Dr. Evil came back this week.

Not for a movie. Twenty-four years after Goldmember, after a decade of will-he-won’t-he about a fourth Austin Powers, Mike Myers finally put the bald cap back on and reanimated the most quotable comedy villain of his generation, to sell Verizon.

He brought the whole band. Seth Green as Scott. Rob Lowe as Number 2. Mindy Sterling as Frau Farbissina. The lair outside Las Vegas. All of it dusted off and fully operational, so Dr. Evil could pitch a world-domination scheme called Menace Mobile and have his own henchmen tell him they’d rather have Verizon’s no-hidden-fees plan.

That’s the joke. The supervillain’s evil phone plan loses to a cleaner telco plan.

This is not even the first time Myers has rented Dr. Evil out for ads. There was a Super Bowl spot back in 2022 too. The character too precious to revive for 24 years. Available, apparently, for a teleco. Turns out, he claims a sequel is coming. God help us all.

This week, another icon, Timothée Chalamet, was being torn apart asking if he had sold his soul. Next to Myers, Timmy C looks like a Trappist monk. But his sellout is the more interesting one.

A man watched his team win its first championship since ‘73 from courtside seats and the internet decided the real story was that he had to sell his soul to do it.

The Knicks closed out the Spurs in San Antonio on Saturday, ending a drought that started when Richard Nixon was president. Funny side bar, but there is an article this week about how Nixon is suddenly cool on social media. But little Lisan al Gaib from Hell’s Kitchen got his ring-adjacent moment.

And the same week, he dropped a Kalshi ad. So the comments went: “had to pay for those courtside seats somehow.” “Bro sold his soul.” “Dune funds couldn’t have dried up that fast.”

The roast is missing the actual story.

HE’S THE MOST INTERESTING AD GUY IN HOLLYWOOD

Here’s the ad résumé people forgot while they were dunking.

Cartier, since 2021. The luxury Muad'Dib on-ramp.

Then Bleu de Chanel in 2023 — and this is where it gets good. Chanel didn’t hand him a 30-second spot. They handed him a Martin Scorsese short film. Ninety seconds, mostly black and white, scored to Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” riffing on a Fellini short about an actor losing himself to fame. A fragrance ad built as an art film about hating fragrance ads.

Last year, Timmy cashed in with Cash App in a spot that ran as an ambient short before blockbusters instead of a hard sell.

And the adidas film, which was barely a shoe commercial. A whole soccer-obsessed universe, Messi and Bad Bunny and Jude Bellingham floating through it, and somehow Chalamet was the gravity. It played like an installation, not a 15-second pre-roll.

See the pattern? Chalamet has never once done a normal ad.

Every partnership is a weird little movie that refuses to behave like marketing. The Marty Supreme rollout was the same instinct — bro climbed the Sphere and pitched his own campaign over a viral Zoom call.

So when this Kalshi ad turned out strange, that wasn’t a betrayal of the brand.

That was the brand.

There’s a reason Chalamet has appeared in The Drink Cart not once, or twice, not three times, or even four times, but five times. At this rate we might need to think about some branded Six Time Drink Cart Jackets.

SO DID HE SELL HIS SOUL OR NOT

The ad itself is committed to the bit. One minute, directed by Linus Sandgren — who has an Oscar for shooting “La La Land,” because of course Chalamet got an Oscar winner to point the camera.

Timmy says “Kalshi” to his dentist mid-procedure. He bangs his head on the ceiling to shut up his upstairs neighbors. He tests keyboards in a Guitar Center. The word flashes. The ad never tells you what Kalshi actually is.

As a piece of craft? It’s exactly his lane. Deadpan, surreal, allergic to explaining itself. If this were for Squarespace nobody blinks.

The problem isn’t the film. The problem is the client.

Kalshi is a prediction market — bet on outcomes, including stuff that got close enough to death markets to draw legal heat. The CEO has since said they don’t list markets tied directly to death. This is not Cartier. This is a casino wearing a fintech blazer.

And that’s the whole tension. Chalamet’s whole appeal is that he chooses. The Scorsese short, the art-film shoe spot — they work because we believe he’s curating, not cashing checks. The second the choosing starts to look like chasing the bag, the spell cracks. An Oscar-winning cinematographer doesn’t launder a predatory product. He just makes it look expensive and cool.

Bro didn’t sell his soul. He rented it to a betting app and hired a fancy director to shoot it.

THE CHALAMET AD RULE

The rule was never don’t sell out. Everybody sells out. The rule is how.

Chalamet wrote the modern version of it. If you’re going to take the check, make it cool. Make it art. Hire the best director you can get in a room. Score it like a film. Stay in control of every frame.

Because here’s the part nobody at the agency says out loud — when the talent is this big, the talent runs the set. The agency is sniffing off his vapor. They’ll settle for a few approving nods in a boardroom and the slim chance the client gets flown out to grab a photo on set with Tim.

So the work bends to him, not the other way around. The Scorsese short exists because Chalamet can summon Scorsese. The shoe film looks like an installation because the star had the leverage to demand it. He’s not a logo’s hostage. Chalemet is the captain now. And he just took Tom Hanks hostage on a boat.

Warhol called this 50 years ago. He would know, he was a commercial illustrator before he was Warhol. Making money is art, he said, and good business is the best art. He stopped pretending the wall between commerce and craft was real and started charging for it.

That’s the rule. You don’t avoid the sellout. You out-class it. You make the ad so good that “he sold out” curdles into “wait, did you see what he did with it.”

Kalshi is the one place the rule strains — not because the film is bad, but because no amount of control makes the client cool.

Make the art. Keep the control. End of lesson.

THE COCKTAIL: THE GALLIANO SOUR

This week’s drink comes with its own vintage ad, and the ad is the whole point. It’s 1972. McKesson is selling Galliano with a candlelit shot of two beautiful people about to either kiss or duel, and a headline that toasts itself: “May all your sours be Galliano sours.”

The body copy doesn’t sell taste. It sells superiority. Make this, it says, and you will devastate your friends with the superiority of your palate.

That’s a Chalamet move if I’ve ever seen one. Take the most ordinary format in the world — a whiskey sour, an endorsement deal — and dress it up until it’s insufferable in the best way.

And Galliano itself is the original prestige veneer. The bottle calls it a secret and ancient formula. It was invented in 1896 by a Livorno distiller named Arturo Vaccari, who named it after Giuseppe Galliano — an Italian war hero who’d died at the Battle of Adwa months before the liqueur hit shelves.

So the “ancient” golden elixir was Victorian, and the legend got bolted on after the fact. Tall Roman-column bottle, gold-rush yellow, a dead hero’s name. Pure manufactured heritage. By the 70s it was the best-selling liqueur in America.

Kalshi hired Chalamet and an Oscar winner to look this expensive. Galliano just did it with a bottle shape and a good story.

So raise with appropriate toast — the ad’s words, not mine. This week the appropriate toast is to the Knicks.

The Galliano Sour
3/4 oz Galliano
3/4 oz whiskey (blend, bourbon or Scotch)
3/4 oz fresh orange juice
1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
3/4 tablespoon sugar

Shake hard with ice and strain into a frosted sour glass. The original calls for sugar straight — if you’d rather not gamble on it dissolving, swap in 1/2 oz simple syrup. Bourbon makes it rounder, Scotch makes it smokier and more interesting.

Vanilla, anise and citrus over whiskey. Devastate and sell out accordingly.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Here’s a number that stopped me cold.

Between 2005 and 2019, people started talking less. Not a little less. Every year, the average person spoke 338 fewer words a day than the year before. Stack it up and it’s a 28 percent drop. From around 16,600 words a day to under 12,000.

A whole conversation, gone. Every day.

The researchers weren’t even looking for it. They were redoing an old study on whether women talk more than men, and the decline just fell out of the data. Their first reaction was that they’d botched the math. Nope.

Nobody can say exactly why. But look at the window. 2005 to 2019. The texting years. The feed years. The self-checkout, tap-to-order, never-speak-to-a-human years.

We didn’t decide to go quiet. We optimized our way into less words. Keep scrolling, stay home, use a QR code to order. The industry I work in spent fifteen years engineering silence.

So it’s a little rich that this month that same industry flies to the south of France to hand itself trophies for “human connection.”

THE AWARD SHOW WITH NO DARK HORSE

In April a KitKat truck rolled down the Gardiner under a convoy of black SUVs flying little chocolate flags. Presidential security detail. Fake heist protection, real production. It happened in my city, on a road I look at every week.

I found out about it this month. From a French awards shortlist.

I read the Ad Age Cannes predictions where forty chief creative officers picked the work they think takes home metal later this month. Sixty-some campaigns.

I’d seen five of them.

Five.

Everyone reaches for the Oscars comparison with Cannes and I totally get it. The hype, the rosé, the sense that you should’ve kept up and didn’t. I write a twice-a-week newsletter on ads and I missed most of these.

There was a time I’d seen every Best Picture nominee by February and had a position on each one. That ended a while ago, same as it did for you.

The Oscars always have a dark horse, an upset, a snub somebody’s furious about. People who haven’t seen a single nominee still know who got robbed. The whole scam runs on an audience that shows up to be surprised.

Cannes has no dark horses. If an ad doesn’t win an award a very small group of people might be mildly upset.

There is nobody outside ad world to surprise. No normal person knows these campaigns exist, let alone has a favorite. The only people who could call an upset are the forty creative directors doing the voting, and they already know the ending. You can’t have an underdog in a race the public doesn’t know is happening. I would be stunned to think many people can even imagine that there’s a French ad festival where chocolate-truck stunts win trophies.

The five I’d actually seen all ran where people actually were. Claude’s Super Bowl spots. The Squarespace thing with Emma Stone. Instacart’s banana ad. Whatever Apple did. Work that ran in the breaks of things millions of people were already watching. Seeing it was the whole point.

The ones I’d never heard of were the stunts and the films. The KitKat convoy. Chili’s opening a fake “fast food financing” storefront next to a McDonald’s. Channel 4 putting vomiting statues on the Southbank. A nine-minute Gushers horror short. A seven-minute M&M’s documentary about peanuts.

And Spike Jonze co-directing a half-hour Gucci film with the woman who made Babygirl.

Thirty minutes? I’d have remembered thirty minutes.

Most of this is made for the jury. They exist to get written up. Written up in exactly the Ad Age roundup I was reading, by exactly the forty people who’ll vote on it. The work isn’t made to be seen. It’s made to be entered.

That’s not a knock. Some of it’s brilliant. The KitKat thing is genuinely funny and I’m low-key annoyed I missed it. I’d actually eat the heck out of one right now. But “brilliant” and “anyone saw it” stopped being the same measurement somewhere along the way.

While the industry packs for France, two horror movies made by kids from YouTube are eating the box office alive. Backrooms, made for $10 million by a 20-year-old, posted A24’s biggest opening ever. Obsession cost $750,000 — roughly a rounding error next to a Cannes hospitality suite, and it’s grossed more than a quarter-billion, climbing every weekend like it’s 1982 and people just found E.T.

Neither ran a campaign built for a jury. Backrooms put a billboard in the one Wisconsin town where the original creepypasta photo was taken — a detail only the real fans would clock. Obsession built a fake product site, vending machines, a phone number you could text. They didn’t advertise at people. They gave people something to do, in the actual world. People actually showed up. Then came back.

That’s the thing Cannes can’t measure. Not whether forty creative directors admired your craft. Whether anyone bought a ticket and took the ride twice.

An award doesn’t measure whether the work reached anyone. It measures how well you reached the people handing out the awards. Five out of sixty isn’t me being out of touch. It’s a closed room doing exactly what a closed room does.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE MARTINI BIANCO SPRITZ

Four days ago Martini launched Jonathan Bailey as its new Martini Man. Multi-year deal, a short film, the coast outside Venice, an original 1970s Martini racing car, the whole sun-drenched Italian summer fever dream. He gets an initiation in sprezzatura, the Italian art of looking like you didn’t try. Then he pours a Bianco Spritz, and that’s the ad.

Martini doesn’t have an awareness problem. Ninety percent of the planet knows the brand, sales north of a billion and a half. What it has is a usage problem — growth’s been flat for years. So the entire job of this gorgeous thing is to get you to order one specific drink. Not to win a jury. To move a spritz.

And it’ll run where people actually are. TV, streaming, social, a summer takeover of Milan, terraces in New York and Berlin. Millions will see it. Some will order the drink. That’s advertising doing its oldest, least glamorous job, out loud, while the trophies go to vomiting fountains.

Sprezzatura is effort dressed up as ease. The exact inverse of a Cannes case study film, which is effort dressed up as even more effort.

THE MARTINI BIANCO SPRITZ

• 1.5 oz Martini Bianco

• 1.5 oz prosecco

• Splash of soda

• Garnish with lemon slice, mint sprig and slices of strawberry.

• Build and serve over ice

AN ITALIAN CANNES WOULD ACTUALLY WORK

It’s not just the Martini ad giving us the wonderfully luxurious concept of “Martini Time” but an ad festival in Italy just might work better.

From 1957 to 1977, Italian TV had Carosello. A ten-minute block of commercials, every night, right after the news. Sounds like a punishment. It pulled 20 million viewers.

The rules were the genius. Italian law wouldn’t let you just advertise at people, so each spot had to be a little film (a sketch, a cartoon, a story) and by rule the plot couldn’t be about the product. You earned the attention first. The brand only turned up at the very end, in a few fixed seconds. Sell last. Entertain the whole way there.

And the whole country watched. Kids were sent to bed the second it ended — “dopo Carosello, tutti a nanna.” After Carosello, off to bed. A generation timed their bedtime to the commercials. Try to picture a North American kid begging to stay up for one more ad.

Real directors shot them, anonymously. Famous actors showed up. The last one ever, New Year’s Day 1977, was Raffaella Carrà dancing for a bottle of Stock 84.

That’s the festival I want. Not a few hundred ad nerds in a room in France. A country that actually watched, every night, and could tell you exactly which ones were worth staying up for.

Carosello didn’t have a dark horse either — but for the opposite reason. No upset, because everyone had already seen everything. The jury was the whole country.

That’s the version where winning means something. The work that wins is the work people chose to watch. We traded it for a yacht party. Yes, I’m 100% jealous that I’ve never been.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

The World Cup isn’t a soccer tournament. Not to ad people. To us it’s a six-week-long open bar where every brand on earth has clearly had one too many.

