• by Danielle Oster , June 26, 2024

When Ozzy Osbourne tells you not to snort something, you listen.

Shortly after the brand began sponsoring “The Osbournes Podcast,” Liquid Death realized Ozzy Osbourne had the expertise it was looking for in its new campaign promoting its Death Dust hydration powder  esponding to Instagram comments about snorting the product.

“A lot of times our ideas come from things we pick up organically across social media. When we first launched Death Dust, we added a line asking people to please not attempt to snort Death Dust,” Andy Pearson, Liquid Death vice president, creative told Marketing Daily. ”People picked up on it and ran with a bunch of hilarious comments. So it felt like a fertile territory to keep digging into.”

The brand had wanted to work with the iconic Black Sabbath vocalist for some time, Pearson said, adding, “And as we started this project for Death Dust, we looked around for someone who is an expert on snorting things. Ozzy seemed like the obvious choice.”

In his autobiography, “I Am Ozzy,” Osbourne wrote that “It would be impossible to exaggerate the amount of coke” Black Sabbath took in 1972 while renting a Bel Air mansion during the making of their fourth album. And Osbourne’s excessive drug and alcohol use – even by the standards of the group – reportedly led, at least in part, to his firing from the band in 1979.

In the ad, Osbourne suddenly shows up as two kids in a back alley open up a pouch of “Death Dust” to warn them not to snort the powder. They assure Osbourne they were only planning on adding it to water for a hydration boost.

“Death Dust tastes much better when it’s mixed with water and used to hydrate. So we hope no one is snorting it,” Pearson said. “We told them not to. And now with this latest video, we’re telling them a whole list of other things they shouldn’t do with it either.”

The ad ends with Osbourne going through that list, providing a succinct definition of the most explicit of the methods, and laughing while his car speeds off. It’s the latest in a line of  tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top humor from the brand, including its gory introduction of Death Dust earlier this year.