign line: “Murder Your Thirst.”
Aggressive, maybe. Distinct? Definitely. Bold branding, plus a savvy marketing campaign and killer merch, explain why Liquid Death is one of the fastest-growing water brands in the world.
And it’s just water in a tallboy can.
Different, But Not Yet Distinct
You could argue that marketing a commodity like water has nothing in common with travel and tourism. And in most respects, you’d be right – except for one detail: that brutally brilliant, highly original campaign line.
“Murder your thirst” is differentiating. Novel. And culturally relevant. Three factors that define the difference between your creative blending in versus breaking through.
Now consider DMO marketing, an industry in which every destination is different, but whose creative can slip into familiar descriptors and phrases: “Vibrant culture!” “Endless adventure!” “Something for everyone!” Vastly different places, similar tired language.
The result? A Sea of Sameness.
Which led Rick Dunn, MMGY’s Executive Creative Director, to ask a simple but far-reaching question:
How can we assure our clients that their creative messaging is objectively and consistently differentiating, novel and culturally relevant?
That question led to Trailblazer.
From Instinct to Intelligence
At its core, Trailblazer is an originality evaluator: an AI-powered tool designed to analyze, compare and score creative messaging against the competitive landscape.
Evaluating creative for its distinctiveness has historically involved trial, error and gut instinct. Trailblazer introduces the simple but powerful idea that creative originality can be objectively measured.
Dunn worked with Senior Strategic Planner Hannah Knott, who, as part of MMGY’s Strategy team, develops in-depth competitive analysis for clients. The task Dunn and Knott addressed focused on making the analysis more actionable at the exact moment creativity is happening.
MMGY’s Director of Editorial Services, Allison Laner, then applied her expertise with large language models to train the AI tool. Using custom instructions, tailored criteria and real strategic inputs, Laner taught the model to bring together Strategy’s competitive analysis, Editorial’s understanding of a brand’s voice and style, and Creative’s conceptualization of bold, unique ideas.
Creative can then be shared with Trailblazer, which evaluates it on a 1–100 scale using three criteria: novelty, differentiation and trend alignment.
The result is an Originality Score: a clear, data-informed and objective score plus analysis on how a creative idea or campaign stacks up.
Powered by People, Guided by AI
Let’s be clear here: Trailblazer doesn’t replace human creativity. It won’t write the next “Murder your thirst.” Nor will it capture the nuance or instinct of a great idea.
Human copywriters do that.
What it does is strengthen our work and give clients greater confidence in the decisions we’re making. Trailblazer is also capable of much more:
- Teams can instantly scan the competitive landscape
- Proprietary data and personas can be layered in for even deeper insight
- APIs can pull in live campaign data to ensure everything’s current
- Eventually, it can evaluate not just words, but visuals too
The Bottom Line
Liquid Death didn’t become the fastest-growing water brand because it changed the product. It changed the conversation. (And seriously: With merch like flaskets, night terror pajama pants and slaughter bottles, how could you debate that point?)
It looked at its competition, found the creative whitespace and leaned in hard.
Finding that ownable whitespace is at the core of what we do at MMGY. Trailblazer simply helps us do that with even greater confidence and clarity. And that killer approach deals a death blow to the Sea of Sameness.