A few commit to something so stupid it loops back around to genius. Most of them embarrass themselves. Others issue press releases so stuffed with word salad (meeting the moment, meaningful, relevant and authentic), you could build a drinking game around them.

COORS LIGHT PRINTED FOURTEEN OS AND DIDN’T FLINCH

The Tallerboy is an 18-inch stainless steel canister that holds three stacked cans of Coors Light, named for the sound of a goal. The brand stretched Coors to Coooors all summer in honor of Andrés Cantor’s bottomless “Goooool,” then kept going and stretched the can with fourteen Os.

Here’s the part that takes it from dumb to perfect. You can’t drink from it. It’s an insulated holder. You slide three cans in like tennis balls and pull one out when you want it. Coors built an 18-inch monument to not getting off the couch. Thirty bucks.

And it’s great. Not despite being idiotic — because of it. Somebody had the chance to value-engineer the joke down to a koozie with a logo and instead said no, make it a foot and a half tall and spell the name like a man falling down the stairs. That’s the brief working exactly as intended. Make it big and silly and commit to the bit.

FIVE BEERS, ONE KETCHUP, AND AN INDUSTRY LOSING ITS MIND

Heinz and Heineken put out a six-pack where the sixth beer is a bottle of Heinz ketchup and called it “The match we’ve all been waiting for.”

Heinz’s first global brand collab in 150-odd years.

Then LinkedIn went to war about it.

Richard Clark, freelance strategist, wanted to know “in what universe do large numbers of people hit the booze aisle for Heineken” and also happen to want ketchup? Great question.

Ben Kay, a group creative director, said the trouble isn’t understanding the idea, it’s “the people who proudly post it on LinkedIn, suggesting it’s anything other than a stupid idea with ugly execution.”

Dan Beaumont kept it to one clean knife: “it’s definitely creative (fun) but does that mean it’s a good idea?” And Duane Bruton asked if anyone in that boardroom had ever been to a BBQ, because no host needs more ketchup and a loose bottle wedged into a carrier “isn’t a gift. It’s a weird beer tax.”

Andrew Tindall was the lonely defender. “For an industry that "champions creativity", the insane commenters below who can't get their heads around a cross-category play say it all.”

Oh, nobody’s supposed to buy this for the logic. It’s simply a visual built to be screenshotted. The work is fine. The comment section is the campaign.

JEEP IS BETTING THE FARM ON 350 GUYS NAMED GEORGE

Jeep’s offer, in full: if the US men’s team wins the entire World Cup, the first 100 Americans legally named George Washington who register could each drive home in a 2026 Wrangler.

The US is a 50-to-1 long shot. There are, best anyone can count, about 350 living Americans actually named George Washington. So Jeep built a national TV campaign around a giveaway contingent on a near-impossible result, capped at a name almost nobody has, max exposure around $3.6 million they will almost certainly never pay.

The whole thing is a dare to the universe that you register at wranglerforwashingtons.com. A real website that exists.

Iliza Shlesinger sheds her Jeep Chief Family Officer title for Chief Soccer Officer and delivers a rallying cry from behind a desk, under an oil portrait of George Washington riding a Wrangler.

BANK GOALS

Two Canadian banks looked at the World Cup and decided it belonged to them.

TD went first. With Leo Toronto on creative, Ogilvy on strategy, the hero activation is a literal welcome mat at Union Station and a promise that staff can help arriving fans in 80-plus languages.

Okay?

It's the TD marketing VP quote that gets me, “this unprecedented cultural moment” in a way that’s “meaningful, relevant and authentic.” That’s a bank brand in a soccer scarf.

Coors committed to fourteen Os, Heinz to a joke, Jeep to a portrait of Washington in a Wrangler. TD committed to three adjectives. A welcome mat is a doormat with a LinkedIn account.

Then BMO staked their claim to “Grow the Game.” TBWA\Canada, a spot where Lamorne Morris calls himself “the Alphonso Davies of banking” while the real Alphonso Davies juggles behind him. Murals, streetcar wraps, station takeovers, an ATM that dispenses fan gear, a thing called the “DeskShaw”.

The creative’s fine and BMO has apparently put real money into Canadian soccer for twenty years. But here’s the quote. Hosting this is “a once-in-a-generation cultural moment” and they (the bank) wanted to show up “as big and participatory as the event itself.”

You know what I don’t need from my bank? Them connecting me to a cultural moment.

AD LESSONS

Remember: An idea’s power equals how dumb it is multiplied by how fully you commit to it. The dumb-brilliant detail isn’t the thing you apologize for. It’s the whole idea.

Every winner this week lives there. Coors committed to fourteen Os and a can you can’t drink from. Jeep committed to a giveaway that needs a 50-to-1 miracle and a 100 guys named George Washington. Nobody sanded the dumb part off.

The banks took a whole world arriving in their city and sanded it down to meaningful, relevant, authentic, once-in-a-generation gobbledygook until nothing was sharp enough to remember was left.

Commit to “authentic” instead of to a specific, stupid, particular thing and you’ve committed to nothing. The nothing is what people remember.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: PITCH BIRD

Spent a few days in Minneapolis shooting some content and handed the map to Marco Ortiz, who walked me around a few of the city’s incredible bars. iI you want to see a city, follow the cocktail creator who used to bartend.

Mara, inside the Four Seasons, pours a thing called Pearanoia. Bosc pear, Calvados, amontillado, cardamom, lemon. A cocktail pun that was actually delicious.

Spoon and Stable had a single barrel rum Zombie with soursop, pineapple-rosemary cordial and ancho. You have to respect a simpler but elegant take on a tiki classic.

But the one that got me was the Tapaculo at Flora Room. Made by Jaxon. A variation on the Jungle Bird with gin, mezcal, pineapple, banana, red bitter, sweet vermouth and garnished with a banana Runt. That’s the whole thing in one glass. A bar mixing mezcal and gin with the same hands that’ll plant a banana Runt on top is not messing around. That’s a bar that knows exactly what they are doing.

You can drop this nugget at the happy hour later today: The Jungle Bird was invented in 1973 at the Aviary Bar at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton in Malaysia. It proved that Campari and pineapple were made for each other. End of story.

I don’t have runts or anything banana so this is a Jungle Bird that put on cleats. I’m calling it the Pitch Bird. Pitch as in the field. Pitch as in the thing every one of us has stood in a conference room and died a little delivering.

The Pitch Bird

• 1 oz gin

• 1 oz mezcal

• 1 oz Campari

• 1 oz sweet vermouth

• 1 oz pineapple juice

Shake hard with ice and strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Pineapple wedge if you’re feeling it.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

I use AI every single day. Not like Gary and Wyatt used their computer in Weird Science, but as a tool that has genuinely changed how I work. So understand that what follows isn’t an old ad guy yelling at the cloud.

It’s an old ad guy who knows exactly how good this stuff is, reads the federal government’s brand-new AI strategy and recognizes a familiar stench.

I’ve spent over twenty years in rooms judging this exact thing. Not policy, campaigns and ideas. And that’s what this is. The new line, “AI for All” isn’t a strategy, it’s a campaign.

Imagine it buried on slide 39 of 72 with a half-hearted political tagline for the big pitch.

I'm going to review it the way I'd review any campaign that crossed my desk. And the note is short: it's a bad ad for a bad idea.

Just a tagline, six pillars, a circular diagram with little icons and a pile of numbers so big and round they're clearly there to stop you asking questions. It's smoke and mirrors.

And the trouble with smoke and mirrors is the smoke clears.

IF THIS IS HOW THEY BUILD, BE VERY AFRAID

PrescribeIT. Canada Health Infoway’s national e-prescribing service. The “axe the fax” project, launched in 2017 to drag prescriptions out of the fax machine and into secure digital transmission between doctors and pharmacies.

The government funded it to the tune of more than $250 million — Conservative MPs put it closer to $298 million — running about $35 million a year. Thousands of pharmacies and doctors’ offices signed up.

And fewer than 5% of prescriptions in this country ever went through it. After eight years and a quarter-billion dollars, it could not beat the fax machine. It got switched off.

Why did it die? The government’s own answer: low adoption and no federal-provincial cost-sharing deal.

They built the tool, gave it away and couldn’t make anybody use it. When they started charging pharmacists twenty cents a prescription in 2025, the ones who were using it bailed.

Now read the AI strategy’s flagship move. The very first “AI mission” — the centerpiece, the one with a $200 million price tag, is pooling national health data. Driving AI adoption across the system. The entire plan rides on one number: getting business adoption from 12% to 60% by 2034.

Six days after they unplugged a national health system that couldn’t crack 5% adoption.

They could not get doctors to stop faxing. This week they are confident that they’ll somehow get the whole country to trust pooled health data running through AI.

THIS ISN’T A ONE-OFF. IT’S THE HOUSE STYLE.

So let’s talk about “AI for All.” Six pillars. The Prime Minister says it’ll shorten your ER wait and save your small business.

I’ve written that deck. Every copywriter has. It’s the one where the idea is thin so you make the numbers round and the verbs future-tense.

The way you judge a launch is the back catalog. PrescribeIT isn’t the only thing in the government’s discography.

Phoenix. The federal pay system. Pitched to save taxpayers $70 million a year on a $309 million build. It launched in 2016 and immediately stopped paying people. Over 200,000 public servants overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all, some for years. The all-in cost is now north of $4.8 billion, and the auditor general says the replacement will run another $4.2 billion. For a payroll system. The thing every corner-store franchisee does on a laptop.

ArriveCan. Everyone’s favourite border app. Initial estimate: $80,000. Real cost: about $59.5 million. It’s “about,” because the auditor general couldn’t determine the actual number and called the bookkeeping the worst she’d seen in years.

The biggest contractor billed $19.1 million and had two employees. That’s a decimal point that went out for cigarettes and never came back.

The long-gun registry. Promised to cost taxpayers about $2 million. CBC’s investigation put the real tab somewhere near $2 billion. The computer system alone (budgeted around a million) blew past the hundreds of millions.

THE GOVERNMENT WOULD BE THE WORST AD HOLDCO YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

The federal government isn’t a brand. It’s a really bad advertising holding company.

Think about how a holdco actually works. One parent, a dozen agencies underneath it, each with its own name so the client never quite connects the disasters.

The work comes out of companies that would not get shortlisted any other way. Phoenix, or Infoway, or the ArriveCan shop, or the Element AI account team — different logos, different press releases, same parent company, same client (the tax payer) getting billed into oblivion. When one shop’s name goes radioactive, you don’t fix the shop. You spin up a new one with a fresh logo and pitch the client again.

That’s this. AI for All is the new shop. Sharp name, big reel, confident pitch. And it’s pitching the same client that’s already been burned by every other agency under the same roof. The holdco’s track record is public. The supercomputer is just the most expensive pitch they’ve ever walked into the room with.

And the tell, the same as every bloated holdco that’s lost the plot? They keep winning the business anyway. Not because the work is good. Because they’re the only agency on the roster. There’s no competitive review. There’s no other shop you can move the account to. You’re a captive client, and they know it.

THE PATTERN

Promised cheap. Came in catastrophically over. Didn’t deliver the thing it promised.

So when the same shop announces — and I quote the actual document — a “world-leading public supercomputer” by 2031, sovereign cloud, a national compute build-out scaling to 2.3 gigawatts, I’m not skeptical because I hate AI. I’m skeptical because they haven’t been able to accomplish that for anything.

The people who couldn’t make a payroll system add and subtract, who couldn’t get doctors to stop faxing, are going to somehow manage this on time and on budget.

Sure.

Businesses adopt AI when it makes them money, full stop. And buried in their own pages is the kill shot: 78% of Canadian companies that haven’t adopted say they don’t see how it helps what they make. Canada ranks 44th of 47 countries on AI literacy. 42nd of 47 on trust.

We invented the modern stuff — Hinton, Bengio, Sutton, the doc brags about all three, and we’re near dead last at using it.

You cannot strategy-document your way out of a culture problem. You can’t procure adoption.

YES, THEY’VE BACKED WINNERS. THE WINNERS ALL GOT ON A PLANE.

Now somebody in the comments is already typing “actually, government money built Shopify.”

Fine. Let’s do it, because the honest version is worse for them, not better.

Government money has ridden some genuine winners. AbCellera got up to $175.6 million from Ottawa in 2020 and IPO’d that December for US$555 million, with an antibody used on more than 2.5 million patients. Verafin out of St. John’s had federal BDC Capital money in its big round and sold to Nasdaq for US$2.75 billion — the biggest Canadian software exit since IBM bought Cognos in 2007. The Ontario pension fund’s VC arm co-led Shopify’s 2013 Series C, and Shopify became the most valuable company in the country. Quebec basically built the world’s largest video game studio with tax credits — Ubisoft Montreal, 4,000 people at its peak.

Here’s what every one of those has in common. Government shut up and wrote a check through professionals, or set a broad incentive and let the market pick. Not one of them happened because a minister pointed at a company and said “that one.”

And look where the winners live now. Verafin? Nasdaq owns it. Cognos? IBM, gone since ‘07. North, the Waterloo smart-glasses darling everyone loved? Google swallowed it. The Canadian success story is a conveyor belt to an American head office, and we stand there applauding the press release that calls it “a vote of confidence in Canadian talent.” Shopify is the lonely exception, which is exactly why we treat it like a national monument, it’s the one that didn’t get on the plane. Yet.

The losers never come back. There’s no redemption arc, no second act, no plucky comeback issue. Element AI anointed itself the face of Canadian AI, built the whole thing around Yoshua Bengio, an actual Turing-winning godfather the new strategy name-drops, collected the Trudeau photo ops, and raised something like US$257 million, including money from Quebec’s pension fund and a $20-million federal cheque.

Then it turned out the company did $10 to $12 million a year in revenue and a Deloitte review valued it at US$76 million, sinking to US$45 million. It got parted out to ServiceNow of California for US$230 million, the founders’ equity mostly wiped to zero, the federal funding quietly cancelled, the talent and the publicly-funded IP on the next flight south. Quebec’s own innovation minister shrugged that the business model “did not work.”

That’s the holdco’s flashiest launch to date. Spun up a glamorous new creative shop, gave it a press tour, couldn’t make the work and sold the talent to a bigger American holdco for parts. Element AI is the exact thing this strategy proposes to do again — anoint a champion, government as the anchor customer, build the national flag-bearer. The new plan is a sequel to the one movie everyone already agreed not to watch twice.

