Death Wish Coffee

The Challenge:
Death Wish Coffee, known for its extremely strong brews and rebellious nature, came to us for their first nationwide brand campaign in the eleven years since their founding. The coffee category was saturated with well-established household names, all selling the same cozy and comforting narrative of sitting back, relaxing, and slowly sipping coffee. To cut through the category noise, we knew we had to go in the opposite direction of our competitors by creating a campaign that was just as bold as Death Wish itself.


The Strategic Insight:
To prove just how our Coffee really is, we looked for a cultural truth that matched the brand’s unapologetic energy, and we found that Death Wish is so highly caffeinated that it's banned by the NCAA and considered a performance-enhancing substance. That rebellious fact became our rallying cry. In true Death Wish fashion, we embraced the ban and flipped the narrative by signing three of the top college football players in the country, rules and regulations be damned. It was the perfect way to embody what it truly means to live with a Death Wish: to grab life by the beans, rebel against the traditional, and to charge headfirst into the unknown. And since putting our sponsored athletes’ faces on the campaign could get them suspended, we had to get a little creative.

The Big Idea:
Enter “Performance Enhancing Coffee”: the world’s first anonymous NIL deal, rolled out across digital and social, and anchored by a 30-second hero spot. The campaign featured our athletes excelling both on and off the field, but always with their faces blurred and their jersey numbers replaced by question marks. We built up hype by working with TikTok creators, sending them influencer kits and inviting them to guess who our mystery players were. This not only raked in millions of views, it also got college football fans asking one simple question: if a player pulls off something amazing on the field, are they on Death Wish Coffee?

The Results:
-- +899% search results for Death Wish Coffee
-- 7M Impressions
-- +105% relative brand lift in ad recall
-- (campaign was cut short due to global disaster)