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Whitney Cummings is a Hollywood multi-hyphenate, with acting, writing, stand-up comedy, podcasting and producing on her resume. And she’s added a new skill recently as a “board-certified plastic surgeon,” or so she says in a Liquid Death campaign.
Except that’s not true, of course.
Instead, she’s taking her first starring turn in a high-concept Liquid Death ad that mashes up a sustainability message with a ridiculous premise: Cummings, posing as a medical professional in a crisp white lab coat, presides over a surgery center that repurposes plastic waste, turning it into implants for butts, chins and calves.
Spoiler alert—Cummings dips into her own supply, showing off three sets of a certain body part in the video’s final reveal. “I’m not just a spokesperson,” she says, leaning into a cheesy old ad trope, “I’m also a client.”
As an investor in the company and longtime ambassador of the canned water brand, Cummings was a strategic fit for Liquid Death’s latest #DeathToPlastic crusade. And because she’s “hilarious, gregarious and super collaborative,” she was a creative match as well, according to Andy Pearson, the brand’s vice president of creative.
The brand didn’t want to take a typically earnest approach to an environmental message because consumers are “so desensitized to bad news,” Pearson told Adweek. Yet it wanted to confront a myth—not all plastic trash gets recycled; only about 5% does, per the brand—and offer a farcical solution that involves putting the other 95% to work in the beauty industrial complex.
“If you want to reach people, make them laugh about something built on a nugget of truth,” Pearson said. “And there’s nothing stupider than the idea that we can solve the plastic pollution problem by having everyone shove beach plastics inside of our body cavities.”
Cummings, a self-described ad nerd who has previously appeared in spots for fin-tech player Affirm and birth control system Annovera, spoke to Adweek about curating her endorsements, speaking her mind and finding the “secretly wholesome” underbelly of Liquid Death.