THE OLDEST LAW IN THE AD GAME

Bill Bernbach, who built modern advertising, said the truest thing anyone’s ever said about this job. A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. And more will get more people to know it’s bad.

That’s the whole issue, right there. Because AI for All is, on its own terms, not the worst. But does the product work?

The product is the government’s ability to ship anything. And we have years of evidence telling us precisely how that product performs. A campaign isn’t going to fix that. It’s going to do what great advertising always does to a bad product — get forty million people to find out it’s bad, faster and at higher resolution than ever before. This will make our investment in hosting FIFA for 13 games look like child’s play.

The better they advertise the plan, the faster the rest of the country meets the thing behind the ad. It’s the oldest law in my business, finally getting tested on the biggest account in the country.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: WORLD CUP FASHIONED

The World Cup is kicking off on Thursday and the defending champs drink the single most divisive thing behind any bar. Fernet con Coca. Fernando, if you’re from Córdoba. Argentina knocks back something like 75% of all the Fernet-Branca made on the planet. An entire football-mad country runs on it.

I had the pleasure of Soccer Dave putting me onto the proper way to scale this. The viajero, the traveler. You lop the top off a 2-litre Coke, burn the cut edge smooth with a lighter, load it with ice, dump in most of a bottle of Fernet, top with Coke and pass it around the circle like a mate gourd.

Think of it like the agency holiday party format. One bottle of Fernet, one big Coke, eleven creatives and a problem that solves itself. I doubt very much that something that fun is at Fan Fest.

For a civilized one-at-a-time version, I built it as an Old Fashioned instead of a highball. Call it the World Cup Fashioned. Argentina’s stadium drink doing the slow walk back to the trophy.

The World Cup Fashioned:

• 2 oz rye

• 1 oz Fernet-Branca

• 3-4 dashes Coca-Cola bitters

Stir with ice, strain over one big cube. Express an orange peel over the top and drop it in. Haven’t made your own cola bitters? A bar spoon of cola syrup and a dash of Angostura is close enough that nobody’s filing a complaint.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Before we get into the equivalent of Shark Week, but for amazingly stupid ideas we love. Then this corner of the feed shows up.

“Loneliness influencers.”

Yep, you got it, young people filming their solo nights in. Empty apartment, dinner for one, TV and one of the bigger ones, Lana Isa, is right here in the GTA.

Influence used to be about what you want to have. The Birkin, the Bali trip, the perfect husband. This is the opposite. The entire brand is what’s missing. No friends, no plans, no Friday.

The detail that got me is the wineglass. She drinks sugar-free soda out of one to make a regular Tuesday feel special.

That’s not sad. Well it is. But it’s also branding.

Full disclosure, I’ve been booking influencers for my clients. Last three months alone I’ve dealt with a pile of them and they sort into three buckets.

The amazing ones. Rare, sharp, turn it around faster than our agency does and make the work better. You’d sign them again tomorrow.

The ghosts. Loved the brief, super interested, then vanished into the group chat never to be seen again. You’re sitting there refreshing a DM like you got dumped.

The rate-card inflationists. Quoting you Birkin money for a single god damned reel with a straight-face. For one video. It’s insane. It’s not sustainable at all.

So seeing this corner of the feed shows up. Broke, alone, filming their little diet soda in their stupid wineglasses. It’s the most honest content any of them are making. Just a girl admitting Friday’s empty and turning it into a brand anyway.

She took the dumbest little ritual she had and made people want it. Which, weirdly, is exactly what four brands tried to pull off this week.

POOPSICLES ARE REAL. AND THEY’RE WINNING

DUDE Wipes threw a “Poopsicle Party” at Sam’s Club. Yes, they dropped ice-pop-scented flushable wipes, stacked to the rafters. And they play it completely straight, like a wipe that smells like a popsicle is a perfectly normal thing.

Remember, this is a brand that started as a literal bit. Wet wipes for grown men, pitched on Shark Tank. Ten years later the bit is a real company sitting on pallets in every warehouse club in America. That’s the whole DUDE thesis.

The DUDE economy runs on committing to the dumbest joke possible, long enough and it becomes a viable business.

And the wipe was never the flex. Getting Sam’s Club to sell eight-foot-high pallets of POOPSICLE is the flex.

143K people looked at flushable wipes because of it.

FIREBALL’S WEARABLE DAD GUT

If you thought ice-pop-scented flushable wipes and the Rib Flute were wild, imagine a fanny pack of a hairy beer belly, Fireball tattooed around the navel, holding 35 shots with a spout built in.

Genuinely revolting.

I’m in love with it.

The object would’ve been enough. But they wrapped it in a Sarah McLachlan animal-rescue PSA and sad piano, save the endangered dad bod, two Southern Charm stars selling the heartbreak.

They didn’t just make a dumb thing. They handed you a format your body already knows how to feel something about. You can’t not get the joke.

Then they actually sold it. $24.99 on Flaviar, two drops, first 200 orders get an “I ❤️ Dad Bods” bumper sticker. Dropped right before Father’s Day, because of course it did.

So the fanny pack is the thing you buy, the PSA is the thing that makes you laugh, and the 35 shots inside are basically a dare to film yourself wearing it. Not quite a Rib Flute, but the novelty of two Bravo stars is a good kicker.

MILLER HIGH LIFE WELDED A BAR TO A JUKEBOX

This is the JukeKeg. A real Crosley jukebox with a working tap built in.

Five feet of dive bar you can put in your garage. Only one exists, and they auctioned it on eBay starting at $1.23 (a wink at 123 years) with every dollar going to Wisconsin musicians.

This is not a random charity bolted onto a stunt. It’s an extension of their “Soundtrack to the High Life” music platform, so the jukebox-for-musicians line is the real deal.

They even toss the winner a $150 gift card to fill it.

Everything else this week is going for a quick laugh. This one’s stupid with something warmer tossed in.

The Champagne of Beers knows precisely what it is, and it’s not too proud to be a jukebox that pours brewskis.

AND THEN COKE SHOWED EVERYONE UP

Coke and Ogilvy turned the contour bottle into chopsticks. Functional ones, food-grade steel, engineered down to where your fingers go.

The insight is the whole game. In a lot of Southeast Asia the bottle never makes it to the dinner table, but the chopsticks always do — so instead of muscling in as a bottle, Coke just became the thing already there.

Then they did the part nobody else this week had the nerve for. They took the logo off. Just the iconic silhouette and the red.

That bottle was designed back in 1915 to be recognizable in the dark, or shattered on the ground. Over a hundred and ten years later it’s recognizable as a pair of chopsticks.

It only works because the brand’s been banking that shape for a century.

The first three are built to win the internet through screenshots, quote tweets and views. This one’s only built to win an awards jury.

THE AD LESSON

Everybody’s making objects instead of ads now, so the real question is how you spot the good ones. For me it comes down to how stupid it is and how far you take it.

Two days ago I sat here and called Chili’s dressing a baby back rib up as a flute the Universal Theory of Advertising: stupidity times conviction. A dumb idea, fully committed, real money behind it, zero irony — beats earnest every single time.

I figured that was a one-off but then I got this note from Matt Sorrell one of the geniuses behind the Rib Flute, “Thank you for reaching into my soul and describing what ridiculous convictions I've based my career around.” And then he shared the sketch of the flute. Incredible.

So that’s how this officially became stupid week on The Drink Cart, and I’m not mad about it.

DUDE Wipes and Fireball are pure stupidity, all the way to eleven, and they never blink. A popsicle-scented wipe on a pallet is levels of unimaginable dumb. A wearable gut you pour cinnamon whisky shots out of? Now we’re talking. That’s why they work.

Miller takes the stupidity down a notch and trades it for some heart — a jukebox that pours beers and gives back. They went all the way. Coke takes the stupidity all the way down to zero — elegant, restrained, over a century of brand equity and the thing still works.

You can dial the stupidity all the way down, but the commitment has to be total or the whole thing falls apart.

That’s the test. How stupid is the idea, and how far are you willing to ride it.

The brands that won this week all rode it to the end and never once let on that they knew it was ridiculous. The ones that lose are the brands running the same stunt with an eyebrow raised, hedging, praying you know that they know it’s silly.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: FIREBALL DR. PEPPER

Of course it’s Fireball. For god’s sake they made a dad bod fanny pack, somebody’s got to drink all this stuff.

Just like the fanny pack. Cinnamon whisky and Dr Pepper have no business together, and the second they hit ice they taste like a melted candy you’d actually pay for.

• 1.5 oz Fireball

• Top with Dr Pepper over ice.

• That’s the whole recipe.

Root beer works too if you want to feel like a kid who made a terrible decision. Stupidity times conviction, in a glass.

Pour one, drink it out of a wineglass to make a regular Friday feel special, film it. Congratulations, you’re an influencer now.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

I’m not sure how I expected my week to go. But when AI said this to me about to make the image above, I knew I might be on the right track.

“I have started generating the cinematic still of the soulful rib-flute duet. The image will feature the man from your reference photo on the left alongside a partner at the prep line, both dressed in red Chili’s polo shirts and focused with absolute, reverent concentration as they perform their pork-flute duet.”

-

Let’s begin where any serious analysis of modern advertising must begin.

The rib flute.

Someone fabricated a flute in the shape of a baby back rib.

A woodwind you could carry into an actual orchestra, shaped like a slab of pork you’d order with a side of fries.

Someone designed it. Someone approved it. Someone, presumably a grown adult with a mortgage and a dental plan, spent a full workday making sure the finger holes were spaced correctly on the pork flute.

Then a four-time Grammy winner raised it to her lips and played it. Like angels whispering in our ears.

All for a casual dining chain best known for unlimited chips and salsa.

I need you to sit with how stupid this is.

The stupidity is the entire argument.

It’s the whole theory. Stay with me.

THE RIB FLUTE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT OBJECT IN ADVERTISING THIS YEAR AND I WILL NOT BE TAKING QUESTIONS

We’ve spent decades canonizing the ads that reach for something bigger than the product.

Coca-Cola gathering a hillside of strangers to sing about world peace.

Budweiser sending its Clydesdales to bow at the Manhattan skyline after 9/11. An ad that aired exactly once, because airing it twice would’ve cheapened it.

Apple casting a sledgehammer-wielding runner as the savior of human freedom in a Ridley Scott epic that turned a computer launch into the fall of Big Brother.

World peace. National grief. Human liberty. This is the most hallowed shelf in the business. These are the ads we hand down like scripture.

And here comes Chili’s with a flute carved to look like a rib, and it is more alive than any of that.

That’s not an accident. That’s a brand remembering what it is.

Chili’s is not a cathedral. Chili’s is a place where the 1,150 calorie lava cake arrives with a hardened crown of chocolate.

The correct register for Chili’s is not reverence. It is a pork-shaped woodwind solo.

They found the exact frequency of their own ridiculousness and they tuned an instrument up to 11 on it.

BEFORE THE JINGLE YOU KNOW THERE WAS ONE YOU’VE MERCIFULLY FORGOTTEN

Here’s the part that makes the whole thing funnier. This wasn’t Chili’s first swing at singing about ribs.

Back in the mid-80s, when baby back ribs were a new menu item, Chili’s ran an earlier spot. A bluesy, sax-soaked number where a voice croons “I love my baby, baby, baby back ribs” before sliding into spoken word about how they smoke ‘em and char-broil ‘em “right down to the bone.”

It is, by every available measure, un-haunting. You could not get it stuck in your head with a staple gun. Nobody remembers it. Nobody has ever hummed it on purpose.

Sit with that. The first attempt at the exact same idea was competent, professional and completely forgettable.

The version that colonized the American brain for thirty years was the one the creative director was ashamed to put his name on.

A MAN WROTE THIS AND HAS SPENT THIRTY YEARS HOPING IT ISN’T HIS LEGACY

You need the origin story the same way Batman insists on telling his every time they reboot the franchise.

The jingle came out of GSD&M in Austin in the late 90s.

Guy Bommarito was the executive creative director. “A Don Draper for the Southwest Airlines and Chili’s set,” wrote Vice. Bommarito loathed jingles on principle. He’s called them the lowest common denominator of the entire craft. Annoying. Unpleasant. The kind of work serious people avoided.

So when Chili’s demanded a tune for people to chew ribs to, Bommarito was so embarrassed by the assignment he refused to hand it down to his own department.

He wrote it himself. It took about five minutes. He got a lackluster green light, figured it would vanish in six weeks and moved on with his life.

Ron Howard Voice: It did not vanish.

And here is my favorite fact in the entire saga: Bommarito does not even like the ribs. Has barely eaten them. He once went on the record hoping that this jingle would not turn out to be the greatest achievement of his life.

A man actively rooting against his own masterpiece.

There is no purer artist in America.

THEY CARRIED IT TO A FUNERAL IN A SMOKER-SHAPED CASKET

Ad Age named it the song most likely to get stuck in your head. Number one. Above songs by people who were trying.

It’s hard to forget Fat Bastard singing it in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

A fictional obese Scottish henchman did more for Chili’s brand recall in 1999 than most agencies manage in a fiscal year.

It’s harder to forget Willie McCoy. The deep bass voice behind the “barbecue sauce” that holds the whole song together.

When he passed, his funeral was filmed for the pilot of a TLC show called, with no irony whatsoever, Best Funeral Ever.

The send-off included pallbearers crooning the Chili’s jingle, a multi-tiered barbecue sauce fountain, dancers brandishing platters of fake ribs and a casket built to look like a smoker. Trust me, once you know this, you can’t not be thinking about it.

A man received a Viking funeral for a rib commercial. And he earned it.

America was so thoroughly convinced Boyz II Men sang the original that when Chili’s wanted to revive it in 2023, they just hired Boyz II Men, making the false memory retroactively true.

The actual a cappella version from the 90s was Take 6. Doesn’t matter. The country misremembered a pork ad with such collective conviction that the brand went back and cast the group everyone hallucinated.

THE ENTIRE THEORY: STUPIDITY TIMES CONVICTION

Here’s what I actually believe, and I believe it harder the longer I stare at the rib flute.

The reason most “fun” advertising dies on contact is the flinch. The half-step. The brand wants to be silly but also needs you to know it’s smarter than the silly thing it’s doing — so it winks. Winks are the worst. Nobody likes winks.

It puts the bit in air quotes so nobody can accuse it of trying too hard. And the air quotes are death. Air quotes are how a brand announces it’s embarrassed.

