Liquid Death Made an Ad Against AI. 7 in 10 Americans Agree.

Most brands spent the last two years working out how to get AI into their marketing. On August 18, two of them ran a campaign built on being against it.

Liquid Death and Garage Beer released a 90-second music video in which NFL veteran Jason Kelce, who co-owns Garage Beer, collects urine alongside Liquid Death’s Murder Man mascot. The product is a “Coolant Collector.” The premise is that AI data centers need water to stay cool, so Americans should send them something else. Marketing Dive reported it as comedic activism, which is fair.

The part worth stopping on is the research note underneath it. Liquid Death’s VP of creative, Andy Pearson, explained the target selection: “When you look at the data, it is literally the one thing that [unites all Americans].”

He’s right, and the number is larger than most marketing teams assume.

The number

Gallup found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their local area. The split is 48% strongly opposed and 23% somewhat opposed, against 20% somewhat in favor and 7% strongly in favor. It’s a telephone survey of 1,000 US adults across all 50 states and DC, fielded by Recon MR between March 2 and 18, 2026.

Note the shape. Strong opposition alone is more than double total support. Half of the opponents name resource use as the reason, with 18% each citing water and 18% citing energy.

For a marketer, compare that to the base rates you already work with rather than to other tech opinions. A 70% agreement on anything is rare, and a 48% intensity score is the sort of number a brand would normally spend years building toward. It was sitting there, unclaimed, and a canned water company took it.

What this asks of you

Read this as a consumer-brand stunt with no B2B application and you miss it. The lesson is also narrower than “AI is unpopular.” We covered the audience-side version of this in the gap between how marketers and audiences read AI creative.

The polling is about data centers in your neighborhood, not about AI products. Those are different objects and people hold different views on them. Nobody has shown that the person who opposes a data center down the road also declines a product because its landing page says “AI-powered.”

What has changed is the assumption underneath that phrase. For two years “AI-powered” functioned as free credibility, a signal of being current that cost nothing to claim. The Gallup spread says the underlying subject now carries real negative weight for a large group of people. A claim that used to be free is now a claim with a distribution, and you don’t know where your buyers sit on it.

Andy Sauer, Garage Beer’s CEO, described the partnership in ordinary terms: “Garage Beer and Liquid Death share a similar sense of humor and approach to marketing. The partnership felt natural from the start.” That’s the tell. Neither brand treated an anti-AI position as risky. They treated it as the safe, funny, obvious consensus play.

The argument that this is nothing

There’s a real case that this is one stunt from a brand whose entire business model is stunts, and it deserves stating.

Liquid Death is a company that sells water in tallboy cans with a horror aesthetic. Being against something loudly is its whole marketing operation, and reading a strategic shift into it is the kind of thing trade publications do when a slow week needs a trend. The Gallup finding is also five months old at this point, and CNN reported in early August that despite the loud opposition, relatively few data centers are actually being blocked. Public sentiment and public outcomes are not the same thing.

The reason it still matters is that the marketing question doesn’t depend on whether the opposition succeeds. It depends on whether the sentiment exists in your audience. Gallup says it exists in most of the country. Whether a data center gets built in Loudoun County is irrelevant to whether your prospect flinches at your homepage.

The test to run

Two questions, both answerable this week without a research budget.

One: does your AI claim describe a benefit or a technology? “AI-powered scheduling” describes a technology and asks the reader to feel positively about AI. “Books the meeting while you sleep” describes a benefit and asks nothing. The second is immune to every point in this article, and it was better copy before any of this.

Two: has anyone checked whether your buyers care? Not whether they use AI tools. Whether the phrase on your homepage moves them. That’s one question appended to a customer call, and almost nobody has asked it, which means most teams are running a claim with an unknown sign in front of it.

A canned water company and a beer company ran the research and concluded there was a large, intense, un-owned consensus available. They took it with a joke about urine. The finding is real whatever you think of the execution, and the budget pressure on AI spend is arriving in the same quarter as the sentiment data. If AI is going to sit in your positioning, it should be there because it earns the space, not because it was free to say. It stopped being free.