An embarrassed brand is a boring one.

The rib flute never flinched. Nobody on that set reached for the air quotes. Somebody engineered a functioning instrument in the shape of a barbecued bone. Somebody defended that line on a budget. And a freelance crew that genuinely calls itself It’s Advertising Time — a name I refuse to believe is real, and yet — shot the whole thing dead straight.

So here’s the Rib Flute Universal Theory of Advertising, and you can have it for free. The power of an idea equals how dumb it is multiplied by how completely you commit to it.

Half-commit and the dumbness just sits there and embarrasses everyone in the room.

Commit all the way: real budget, straight face, custom tooling and the dumbness converts into something people quote for thirty years.

The flute isn’t good despite the stupidity. The flute is the stupidity.

I know this because at some point in the last year in a deck I pitched the idea of steak pants. Actual pants. Themed to steak. I stood in a Teams call and argued for a pair of steak pants with a completely straight face, because the instinct was the right one. unhinged committed, unflinching. And I got to say “About Steakin’ Time.”

I won’t tell you how that pitch went. I’ll only tell you that Chili’s just shipped a rib flute, and I am sick about it in the most admiring way possible.

I wish I’d asked for a rib flute years ago.

Lizzo could have phoned this in. Instead she treats a thirty-year-old rib jingle like a single off the album.

Shot-for-shot callbacks to the original spot. A full a cappella rendition where she sings every part herself. The reverence is total. She did not come to dunk on the dumb thing. She came to honor it harder than any reasonable person would, and then she pulled out the pork flute.

That’s the highest form of the craft. Not the manifesto. The total, unembarrassed, fully commitment to an idea so dumb it loops all the way back around to magnificent.

We take the most disposable object imaginable and we build a cathedral around it.

Which, conveniently, is also the entire history of this week’s drink.

PETA MADE A PROTEST VIDEO AND THAT IS HOW YOU KNOW THE RIB FLUTE WORKED

Here’s my favorite piece of evidence. PETA made content about the rib flute.

Somewhere a PETA staffer clocked in, got assigned the rib flute, sourced stock footage of pigs in cages and cut it against Lizzo’s solo.

Somebody wrote the copy — “beyond grotesque” — and somebody approved it. A team spent a working day building a campaign to condemn a flute that may or may not produce a single note. That may or may not even be a real rib.

Which is, in its own way, also committing to the bit. They saw a pork-shaped novelty woodwind and treated it as a moral emergency, full production values, no air quotes.

They built their own rib flute in response to the rib flute. A double rib flute? My god. This must have been how Oppenheimer felt.

That’s the tell. Nobody protests an ad that didn’t land. A dumb idea, fully committed, doesn’t just get remembered. It gets picketed.

End of lesson.

THE COCKTAIL: A MANHATTAN BUILT ON A BEAUTIFUL LIE

Today we’re drinking the Monte Carlo.

A Manhattan that fired the sweet vermouth and hired Bénédictine in its place. A simple cocktail of rye, that honeyed herbal liqueur and a couple dashes of bitters. First written down in David Embury’s 1948 cocktail bible.

I’ve talked about it before, but this really shows that Bénédictine is the rib flute of the liquor cabinet.

The bottle wants you to believe it descends from monks. The legend, stamped right into the brand: a Venetian Benedictine monk concocted a secret elixir at the Abbey of Fécamp in 1510, the recipe vanished in the chaos of the French Revolution and was miraculously rediscovered three centuries later.

Except that is complete rib flute fantasy.

In 1863 a wine merchant named Alexandre Le Grand invented a liqueur. That’s it. That’s the story. But “salesman makes new drink” is a terrible story, so Le Grand built a better one.

He fabricated the monks. He fabricated the lost recipe found in his own library. He stamped D.O.M. — an actual monastic motto — onto the label, talked the real Benedictine order in Rome into licensing him their name and coat of arms, and then, for the finish nobody asked for, built an enormous palace in Fécamp with stained glass windows dramatizing the legend he’d made up.

Historians will gently point out there’s no record the king he claims blessed the stuff ever even visited the town.

He built a literal palace to honor a monk who is, generously, semi-fictional. Chili’s built a rib flute to honor a jingle a guy wrote in five minutes and resents to this day. Same move. Manufactured reverence is the oldest trick we have and it works every single time.

So the Monte Carlo is reverence stacked on reverence stacked on a sales pitch. A stone-cold classic cocktail, reinvented with a 19th-century salesman’s gorgeous fairytale standing in for the vermouth.

Drink it slowly. You’re tasting a brand legend that’s mostly invention and entirely delicious. Like the rib flute. Like all of it.

Here’s the cocktail recipe:

• 2 oz rye

• 3/4 oz Bénédictine

• 2-4 dashes Angostura bitters

Stir with ice, strain into a chilled coupe or over one big cube. Lemon twist or a cherry — go with your gut.

Raise it to the monks who never existed and the jingle that won’t die.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Here’s what people get wrong about the Trix Rabbit: he hasn’t eaten much Trix.

By General Mills’ own count, five times in sixty-five years. 1968. 1976. 1980. 1987. 1991.

Most of those because General Mills ran a Mail in your vote promo. Should the Rabbit finally get a bowl?

The kids said yes.

They always said yes.

It was never even close.

And every time, General Mills aired the commercial where he finally gets the cereal, let it run and quietly reset the whole thing. Next campaign, he has nothing again.

He doesn’t just lose. He wins big time, by popular vote and then they take it all back.

If ever there was a case for election tampering this is it.

His last bowl was in 1991. He’s been trying to eat Trix since 1959.

Trix launched in 1954 without a mascot. Just colourful corn puffs and over 46% sugar, in three colours, marketed to children.

A few years in, someone at General Mills experimented with a hand puppet rabbit to introduce sponsored TV shows.

The puppet appeared on Captain Kangaroo. Nobody remembers the puppet.

Joe Harris remembers.

Harris was a copywriter and illustrator at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. On August 4, 1959 he drew the Trix Rabbit from scratch and coined the “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids” line.

He debuted in a simple line-drawn commercial called “Rabbit and Carrot.” The Rabbit saw Trix. The Rabbit wanted Trix. The kids stopped him. The end.

Here’s the part of the Harris story that surprises most people.

Asked on a Friday to take a run at it, Harris blew off Saturday, blew off Sunday, and sat down around 11 p.m. Sunday night. Drew a rabbit. Decided the rabbit would always be denied.

Done.

He did all of it — art, script, the line — which annoyed the copy department. The interoffice memo praising him opens, near verbatim: painful as it is to admit that someone outside the copy department can come up with a campaign idea and write it as well. A backhanded compliment that doubles as the rare ad-history document putting an art director’s name on the work.

So Harris got credit for creating one of the most famous figures in cereal history who never gets anything. By design. “The subtle idea,” he said, “is that keeping something away brings people to say, why don’t they give it to him. You have to withhold resolution.”

He meant it. Years later, when General Mills finally let the Rabbit win, Harris, long off the campaign, was disgusted. Caving, he said, “destroyed the tension.”

Harris left to start Total Television, Saturday cartoons that were really General Mills cereal in 22-minute doses. King Leonardo. Tennessee Tuxedo.

And Underdog.

The campaign structure has never changed.

The Rabbit wants Trix. The Rabbit disguises himself. Children discover the ruse. “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.”

The Rabbit leaves without cereal. Roll credits. Sixty-five years of it. If you read my earlier newsletter this week, that is a platform.

They also merchandised the losing. In 1965 General Mills sold a Trix pillowcase. The picture on it was a scene from a commercial where the Rabbit dreams about eating Trix. He fails in the dream. They printed the rabbit’s subconscious defeat on something children sleep on. Such a diabolical brand move.

In 1986 and 1987, Bugs Bunny showed up to help. The Rabbit in a Bugs disguise, the scheme failing as usual. But watch those spots: the kids happily share their Trix with Bugs. Who is also a rabbit. The rule was never “rabbits can’t have Trix.” It’s that this rabbit can’t. Not the species. Him. Outrageous Trixism.

In a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air episode, Carlton Banks delivers a sincere lament about the Rabbit’s plight. The writers thought the audience would understand immediately. They were right.

In 2015, General Mills reformulated Trix with natural colours. No artificial dyes. The cereal went from six vivid colours to four muted ones that looked like they’d been left in a window. Consumers revolted. Not about nutrition. About colour. They wanted the neon back. General Mills held for a year.

In 2017 they brought the artificial colours back alongside the natural version.

Customers chose the fake ones. Unanimously. Emphatically.

There’s a footnote to the colour war. To promote the natural version, General Mills ran a national casting call for a real rabbit to put on the box. A two-pound Holland lop named Cinnabun won.

Fifty-seven years in, a rabbit finally got the Trix box. Just not that one.

The Rabbit was involved in none of this. He just wanted to eat some cereal.

Carlton Banks understood.

Here’s the one that should be illegal.

1968 was a vote year for the Rabbit. The kids said yes for the first time and he finally got a bowl. It was also a vote year for everyone else. Nixon. Humphrey. Wallace. A real election.

General Mills ran both. The kids’ ballot about the cereal. And a push in the company newsletter telling General Mills employees to check their registration and get to the polls.

Same rabbit. Same year. One vote was theater with the ending already written. The other one picked a president.

The mascot whose whole job is losing a rigged election was their get-out-the-vote strategy

THE AD LESSON

Every brand chases resolution. The before-and-after. The problem solved by the product. The satisfied customer grinning at the camera.

Trix has ran the opposite play for 65 years and only blinked 5 times.

The Rabbit doesn’t get the cereal because the wanting is the cereal. His failure is the franchise. Hand him a bowl and there’s no reason to tune in next week, which is exactly why, the few times they caved, they quietly took it back.

Joe Harris said it before any of them: you have to withhold resolution. Then he watched the brand forget it, let the poor guy win, and it made him furious.

The lesson isn’t be cruel to a cartoon. It’s that desire you satisfy is spent and desire you sustain is an asset. Most marketing can’t help itself. It sprints to the happy ending and then wonders why nobody shows up for the sequel.

Trix never gave anyone the ending. Sixty-five years later it’s still on the shelf and the Rabbit’s still hungry.

TGIF COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: TRIX RUM PUNCH

The most democratic drink ever invented. You make it in a bowl. Everybody gets a cup. That’s the whole point — punch predates the cocktail, it’s communal by design, nobody mixes you your own.

There’s a formula older than the recipe: one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak. Sailors ran on it. Every kid’s birthday party serves the no-rum version out of a giant plastic bowl with a ladle.

Which makes it the drink for this issue. Punch is the one thing on the table built so everyone gets some.

Everyone but you-know-who.

• 2 oz white rum

• 1 oz dark rum

• 1/2 oz orange curacao

• 1 oz lime juice

• 1/2 oz grenadine or if you want to kick it up a notch: cherry liquor.

• 2 oz pineapple juice

• 2 oz orange juice

• Build over crushed ice. Stir.

• Orange slice if you’re feeling festive. Cherry if you’re feeling more fancy.

• Umbrella, mandatory.

Colorful. A little tart. Fruit-flavored and faintly neon — which, if you think about it, is just Trix you’re allowed to have.

Not him.

Serving instructions? Best drinking it while watching these 147 Trix vintage ads.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Somewhere along the way, marketing started being overly cute and making things people didn’t ask for and everything got harder than it needed to be.

Exhibit A: President’s Choice now sells hummus in a squeeze bottle. With a nozzle. For five dollars, as if a food that has been getting scooped without incident since the twelfth century, was sitting there for nine hundred years waiting for a squeeze bottle.

Exhibit B: a Mountain Dew cap from 2004 simply states PLEASE PLAY AGAIN. The contest started and ended inside the lid. No app, no account, no handing your birthday to a soda company to find out you lost.

Exhibit C: KD Mac & Cheesecake. Kraft cheese powder folded into cheesecake at select bakeries? Kraft Heinz’s head of brand explains the thinking: “why should the unmistakable KD flavour be limited to dinner time?” One possible answer, unexplored: because it’s dinner?

This issue is about that instinct and the language brands use to make anything they do sound like progress.

—

Here’s a theory. Marketing has gotten so bad at solving real problems that it’s started inventing fake ones instead.

It makes sense if you think about it. A real problem is brutal. The sandwich costs too much. The stores keep closing.

Fixing these things takes years, money and a better product. A fake problem like “we lack emotional resonance” or “we need a new platform” takes a press release and an afternoon. The KPI is fixing simply announcing that you are fixing it.

So brands invent the fake one and solve it in public. Four things have been floating around my head lately: emotional resonance, brand platforms, unplanned moments, and patriotic consumer branding. Not one is a thing a single customer has ever once asked for.

Subway thinks you should feel more about a sandwich

Subway is blowing up its US marketing department, and the stated reason is incredible. An internal brief says the brand “falls short on emotional resonance and brand distinctiveness.” That Subway is “more known than felt.”

About a sandwich.

Here’s what’s in the same reporting. Subway has closed US stores for 10 straight years, down from more than 27,000 in 2015 to fewer than 19,000 today. 2025 US sales fell 5.7%. It shuttered 729 restaurants last year.

That is not a feelings problem. That is a mid footlong that costs fourteen dollars problem.

“Emotional resonance” is the phrase you reach for so you never have to write the real sentence: the product got worse, more expensive and people noticed. It’s a diagnosis that blames the advertising and lets the sandwich walk free.

Of course, at the same time, the brand is also bringing “the comfort of Subway to the fields, giving fans a way to recharge without missing a beat!” That comfort? A Sleeping Bag-uette for Gen Z festival goers can enter to win.

You cannot campaign your way to being felt. You can’t make people want to sleep inside your sandwich if they don’t want to buy it. You make the product actually better and the feeling catches up.

Everyone got the memo that said “platform.”

When did marketing become obsessed with the word “platform”? It’s not a new word, it's decades old. Marketers just promoted it to SVP, the way they promote every buzz word, past the point of meaning.

Platform used to name the idea underneath the entire brand. Now it’s just the deck word salad used to sell in a :15 second spot for Instagram. “Ohhhh, it’s a platform. You wouldn’t get it.”

Muskoka Brewery just launched a new brand “Muskoka Is Calling” platform for its 30th anniversary. The beer is decent, the lake is real, the chairs are iconic, the dock is a good place to be.

But here’s the marketing dept on the work: it’s about “unplanned moments,” and “we’ve built it right into the beer, starting with the crack of the can.”

You did not build that moment into the beer. The crack of a can is the most planned sound beer makes. It happens every time, on purpose with or with out your platform. That is what the tab or cap is for.

And it’s not just beer.

Destination Vancouver, a whole city’s tourism board announced its own new “creative platform.” “Recouver in Vancouver,” celebrates “uniquely restorative experiences” in four films for its new platform.

A brewery and a city reached for the identical word in the same two weeks. The work is perfectly good. But honest take: neither of these will outlive a normal campaign. When these run out of juice, a new platform will be needed. It’s a self fulfilling marketing ecosystem where the glass is always half empty.

That’s the whole problem with the word. It used to mean a thing you stood on and built up from for years. Now it’s the default noun for any campaign with a press release attached. Three film cutdowns and a media buy is a campaign. Calling it a platform just makes the announcement sound like something it’s not.

The part nobody wants to talk about is how easily it goes away. A new marketer walks in, renames it and nothing is lost. That’s because nothing was actually built, only a psuedo-branded idea in a deck. If it can’t survive an afternoon of social media critism and a personnel change, it was never a platform anyway.

Patriotism, now available in a six-pack form.

Jeep just got named America’s Most Patriotic Brand. It’s the 25th year running, and no other brand has ever held the top spot since the survey began.

A national-pride ranking that hasn’t moved in a quarter century isn’t measuring pride. It’s measuring who got there first and kept the budget on.

And look who else made it. The top 10: Jeep, Coca-Cola, Ford, Levi Strauss, Disney, Amazon, Walmart, Hershey’s, Ralph Lauren and WeatherTech.

WeatherTech? The rubber floor mat people. America!!! Patriotic because they manufacture in Illinois and buy Super Bowl airtime to say so every year? Which tells you what the word is doing. It doesn’t describe the brand. It describes a budget.

And right now everyone’s grabbing for it at once for America’s 250th. Just this month: Mountain Dew rebranded its flagship soda “American Dew.” Velveeta is selling noodles shaped like the fifty states. Johnsonville is offering “With Liberty and Bratwurst for all” in 250 pack sizes. Greyhound launched an “America 250 Fleet”; Amtrak countered with a new “Freedom250” train

And my personal favourite. Doritos is offering up $250,000 for you to sculpt your version of an iconic American landmark out of Doritos.

It’s patriotism as a seasonal flavour, racked next to Pumpkin Spice. The Stellantis CMO on the new Captain America Jeep Wrangler, “Instead of product inspiring marketing,” he said, “marketing inspired the product.”

He meant it as a brag.

Patriotism is hard to argue against. I even love that 50 years ago, brands were doing the same thing, well maybe classier. 7Up had an incredible 200th can collection that you can still find people seeking out on eBay.

Patriotism is the perfect fake-problem solution because it’s the cheapest word on the shelf. You can’t review a flag.

It’s been the fuel of Canadian brands for the last 18 months of Elbows up. Free to borrow. Impossible to argue with.

Michelin built a platform. It’s still standing.

Here’s what sticks with me. In 1911, Michelin opened its UK headquarters on Fulham Road in London. They didn’t announce a platform. They built one out of glazed terracotta.

Three enormous stained-glass windows of Bibendum, the Michelin Man. A reception floor mosaic of him raising a glass of nuts and bolts, captioned “Nunc Est Bibendum. It’s Latin for “now is the time to drink,” the line that gave the mascot his name. Two cupolas out front shaped like stacked tyres. Designed by François Espinasse — not a famous architect, a Michelin engineer.

They put their mascot in cathedral windows. They laid him into the floor so you’d walk over him on the way in.

And here’s what that buys you. Michelin sold the building in 1985 and left decades ago — and it is still called Bibendum. A restaurant named after their mascot, in their building, that they no longer own.

The company left and the brand stayed in the walls. A building is the one ad you can’t quietly take down.

That’s the whole contrast. The vocabulary got bigger exactly as the commitment got smaller. “Platform,” and “emotional resonance” are expensive-sounding and completely free.

A building is humble-sounding and ruinously expensive. Brands say the big words now precisely because saying is free and survives no longer than the CMO who said it. Nobody renames a building on their first day. That’s the point of making a building that can’t be thrown out.

And every one of these brands already had the real thing. Michelin wasn’t braver than the marketers working today.

They just hadn’t been handed a vocabulary that lets you skip making something permanent.

Cocktail of the week: the El Presidente

A drink that gave itself a title. How very Marketing of it.

The El Presidente came out of 1920s Havana, and it was never really a cocktail, it was flattery. Bartenders named it after the sitting Cuban president, most likely the strongman Gerardo Machado, because attaching your drink to the most powerful man in the country was good business.

Prohibition-era Havana was wall-to-wall thirsty American tourists. So the drink got a presidential name and a presidential glow. None of which it earned.

Then the politics curdled. Machado’s government collapsed into dictatorship and got overthrown, and the man the drink honoured became someone nobody wanted near their bar. The cocktail survived for one reason. It’s actually good.

That’s the issue in a glass. Everything this week is a thing reaching for a name bigger than itself. The El Presidente at least delivers on the flattery. The brands betting on platforms should hope they age as well, and they only will if, like the drink, there’s something good under the grand name.

• 1.5 oz white rum

• 1 oz dry vermouth

• 1 tsp orange curaçao

• 1 dash grenadine

Stir with ice, strain into a chilled coupe, orange twist. A decent aged rum rounds it out, not going to lie, I made mine with Captain Morgan spiced, the original used a crisp Cuban light rum, so anything clean works.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

To anyone currently maintaining a private screenshot folder titled “Travolta Cannes Berets 2026” that has been growing by the hour — I see you. I am you.

The man wore a different beret every day at Cannes this week for his own directorial debut because, his words, “the old school directors wore berets and the glasses. And I thought, that’s what I’m doing.” Then he flew his own plane home.

Anyway. This week’s issue has nothing to do with that. Except for the beer. Oui.

—

The beer that made Milwaukee famous is dead.

175 years. The biggest brewery in the world by 1902. Built the city’s identity. Built its fireworks. Built Summerfest. Built the bottling line you’ve seen a thousand times in the opening credits of Laverne & Shirley.

Done.

Wisconsin Brewing is pouring the last 80 barrels on May 23. After that, there is no more Schlitz.

Meanwhile, 800 miles north, the oldest company in North America is haunting a Canadian Tire as a $9,800 cedar canoe. Same week. Two ancient brands. Two different funerals.

This is what happens when nobody in the boardroom remembers what the brand was actually for.

The Bull

Schlitz had a mascot. Most people forget.

The Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull. A real 2,000-pound Brahma named Zane. Stand-in twin called Heckle. The Bull crashed through walls in ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, Robin Hood-era England, modern bars, modern nightclubs. Whatever the setting, the Bull was coming through it.

The commercials featured Gregory Hines, Richard Roundtree (yes, Shaft), Rufus Thomas, the Marshall Tucker Band, .38 Special, Kool and the Gang versus The Platters, the Four Tops. The full compilation is worth your Friday evening.

Schlitz Malt Liquor was marketed aggressively to Black audiences and the Bull ads ran heavily in that programming through the 70s.

The Bull is one of the great forgotten ad mascots of the era. He survives on the Schlitz Malt Liquor cans Pabst still puts out. Everything else around him is dying.

The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous

Quick history. Schlitz didn’t start with Schlitz.

It started with August Krug, a Bavarian who opened a tavern brewery in Milwaukee in 1849. Schlitz was his bookkeeper. Krug died in 1856. Schlitz married Krug’s widow Anna and renamed the brewery the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company.

What followed was absurd.

After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 wiped out most of Chicago’s breweries, Schlitz shipped barrels south. Chicago discovered the beer. The slogan “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous” was registered in 1895. By 1902, Schlitz was the largest brewery in the world.

In 1912 they invented the brown bottle. The entire industry copied them.

At its peak, Schlitz produced 24 million barrels a year. The brand bankrolled Milwaukee’s Fourth of July fireworks. Founded what became Summerfest. Built Uihlein Hall at the Performing Arts Center.

Schlitz wasn’t a beer in Milwaukee. It was the city.

Slogan Cemetery

Schlitz cycled through a lot of slogans. Here they are, roughly in order of how confident the brand was when it wrote them.

“The beer that made Milwaukee famous.” 1895. The all-timer. A brand naming the city it built.

“The greatest name in beer.” 1940s. Not pretending it was a contest.

“Real gusto in a great light beer.” 1963. Gusto became the brand’s whole personality. The print campaigns from this era — sailboats, baseball gloves, brown bottles against blue sky — are still some of the best beer advertising ever made.

“When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer.” Mid-60s. Bartenders said it back to drinkers. The line that’s now literally true.

“Go for the gusto.” 1971. Full version: “You only go around once in life, so you have to grab for all the gusto you can get.” Peak Schlitz. A 1971 print ad: “You get no second chances. So you go for all the gusto there is.”

The brand was writing its own obituary three years before the recipe started killing it.

“No one does it like the Bull.” 1970s, Malt Liquor era. Confidence projected onto a Brahma because the lager couldn’t carry it anymore.

“When it’s right, you know it.” Late 70s. Defensive. Promising rightness instead of taste. The “you know it” doing the work the beer wasn’t.

“Schlitz Rocks America.” Early 80s. Desperation. A brand named after a 19th-century Bavarian brewer trying to convince you it rocks. It did not rock.

Eight slogans. One cause of death.

Drink Schlitz Or I’ll Kill You

In 1977, Schlitz hired Leo Burnett.

The same Leo Burnett that built the Pillsbury Doughboy. The Jolly Green Giant. Tony the Tiger. The Marlboro Man. Charlie the Tuna. The mascot factory at the peak of its powers.

Burnett came back with four TV spots. Each one featured a tough guy approached by an off-camera voice asking him to switch beers. The tough guys responded with threats. A boxer who looked like Muhammad Ali: “I’m gonna play Picasso and put you on canvas.” An outdoorsman threatened to sic an actual on-screen cougar on the narrator.

The audience didn’t like it. Hated it. The threats read as threats — directed at the viewer. The campaign got nicknamed “Drink Schlitz or I’ll Kill You” almost immediately.

Ad Age’s later summary: an ad showing a Schlitz drinker threatening to sic a cougar on an off-screen narrator backfired and was scrapped for a series of promotions built around a taste test.

Schlitz pulled it after ten weeks. Burnett got fired.

Leo Burnett built half the most-loved mascots in American advertising. They could not save Schlitz. Because Schlitz had already killed itself a decade earlier.

The Recipe That Killed The Beer

Here’s what actually happened. The only ad lesson that matters.

Sometime in the late 60s or early 70s, Schlitz executives decided to brew the beer faster and cheaper. They introduced something called Accelerated Batch Fermentation. Replaced malted barley with corn syrup. Tried silica gel to clear the cloudiness. Quietly retired “The Most Carefully Brewed Beer in the World.”

The taste changed. Drinkers noticed.

By 1976 the beer was looking flaky in the bottle. Perfectly safe to drink — just visibly cloudy. Schlitz tried to recall 10 million bottles and cans on the quiet. They got caught. The Burnett campaign was the next move. An ad campaign trying to fix a recipe problem.

It couldn’t.

By 1981 the Milwaukee brewery was closed. By 1982 the Uihlein family sold to Stroh for $500 million — a number that sounds big until you remember the brand had been worth several billion ten years earlier.

Stroh sold to Pabst in 1999. Pabst relaunched Schlitz in 2008 using a recovered version of the original 1960s recipe — the $3 dive-bar tallboy that drinkers at Wolski’s Tavern in Milwaukee have kept alive ever since.

The Show That Made Milwaukee Even More Famous

One thing nobody outside Milwaukee remembers.

The opening credits of Laverne & Shirley — Penny Marshall placing a glove on a bottle as it rolls down the line — is one of the most iconic sequences in 70s television. The show’s fictional Shotz Brewery was a direct riff on Schlitz. Same city. Same era. Name chosen specifically to evoke “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.”

The actual bottling line in those credits? Came from the real Schlitz brewery.

When Schlitz shut down the Milwaukee plant in 1981, Lakefront Brewery bought the bottling line and still operates it today. It’s a tour stop. They sing the theme song.

The most-watched opening credits sequence in 70s sitcom history was Schlitz equipment. The brand was so embedded in Milwaukee that even the fictional brewery had to be Schlitz.

The Last 80 Barrels

That’s the part you can still do something about.

Wisconsin Brewing’s brewmaster Kirby Nelson is brewing one last 80-barrel batch on May 23. He’s using 1948 brewing logs from the year Schlitz was the best-selling beer in the world. Six-row malted barley. 25% yellow corn grits. German Hallertau Mittelfrüh hops. Washington Cluster.

Nelson: “Things change, but Schlitz deserves better than just to be swept under the rug. It needs to go out with dignity and respect.”

After May 23, there is no more Schlitz.

Sean McCarthy at Wolski’s: “It’s like losing Harley-Davidson or Kohl’s.”

Meanwhile, In Canada

A different kind of dying.

Up here, Hudson’s Bay isn’t being killed. It’s already dead. Now it’s haunting a retail chain that didn’t ask for it.

Founded in 1670. 356 years old. Older than the United States. Older than Canada by 197 years. The oldest company in North America.

Filed for creditor protection in 2025. Liquidated. Stores closed. The Bay as a retailer is gone.

This year, Canadian Tire bought the Hudson’s Bay IP for $30 million and turned the brand into a kiosk gift shop.

The Stripes Summer 26 collection launched May 1. Made with Publicis Toronto. “Make It Last” the brand promise. Thirty-two pieces. A $9,800 cedar canoe. A $530 king-sized point blanket. Pickleball paddles. Aprons. Tote bags. All four stripes. All sold next to brake fluid.

The Bay that explored half a continent now sells stripes-licensed kayak paddles next to the auto-parts aisle.

This isn’t a funeral. It’s a brand haunting.

AD LESSON

Brands don’t die from the outside. They die from a memo sent decades earlier that started with “we can save money here.”

The recipe change. The store closure. The supply chain swap. The “modernization” that strips out whatever made the thing the thing in the first place. By the time you’ve hired Leo Burnett to bring back the gusto, or Publicis to make it last — you’ve already lost.

The work the agencies make in the final years of a brand is often the best work the brand has ever had. The Schlitz ads of the 60s are beautiful. Schlitzfest? Come on. The “Make It Last” Hudson’s Bay film seems beautiful even if it’s giving slop nostalgia vibes. Even Drink Schlitz Or I’ll Kill You is, in retrospect, magnificently weird.

Agencies do their best work trying to save things that can’t be saved. By then, the people who killed the brand are long retired. Sometimes long dead.

The agency is left holding the bag. Sometimes literally. A striped one.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE BOILERMAKER

The Boilermaker is the drink of dive bars, train depots and Milwaukee taverns. A shot of whiskey or brandy. A cheap beer. That’s it. Imagine drinking one with Lenny and Squiggy.

No garnish. No technique. No “elevated take.” If you serve a Boilermaker with a chiffonade of mint and a smoked jalapeno rim, you should not be allowed to serve drinks.

The Wisconsin version uses brandy instead of whiskey because Wisconsin drinks half the brandy sold in America and refuses to explain why. The men and women holding wakes for Schlitz this weekend are ordering this drink right now, with what’s left of the supply.

• 1 shot brandy (Korbel if you’re being Wisconsin about it, orbourbon if you’re being more American about it)

• 1 can or bottle of cheap American lager (Schlitz if you can find it, any trash tallboy if you can’t)

Two methods. The civilized version: drink the shot, then drink the beer.

The depth charge version: drop the shot glass into the beer and drink the whole thing before the foam settles.

The depth charge is technically a different drink in some regions. In Milwaukee they don’t care what you call it.

Drink one this Friday for the beer that made Milwaukee famous.

Drink the second one over a striped blanket for the former company older than Canada. It’s medicine.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Seven brands got marched to brand court this week. Six got acquitted. One actually did the crime.

The internet went after an em dash, a harmless disco ball, a flour bag, an Olipop can, an actress, an egg sandwich and a 30-year-old jingle.

Hyphen Hysteria

Nike posted Jannik Sinner on the Rome clay last Sunday. Career Golden Masters, six straight titles, the works. Caption: “This isn’t just history — it’s his story in the making.”

Sanny Rudravajhala screenshotted it. “ChatGPT to write the copy and half the replies are bots. Dead internet.” 2,500 likes. The internet decided Nike fed it to a chatbot.

It’s not clear if it really is AI copy. It’s actually worse. It’s lazy copy.

The em dash was a tell long before ChatGPT existed. The line works for Sinner. It also works for Cole Palmer, Caitlin Clark or any random sports moment. When a line works for everyone, it works for no one.

Nike’s social team shipped it because they could. AI isn’t degrading the craft. AI just made them faster to produce.

OpenAI added a setting last November to suppress em dashes because the punctuation got too associated with bot output. So now copywriters are editing their own punctuation to dodge bot accusations. Emily Dickinson would have been flagged. Boo hoo, I can’t use the em dash anymore. Get over it, the em dash will survive like a punctuation cockroach.

The Witherspoon Court Martial

Reese Witherspoon posted on Instagram: women’s jobs are three times more likely to be automated, women use AI 25% less than men, learn it, don’t get left behind.

The internet ate her. Tressie McMillan Cottom in the Times called the whole celebrity-AI-empowerment beat cruel — the 2015 girlboss playbook now selling the technology that will displace the women it claims to empower. Mel Robbins got hit harder in the same piece because her Copilot post was a paid ad. Reese’s wasn’t. Reese followed up Tuesday: “no one is paying me to talk about this. I’m just a curious human.”

Garry Tan rebutted on X by calling Tressie a “Foucault-loving Marxist nutjob.” 22K views. Two camps now yelling about whether an actress should be allowed to recommend a software category.

Hot take: dunking on Reese for this is the lamest beat of the week.

Reese said women should learn a tool that’s going to be in every job in five years. That is not class betrayal. That is normal advice. The same advice every art director got in 2009 when they had to learn InDesign, every copywriter got in 1998 when they had to learn email, every account person got in 2015 when they had to learn social. New tool shows up. The people who learn it earlier do better than the people who learn it later. This has been true for every working generation. It is true now.

The argument that learning AI is “siding with the plutocrats” is the same energy as the people who refused to use computers in the 80s. The luddites lost that round. They are losing this one.

Reese isn’t running OpenAI. She’s a 50-year-old actress with kids who use AI, and she’s saying — accurately — that women who skip the tool are at a disadvantage to women who learn it. Tracy Flick would have learned AI. Tracy Flick would have a Copilot subscription, a Perplexity Pro account and a 47-slide deck about it by Tuesday. Reese knows this because Reese played her.

That’s not selling out. That’s just true. Tressie’s piece has real arguments about how the AI economy extracts value from labour. Those arguments are all important. They have nothing to do with Reese Witherspoon’s Instagram. The people piling on her are doing the same lazy move the em-dash police are doing one slot up. Identify a thing that looks like the bad thing, yell at it, post the screenshot.

They are losing this one. The actress is on the right side of it.

Three Logos On Trial

Spotify went first. May 12, anniversary stunt — the green soundwave icon wrapped in a glitter disco ball for the platform’s 20th birthday. Temporary. By May 17 they’d folded. “We know glitter is not for everyone.” The regular icon is coming back. Michael Miraflor in the replies: “Look what you’ve done, dorks. You’ve bullied Spotify into reversing something fun and different (and temporary to begin with). We don’t deserve nice things.”

While this was no Cracker Barrel or Jaguar rebrand. Spotify tried to throw its own birthday party. The audience demanded a reversal in five days. Move on.

Bob’s Red Mill is the real one. Monday morning. Three-year Turner Duckworth overhaul. Bob Moore’s face — bearded, bolo-tie, on every bag for decades — shrunk down to a tiny “Seal of Quality” on the corner. The company’s own page calls it “a little glow up” and promises it’s “more Bob’s than ever.” More Bob’s than ever, with less Bob.

Two complications. Bob Moore died in February 2024 at 94. The brand is named after him. He gave the company to his employees on his 81st birthday. The new packaging frames the shift as “From Bob to all of us” — a clever pivot that turns the dead founder’s reduced presence into an employee-ownership story. Whatever the design logic, the human read is loud. A brand built on a man’s face is quietly dialing him down two years after his funeral.

Every CPG rebrand since 2009 has been an answer to Tropicana, when PepsiCo replaced the iconic orange-with-a-straw with a clean glass-of-juice. At least they kept Bob in the seal.

The thing that made Bob’s Red Mill different from the rest of the flour aisle was the man on the bag. Now the man is smaller. The bag will sell harder. And the thing that made it feel like a small Oregon mill instead of a corporate CPG entity is now a quarter-inch tall.

Olipop also dropped a refresh. “Feel Good Soda” platform, richer palette, hand-drawn illustrations I’m surprised people are accusing of being from AI too. SVP Tara Piper, formerly Liquid Death, brought in to evolve a brand designers were already using as the example of how to do CPG in 2023.

Tom Goodwin in the replies: “Did you get bored of the old one already? Nobody else did.”

Brand refreshes are a lot like kitchen renos. You don't tear out the cabinets because the kitchen stopped working. You do it because it's been a while, the finish is looking dated, the new owners want it to feel like theirs and the contractor said now's a good time.

No one cares if the kitchen was fine. They don't even care if you liked it the way it was. Every couple of years the cabinets must come down. Sometimes the result is better. Sometimes it's just newer. Either way it's happening whether you wanted it or not. And it will take three times longer and four times more expensive than you planned.

There’s A New Slut In Town

Eggslut opened its first Canadian location on King West last month. Their OOH campaign reads “There’s a new SLUT in town” with “egg” tucked between “new” and “slut” in microscopic font.

The Toronto Sun asked the City of Toronto if there were complaints. The City wouldn’t say. Astral Media runs the shelters. Ad Standards reviews complaints in secret.

The brand has been around since 2011. The outrage is 15 years late for a brand that’s been operating internationally for over a decade. The TTC poster is the headline equivalent of a guy who’s been on the block the whole time and just opened a flagship too loud.

The Quietest Felony of all

This is the actual felony. The jingle that took 30 years to prosecute.

Kars4Kids got banned in California. Civil trial. Found in violation of state false advertising and unfair competition law. Judge’s language: “actionable strategy of deception.”

Quick numbers. Kars4Kids spent $41.5 million on advertising in 2024. Transferred $35.3 million to its affiliated charity, Oorah. Only 41% of expenses went to actual charitable programs.

But people are mad that 60% of funds raised flow to Oorah, a New Jersey Orthodox outreach organization that funds gap-year trips to Israel, adult matchmaking services and a $16.5 million building purchase in Israel. California accounts for 25% of national vehicle intake — about 30,000 cars a year. The charity runs no programs in the state.

Emily Sundberg in Feed Me: “To me, this story shows the power of a good jingle is better than hypnosis — if it’s good enough, people will just give you a 2021 Volvo and not care what you do with it.”

Even the CBC stopped running them here in Canada.

The audience used to be the audience. Now they’re the brand cops, the Ad Standards complaint pile, the algorithm jury and the prosecutor — all running simultaneously, all flagging everything, all at the same decibel.

You can refresh a perfectly-good can and get yelled at by Tom Goodwin.

You can shrink a dead founder’s face and get compared to a $35-million 2009 disaster.

You can write boilerplate agency copy and get accused of being a robot when the actual problem is you’re a hack.

You can tell women a true thing about a tool and get called a class traitor by people who learned the last tool ten years late.

And you can run a 30-year false-advertising scheme with a great jingle worth tens of millions a year and barely register on the same week everyone’s mad about a glitter app icon.

The audience is yelling at everyone at once. Brands respond to volume because volume is the only signal left.

Court is always in session. Court doesn’t care what the crimes are.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE HANKY PANKY

Created in 1903 by Ada Coleman, head bartender at the Savoy in London — one of the first famous female bartenders. She made it for the actor Charles Hawtrey, who walked in asking for “something with a bit of punch.” She handed him gin, sweet vermouth and a couple dashes of Fernet-Branca. He tasted it and said: “By Jove! That is the real hanky-panky!” The name stuck.

Make one of these and don’t post about it on social media. Especially if you have AI’d yourself into a Morning Show scene with Reese Witherspoon.

• 1.5 oz gin

• 1.5 oz sweet vermouth

• 2-4 dashes Fernet-Branca

• Orange peel

Stir with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Express the orange peel over the surface and drop it in.

Fernet is bitter and herbal. Start with two to four dashes, taste, add more if you want it sharper. This is a drink for anyone in advertising who’s been drinking a while and wants to feel something. You’re welcome.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Sonny the Cuckoo Bird once took General Mills to court.

He wanted out.

Like Michael Corleone in Godfather III out.

Legal separation from Cocoa Puffs.

He called the cereal to the stand as a witness. The box appeared. He went cuckoo. He bounced off the courtroom walls.

He was always going to lose. Sonny always lost.

The Cuckoo Court ad was not an anomaly. It is the same basis of every Cocoa Puffs spot since 1962. A character who cannot manage his compulsive relationship with cereal.

He has strategies. Those strategies always fail. “Munchy.” “Crunchy.” “Chocolatey.”

One of those three words breaks him every single time.

This has been presented to children as charming entertainment for 60-plus years.

Or if you believe some, it has been a tool of capitalist fearmongering.

This part blew my mind. Even his name is the residue of a broken relationship.

Sonny doesn’t have a name. The original 1962 commercials had two characters — both voiced by Chuck McCann. They called each other “Gramps” and “Sonny.” When General Mills dropped the grandfather in the early ‘70s, “Sonny” was all that remained.

He was named after a relationship. The relationship ended. The name stayed.

OF COURSE SONNY WAS FROM AN AGENCY

Dancer Fitzgerald Sample had the General Mills cereal business locked down. They had created the Trix Rabbit two years earlier. They would create Lucky the Leprechaun two years later. Three of the most iconic kid cereal mascots in American history. An abosute generational mascot run.

The Trix Rabbit and Sonny are mirror images. The Rabbit desperately wants Trix and is never allowed to have any. Sonny desperately doesn’t want Cocoa Puffs and cannot escape them.

Two characters trapped on opposite sides of the same locked door. Each one’s brand depends on the door staying locked forever. That should have been the court case.

THE PITCH FEELS LIKE A MAD MEN EPISODE

In the early ‘60s, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample creative Gene Cleaves came up with the bird and the line. The pitch to General Mills should have been a normal one. Storyboards on an easel. Voiceover read off the page. Polite questions afterward.

But Cleaves’s colleague Jack Keil decided the deck wasn’t selling it. So Keil climbed onto the conference table in the General Mills boardroom and started performing the character himself. Flailing his arms. Kicking. Screaming “I’M CUCKOO FOR COCOA PUFFS! I’M CUCKOO FOR COCOA PUFFS!” at the top of his voice.

General Mills bought it.

The campaign about a character with no impulse control was sold by an adman with no impulse control. The first creature ever to go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs was wearing a suit, standing on a boardroom table, in front of startled executives.

The campaign was the pitch.

Fast forward to 1986 and Dancer Fitzgerald Sample is acquired by Saatchi & Saatchi. The new agency makes Cuckoo Court — the commercial for a character their own agency, in a previous corporate life, had invented.

Advertising can break your heart.

THE AD LESSON

The campaign structure has never changed.

Sonny is doing something normal. Riding an elevator. Going for a jog. Sitting in a courtroom. He hits a trigger. He tries to resist. He cannot. He bounces.

That’s every commercial since 1962.

Look at the other cereal mascots. Tony’s flakes are great. Snap, Crackle and Pop are having a wonderful morning. The Trix Rabbit wants the cereal and can’t have it — at least that’s a problem with a possible solution.

Sonny is the only mascot whose problem is the product. He’d be totally fine if Cocoa Puffs didn’t exist. He cannot be fine because they do exist. The campaign cannot resolve. If Sonny ever beats his condition, the spot is over. The brand is over.

So General Mills keeps him in crisis. For 60 years. On purpose.

The lesson: pick the loop that can’t close. The Marlboro Man rode into the sunset and the campaign ended. Wendy’s stopped asking where the beef was. Old Spice’s guy on the horse got tired. Sonny is still bouncing. Tension lasts longer than resolution. Pick the version of your brand that has nowhere to go but back to the start.

“Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” escaped the commercial entirely.

By 1994, Ethan Hawke was using it as shorthand for crazy in Reality Bites.

By 2003, Chuck Klosterman had named a pop culture book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and didn’t need to explain the reference.

By 2026 I’m using AI to put myself into Reality Bites with a box of Cocoa Puffs for no reason.

That’s not a tagline. That’s a diagnosis.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE CUCKOO ALEXANDER

In 1974, John Lennon spent his Lost Weekend in LA drinking Brandy Alexanders by the carton. He thought they were milkshakes. He got thrown out of the Troubadour for heckling the Smothers Brothers. Harry Nilsson had to help him stagger out.

This version is worse. It actually contains the cereal.

Think of this as a Brandy Alexander that has been to therapy and didn’t learn anything.

Munchy. Crunchy. Chocolatey.

The cocktail:

• 2 oz cognac

• 1 oz dark crème de cacao

• 1 oz Cocoa Puffs cereal cream

• Shake hard with ice. Strain into a coupe.

• Float three Cocoa Puffs on the foam like it’s an espresso martini.

Yes, you have to make your own damn cereal milk (do this first).

1 cup heavy cream, 1 cup Cocoa Puffs. Combine in a bowl. Steep at room temperature for 30 minutes. Strain through a fine mesh. Discard the soggy cereal or eat it with a spoon over the sink like a feral adult.

You now have chocolate cereal milk that thinks it’s heavy cream made for cocktails. You’re welcome.

ONE MORE THING. IN CEREAL HAT FORM.

The Buffalo Bisons — Toronto’s Triple-A affiliate — just announced My City Smells Like Cheerios Night at the Ballpark, August 7 vs. Norfolk.

The General Mills plant has been in downtown Buffalo since 1904. The smell of Cheerios genuinely hangs over the city when the wind blows right. The Bisons designed a yellow cereal-box jersey to celebrate it — Buster the mascot diving into a bowl of cereal to catch a fly ball, a Family Size patch on one shoulder, a Nutritional Facts patch on the other listing Buffalo virtues at 100%: passion, pride, loyalty, good neighbors, charity, friendliness, love.

Minor league marketing operating at the top of its form. The hat is incredible. It’s a good thing they are sold out in my size.

The same plant that makes Cheerios also makes Cocoa Puffs. Look for “BU” stamped on the box.

Sonny just might be from Buffalo.

The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

The active military base near my apartment has packed up and left for the summer.

Yep, the Fort York Armoury houses three Canadian Army Reserve units. It sits next door to the Fort York National Historic Site, where a British garrison has stood since 1793.

The Armoury has temporarily surrenderd its base.

The Army moved out. FIFA has moved in.

That’s the scale of the 2026 World Cup. WARC says global advertisers will spend an extra $10.5 billion in Q2 because of this tournament. Not total. Extra. Adidas has already moved $292 million in branded merch before kickoff.

The Toronto government has made condoms. The Army is having a nice time at the summer cottage. Toronto hosts six matches starting June 12.

Here’s what the brands are doing with all that soccer money.

THE RENDERINGS ARE WORTH THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS, APPARENTLY

The city released its Fan Festival concept art on April 27. Fort York and the adjacent Bentway have been carved into thirteen zones.

Thirteen. Including the “Casamigos Clubhouse”. For the record, there’s no way it looks like this at all. Not a chance.

The Bentway is the strip under the Gardiner Expressway, so a meaningful portion of the world’s largest soccer fan zone is sponsored by a seventy-year-old elevated highway. Fun! The Bentway calls this “part of a larger shift that repositions infrastructure as a public destination.” Sure.

The art slate includes a shipping container turned into a recording studio that captures fans doing soccer-celebration dances and projects the moves onto a screen. A mural wrapping the highway columns. Interactive LED flags that respond when you touch them. Modular benches shaped like a soccer pitch. Furniture made of soccer balls and netting.

All of it described as “public art as a catalyst for urban transformation.”

Tickets are free. Tickets were free. Then the city tried to charge. Then there was backlash. Then they were free again. Then they went on Ticketmaster May 6 and were gone by lunch.

Premium tickets are $100 to $300. They get you expedited entry, a dedicated viewing area, and what the city calls “upgraded washrooms.”

For three hundred dollars, the city would like you to know you will pee well.

TORONTO PUBLIC HEALTH MADE INNUENDO CONDOMS, ON YOUR DIME

Toronto Public Health launched a limited-edition World Cup condom line last week.

Six designs. “Strings Attached” with floating soccer cleats forming a heart. “What A Finish!” with a ball in the net. “Block Those Shots!” with a wall of defenders. “Peaches & Cream,” which is a peach and an eggplant in front of a goal. “Ohhh, Canada.” And “In The 6ix for ‘26.”

This is real. The municipal health agency designed these. They’re being handed out free at four sexual health clinics. The Director of Health Promotion is on the press release saying “don’t pass up protection.” You can’t make this up.

ADIDAS BUILT A FIVE-MINUTE FILM. EVERYONE ELSE BUILT A COMMERCIAL.

A five-minute film. Timothée Chalamet plays a Pier 40 kid recruiting a team to beat a neighbourhood crew called Clive, Ruthie and Isaak whose win-or-go-home streak has gone undefeated for generations.

The roster Chalamet assembles: Messi, Bad Bunny, Bellingham, Yamal, Trinity Rodman, Dembélé, Raphinha, Pedri, Wirtz, Giménez.

The flashback opponents are de-aged AI versions of Beckham, Zidane and Del Piero who also failed to beat the local crew in 1996.

Agency LOLA USA, the Omnicom mash-up of adam&eveDDB New York and 180. Directed by Mark Molloy through SMUGGLER.

The de-aged AI legends will be the headline. The actual story is that Adidas committed to five minutes and treats this like a feature release.

Pier 40 is the soccer pier on the Hudson, a former shipping warehouse turned into the largest patch of athletic real estate in lower Manhattan because there’s nowhere else for NYC kids to actually play. Chalamet played there for a real club called Manhattan Kickers FC. Around 2006-2008 the Kickers went to London for a tournament and one of their opponents was a Charlton Athletic youth side featuring a pre-teen Joe Gomez, currently Liverpool and England’s center back.

There’s a viral photo from after that match — Joe Gomez sitting next to a 12-year-old Timothée Chalamet.

Chalamet’s said his original ambition was to become a footballer. “I am French, after all.”

BRAHMA IS THE ONLY BRAND HONEST ENOUGH TO ADMIT BRAZIL MIGHT NOT WIN.

Brazil hasn’t won a World Cup since 2002. Belief is depleted. Ancelotti just took over the national team. The country is wondering whether its football identity is still real.

Africa Creative made the most honest ad of the tournament.

A skeptical Brazilian watches a street match in Rio and gets pulled back into believing. Shot in 90s and 2000s Brazilcore. Ronaldo Nazário cameos. Cauby Peixoto’s “Tamanco no Samba” plays.

Most national-team ads pretend their team is invincible. Brahma knows the audience needs to be talked off a ledge. That’s harder to write than faux triumph.

THE GREATEST FOOTBALL AD EVER MADE GOT JOHN WOO MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II.

Brahma’s new spot is trying to be a 1998 Nike ad and most of you have probably forgotten that one.

Nike’s “Airport” was the moment the World Cup ad became a genre. Sergio Mendes’s “Mas Que Nada” plays. The Brazilian national team is stuck in Rio’s Galeão International waiting to fly to France. Ronaldo starts doing tricks. The whole squad joins. They blow past metal detectors, beat up x-ray machines, dance through moving walkways. Cantona appears. Ronaldo hits the post.

Wieden + Kennedy wrote it. The agency wanted to pull Nike out of its 1996 “Good vs Evil” era into something looser and more human. They needed a director who could make football feel like joy without choreographing it to death.

So they hired John Woo. The Hong Kong gun-fu auteur. The man who invented two-pistol slow motion in The Killer and A Better Tomorrow. They put him on a soccer commercial in Brazil at Christmas.

The production company was A Band Apart. Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender’s outfit, named after the Godard film.

So Tarantino’s production house produced the most influential football ad ever made, directed by the closest thing Hollywood had to a Hong Kong-action samurai, written by a Portland advertising agency, in a Rio airport over the 1997 holidays.

Where’s the documentary of that?

Multiple producers have said the players were impossible to wrangle because Brazilians genuinely enjoy Christmas. Romario kept disappearing to the beach. Ronaldo, between takes, told the crew “we’re going to win five World Cups.” Brazil lost the final to France that summer.

While Woo was on set in Rio, Tom Cruise called. Cruise had just watched Face/Off. He wanted Woo to direct Mission: Impossible II. Woo said yes.

Woo did one Adweek interview about the spot in March 1998. He couldn’t share specifics so he stayed broad. The quote: “People will recognize my work, even though there’s no violence or action scenes. They can touch the purity and the humanity.”

That’s a sentence written by a Hong Kong filmmaker about a shoe ad.He never did another ad of that scale.

Made MI:II in 2000, then Windtalkers, then Paycheck, then got quietly iced out of Hollywood and went home to China.

Some people put one piece of work on a flight to glory and never need to make another one. Woo is one of them.

The Airport ad is so good that Brahma made a love letter to it in 2026, twenty-eight years later.

MICHELOB ULTRA QUIETLY SUBTWEETED ADIDAS BY SAYING “NO AI”

A hotel lobby pickup game. Messi, Lautaro Martínez and Nicolás Paz Martínez against Pulisic, Sergiño Dest and Antonee Robinson. Ochoa in goal. Alex Morgan delivers the assist. Ronaldo Nazário cameos. Billy Bob Thornton orders a bucket of Michelob Ultra to his room and finds his bucket has become the prize.

Two flexes. First — Thornton plays a Mich Ultra-drinking character on Paramount’s Landman, so this is the meta-commercial. The actor plays himself drinking the beer his character drinks.

Second — and this is the more interesting one — the directors made a point of telling USA Today that no AI was used in the spot. Three weeks after Adidas resurrects dead legends with generative effects, the next major tournament ad quietly subtweets it.

A craft fault line just opened up and it is playing out in 60-second hotel lobby gags.

The Canadian version subs in Jonathan David. Billboards in his hometown of Ottawa and one going up directly across from BMO Field.

And a quick tally because it’s worth seeing on the page. By my count for the WC window, Messi is in six ads: Two Adidas ads, Michelob Ultra Superior Match, Duracell Reboot, LEGO Editions and Lay’s Most Epic Watch Party. Industry trackers put his lifetime endorsement count at 44 active brands.

Beckham is in four ads tied to the tournament: Pepsi, Lay’s, the de-aged AI version of himself in Adidas Backyard Legends — and yes, another beer ad I’m not covering because I’ve already covered enough beer ads.

So when WARC says spend doubled, the cast list didn’t. We just see the same faces more often.

Beckham’s de-aged AI face is now competing for media share against his actual face in what can only be described as a Black Mirror episode.

JIM BEAM MADE THE BEST AD OF THE TOURNAMENT AND IT STARTS WITH A FENCE

A groundskeeper rides a power mower across a soccer field. The mower is loaded with Jim Beam bottles. Doug Ford must be furious about this. He crashes through a fence into a backyard BBQ, then into a packed bar, then into an office break room. All watching the World Cup.

“This tournament may be fought on the pitch but it will be won at backyard BBQs.”

Someone goes, “are you Tim Howard?” Tim Howard, sitting at the BBQ, says: “I am Tim Howard.”

ARK Brands made it. Suntory Global Spirits owns Jim Beam and just locked in a US Soccer Federation sponsorship. Tim Howard, of course, is the Secretary of Defense — the man who set the World Cup record for most saves in a single match against Belgium in 2014.

Most fan-watching ads are gauzy slow-motion celebrations. This one starts with a man driving a riding mower into a fence.

It’s the best non-sponsor spot of the tournament.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK — THE MARY PICKFORD

Speaking of celebrity endorsement deals.

The Mary Pickford was invented in the mid-1920s at the bar of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, during the great American Prohibition migration when New York’s drinkers fled south to keep drinking.

The bartender was Eddie Woelke. Formerly of the Plaza in New York. Previously of the Ritz in Paris. He was the Forrest Gump of the cocktail world’s first golden age. Every hotel bar that mattered, he tended. I would also watch that on Netflix.

Woelke made this drink for Mary Pickford on a trip to Cuba with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. Pickford was the most famous woman in the world at the time. She co-founded United Artists with Chaplin, Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith in 1919 because she was tired of studios deciding what her movies were worth. She produced her own pictures. She won the second Best Actress Oscar ever awarded.

She also reportedly didn’t drink the drink named after her. Pickford was a near-teetotaler.

Same gag Messi is running a hundred years later. The biggest star of the era gets his name on a beverage, the beverage outlives the era, and somewhere in there nobody asks whether he actually drinks it. The only differences are that Pickford did it for free and Messi got paid by Anheuser-Busch.

• 1½ oz white rum

• 1½ oz pineapple juice

• ¼ oz grenadine (real grenadine, made from pomegranate, not the high-fructose stuff)

• ¼ tsp maraschino liqueur

• Brandied cherry

Shake hard with ice. Strain into a coupe. Cherry on top. Light pink. Looks like a 1920s movie poster.

WHEN FIFA IS DONE FLIPPING NORTH AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, THIS IS HOW WE FIX IT.

For 39 days starting June 11, North America will be the loudest piece of real estate on earth. Stadiums in fourteen US cities, two Canadian, three Mexican. 104 matches. $10.5 billion in extra ad spend. De-aged Zidane. A man riding a lawnmower full of bourbon. Six different soccer condoms. A 40-foot screen under an expressway.

When the trophy is lifted on July 19 in New Jersey and the billboards come down and the AI Beckhams are deleted, the antidote is already booked.

The Louisville Bats — Triple-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds is offering up something called Nothing Night.

The promo image is the entire ad. Black text on white. “TODAY IS NOTHING NIGHT. THAT MEANS NO MUSIC, AD READS, VIDEOS OR ON-FIELD PROMOTIONS. JUST BASEBALL IN ITS PUREST FORM. CLICK THE LINK TO PURCHASE TICKETS.”

No walk-up music. No t-shirt cannons. No kiss cam. No “this strikeout is brought to you by.” Nine innings of crowd noise, the crack of the bat and a guy yelling at the umpire.

The post got 5,700 likes and 336,000 views on X. Roughly 335,000 more views than any individual Bats game gets with a gimmick.

A Triple-A team in Kentucky read the room and sold tickets to the absence of the room. The brands spending $10.5 billion this quarter are buying attention. The Bats sold the opposite.

That’s where I’d want to be in August.

Drink up.

The Drink Cart is a newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Lucky Charms exists because a man’s favorite candy was Circus Peanuts.

Circus Peanuts? Yes, the orange banana-flavored marshmallow things shaped like a peanut for no defensible reason.

Nobody knows who invented them. They’ve existed since the 1800s, sold at traveling circuses as penny candy. Originally only available in spring because no packaging existed that could keep them fresh through summer. Cellophane fixed that in the 1940s and now they’re in every gas station in America.

The shape is a peanut. The color is orange. The flavor is banana. None of those decisions agree with each other.

The banana flavor wasn’t a creative choice either, it was simply a cost-cutting measure. According to a Brach’s R&D guy who talked to the Wall Street Journal in 1999, banana flavoring was cheaper and more shelf-stable than peanut oil. So they just used banana. The shape stuck because the molds already existed.

They were originally stale and gross by accident. Customers preferred them stale. So manufacturers started making them stale on purpose. Spangler Candy in Ohio still produces 32,000 pounds of them a day. The candy is built entirely on errors people decided they actually liked.

ACCIDENTAL CEREALS IN SIX MONTHS OR LESS

This is the candy John Holahan was eating in 1963.

Holahan was a product developer at General Mills. The company asked him to do something unique with one of their existing cereals (Cheerios or Wheaties) and gave him six months to do it.

Most General Mills products got two to three years. He went to the grocery store. He bought Cheerios. He went home, chopped up some Circus Peanuts and stirred them in.

He liked what he tasted.

That’s it. The first cereal with marshmallows in the box was invented by a man dumping his ridiculous guilty pleasure candy into someone else’s cereal at his kitchen table. Yes, the most magical children’s breakfast in American history was inspired by the most accidental candy in American history.

Then the agency named it.

General Mills hired Dancer Fitzgerald Sample to figure out how to sell it. That’s right the same agency behind the Trix Rabbit, the Monster Cereals, the original Duracell drumming bunny and eventually “Where’s the beef?”

They looked at the marshmallow bits and pitched a campaign built around charm bracelets. The marshmallows became “charms.”

That’s it. That’s how Lucky Charms got its name. Not from leprechaun magic. From a creative team staring at costume jewelry.

DFS launched on St. Patrick’s Day 1964. Full color comic book ads. Animated TV spots. They introduced a leprechaun first called L.C. Leprechaun, then Sir Charms, then finally Lucky.

The premise was simple: kids chase Lucky through a meadow trying to steal his cereal. Lucky always escapes. They’re magically delicious.

A WORD ON MARBITS

The marshmallows in Lucky Charms aren’t actually marshmallows. They’re marbits — short for “marshmallow bits,” the genuine industry term for the crunchy little shapes inside a box of cereal.

A marbit is engineered for the box. Drier than a real marshmallow, harder, with most of the moisture pulled out so it won’t melt in milk and won’t go stale next to dry oat cereal. A regular marshmallow on a Cheerio would turn the whole bag into a brick by Tuesday.

A marbit lasts months on a shelf and still has snap when it hits the bowl. The pink heart, the orange star, the green clover — all marbits. Everything else in this story revolves around them.

The first boxes had four marbit shapes (pink hearts, orange stars, yellow moons, green clovers) plus oat shapes (bells, fish, arrowheads, clovers and x’s). The oats weren’t sugar-coated. Sales were disappointing.

General Mills sugar-coated them in 1967. Sales grew. The lesson was absorbed immediately and applied to children’s breakfast for the next sixty years.

THE WIZARD WHO ALMOST KILLED LUCKY

In 1975, somebody at General Mills decided Lucky wasn’t friendly enough. He was too aloof, too slippery, too unwilling to share his cereal with the children chasing him. The job of replacing him went to Alan Snedeker, a copywriter at DFS who’d been on the Lucky Charms account for years.

Snedeker came back with not one replacement, but two.

The first was the Good Knight. A medieval knight in armor who jumped off cliffs to deliver Lucky Charms to children. The slogan: “If you want Lucky Charms in the morning, just yell ‘Good Knight!’” Tested with five-to-eight-year-olds. Tested well. General Mills passed because a knight wasn’t “magical enough” for a cereal called magically delicious.

The second was Waldo the Wizard. Green cape. Wizard hat. Bow tie. Slightly overweight. Always forgetting where he put his cereal. Never ran from the kids. Catchphrase: “ibbledebibbledelicious” — a jibber-jabber line Snedeker borrowed directly from “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” in Disney’s Cinderella, his favorite Disney song.

Here’s the part nobody tells you. Waldo wasn’t even originally a Lucky Charms idea. Snedeker had created him in 1970 for a different General Mills cereal called Amazin’ Raisins, which never launched. Waldo had been sitting in a drawer for five years. Snedeker pulled him out, dressed him in marshmallow shapes and shipped him to New England.

Test markets confirmed it. Waldo beat Lucky.

“My work beat Lucky twice in tests,” Snedeker would later say. He meant Waldo and the Good Knight, both.

So why is Lucky still on the box?

Because while the Waldo test was running in New England, Snedeker was also working on a parallel set of comparative ads featuring a softer, friendlier version of Lucky. He turned in the script. The new friendlier Lucky tested better than the original grumpy Lucky. And once the friendly Lucky existed, there was no reason for General Mills to spend the millions it would cost to retire him for a wizard.

Snedeker’s verdict: “In making Lucky nicer, I probably killed Waldo.”

He created two replacements. Both beat the original. Then he fixed the original well enough to kill both his own creations. The man who pitched the replacement made the case for keeping the thing he was replacing. Waldo went into a folder at the General Mills Archives. The Good Knight, as far as anyone can tell, never even made it to a finished commercial. Snedeker stayed at DFS for another ten years.

Every new marbit was a small event. The 1975 blue diamond moved sales thirty percent in a single year. General Mills learned the lesson on the spot. Purple horseshoes followed in 1983. Red balloons in 1989. Rainbows in 1992. Blue moons in 1995. Hourglasses in 2008. Unicorns in 2018, chosen by emoji vote on social media. Each one got its own commercial. Each one updated the jingle. Each one gave the box something new on the front and gave kids one more shape to dig for.

Today there are eight permanent shapes. Only the pink heart has survived from 1964. Everything else has been rotated, retired or replaced. Sixty years of brand strategy, encoded in colored sugar.

In 2020, General Mills sold bags of just the marbits. No cereal. No oats. Just the marshmallows. They sold out immediately. Sixty years of restraint, abandoned in a pandemic. Turns out nobody actually wanted the cereal.

THE AD LESSON

Lucky Charms was inspired by an accidental candy, named after costume jewelry, launched on a holiday and grown by adding things kids liked one marshmallow at a time.

It never had to reinvent itself. It just kept accumulating. Each new marbit was a small event — something to look for, something to update the jingle, a reason to grab the box again on a Tuesday in April.

The brand didn’t transform. It kept adding. The lesson is that you don’t always need a new idea. Sometimes you just need to keep making the thing you already have slightly more magical on a regular schedule.

Lucky has been doing this for sixty years. The pink heart in the box this morning is pretty much the same one Holahan stirred into Cheerios at his kitchen table.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE TIPPERARY

In 1916 a German-born bartender named Hugo Ensslin was working at the Hotel Wallick in Times Square — the best bar on the most sophisticated cocktail strip in the world at the time. As the story goes, a customer walked in humming “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” a music hall song from 1912 that had become the unofficial anthem of homesick Irish soldiers in the trenches of World War I. Ensslin grabbed a bottle of Irish whiskey, reached for the green Chartreuse and built the drink on the spot.

Then he put it in a book. Recipes for Mixed Drinks, 1916. One of the most important pre-Prohibition cocktail manuals ever written. Harry Craddock plagiarized half of it for the Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930 and got famous off Ensslin’s work. Ensslin himself shot himself in 1929. The book outlived him by about a century.

So the Tipperary is what happens when a German immigrant in New York invents an Irish cocktail to honor a song British music halls wrote about a town in Ireland that homesick soldiers turned into a marching anthem. Then he dies broke and somebody else takes the credit.

• 1.5 oz Irish whiskey (Jameson, Bushmills or Powers — pick one)

• 1 oz sweet vermouth

• 1/2 oz green Chartreuse

• 2 dashes Angostura

Stir over ice until cold. Strain into a chilled coupe. Lemon twist.

It’s Manhattan-shaped but greener and weirder. Lucky would absolutely drink it. So would Waldo, until he forgot where he put it. Sit back, relax and watch a movie-length amount of Lucky Charms ads.

The Drink Cart is a newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

It’s Saturday. I’ve finished a few hours of social media for a client, and I’m in various conversations about sports with some of our team. Its not lost on me that when you’re working on sports, you’re always working and talking about sports. I don’t hate it.

The night before Toronto Blue Kazuma Okamoto went deep twice against the Twins. He just misses a third.

Through interpreter Yusuke Oshima, he delivers one of the great post-game lines of the year:

“I didn’t have my pre-game quesadilla today. I think if I’d had that, it would have been a home run.”

Beat writers ate it up. MLB ran with it. The Jays followed the next day with “We think he had his quesadilla today” when he blasted another homer.

I had shifted to my own feed vs. our client’s feed. Having the kind of Saturday-morning fun social media used to be made for. One member of our team was commenting on something that showed up in my feed about the Quesadilla that launched a thousand likes.

It hit me that this was the perfect 80s sports poster idea.

The Quesadilla. Quesadilla Power. Quesadillas in the Outfield. This is exactly how the great 80s sports posters were born. Before there were memes. Or even social media. A pun or a little joke became a poster of epic proportion. It maybe even became a hat.

It was just pure stupid fun. Except out of a few hundred likes across a few versions and posts, two people replied “AI slop 👎.” That made me laugh out loud.

Didn’t they know this AI-made poster was pure nostalgia?

I didn’t think this through in the moment. But the aesthetic I was reaching for has a name.

In 1984, two Greek brothers in Seattle started a t-shirt company out of their dad’s parking garage. John and Tock Costacos. Their first hit was a Huskies shirt called “Purple Reign” — Prince crossed with the Washington defense. If you grew up in the Pacific Northwest you knew this shirt.

Two years later they noticed nobody was making decent sports posters. They went after Seahawks safety Kenny Easley. Cast him as “The Enforcer.” They couldn’t get a league license so they couldn’t show team uniforms. So they leaned entirely on Easley’s persona instead. That accident made them.

By 1996 they’d sold 30 million posters. Bash Brothers — Canseco and McGwire posed on the hood of an Oakland PD cruiser with giant Louisville Sluggers. Rickey Henderson as the Man of Steal. Bo Jackson was “Black & Blue.” Lawrence Taylor ended up as the Terminator. Jim McMahon as Mad Mac, a play on Mad Max.

There was the epic Andre Dawson as the Hawk. An incredible Kirk Gibson Big Game Hunter poster. And of course my favourite player, Will Clark, in an incredible Pacific Sock Exchange classic with Kevin Mitchell.

These weren’t team-approved corporate marketing. The leagues hated them at first. The athletes loved them.

Then a thing happened. The Costacos brothers eventually got their league licenses. They could finally put guys in real uniforms. The work got worse. The sanctioned stuff lacked the gonzo creativity of the bootleg years.

Today these posters hang in galleries next to Jeff Koons. Dana White paid $2,500 each for them at a New York show.

The official book of their work, Walls of Fame features the definative quote from Charles Barkley:

“The poster made you cool. You didn’t make the poster cool.”

The Quesadilla poster I made with AI is a Costacos Brothers poster with 2026 tools and 50 fewer dollars worth of explosives.

On X it was clearly labeled as AI.

I wasn’t passing it off as not AI. It was the equivalent of me dropping a Michael Scott The Office GIF.

The problem was more about fun.

The Carolina Hurricanes sold 4,687 Beer Skates Friday night at the Lenovo Center. One in every four fans. A plastic ice skate that holds a beer. Introduced with a ten-second pour clip and the line “BEER SKATES ARE HERE 🚨.” The real question is how have we lived without beer skates all this time?

The next morning they posted a follow-up — “Can confirm Beer Skates were a hit” — over a stat card with the sales number and three fans clutching three skates apiece.

While other franchises pump out gameday graphic templates, they’re just putting beer in a skate and posting that.

Carolina’s mascot Stormy is currently in a one-sided beef with Gritty. Gritty posted “rd 2.” Stormy quoted it: “Welcome to hell you muppet reject.” That’s good copy. From a costumed dog.

What’s striking: the league offices aren’t driving any of this.

Gary Bettman didn’t sign off on Beer Skates. Rob Manfred didn’t approve a whole Quesadilla content arc for Okomoto. Teams and fans have just figured out that fun is a competitive advantage. The franchises that allow themselves to invest in it are eating the ones that won’t.

Same lesson the Costacos brothers learned the hard way. The closer you are to the core, ruins it. Fun comes from somebody not asking permission.

But here’s where it gets un-fun.

On Saturday May 3rd, the Detroit Pistons — facing elimination from the Magic in Round 1 — posted an AI graphic for Game 7. A wolf paw scratching at a magicians hat. The caption: “All Dawg.” And note the clearly labeled “Made with AI.” The playing cards are the bigger tell.

4M views. 4.7K likes.

The very next day, the Minnesota Timberwolves posted a snarky response.

1.8M views. 83K likes.

Read that ratio. The Pistons got over twice the views with a full graphic. The Wolves got seventeen times the likes with one sentence about AI.

Jack Appleby called it out: “Presenting your brand as ‘anti-AI’ really does work in 2026, when regular ol’ humans feel very threatened by technology.”

This complicates everything I’ve said up to now. So I’ll be honest about it.

The bland brigade has found a play. “Anti-AI” is now a brand stance that gets engagement. Performing a virtue is, suddenly, a content strategy. The Wolves found a market in fear and they cashed in.

And it is true, billion dollar sports teams can afford a lot of designers and can even paying for artists. That’s a lot different than me posting AI as form of a reply or comment to communicate. An art form all its own.

But.

The Wolves didn’t post a piece of art. They posted a one-liner about themselves. Eight months from now nobody will remember it. The Bash Brothers poster, the Beer Skate, even my stupid little Quesadilla poster and hat will all still be fun.

The Wolves played the algorithm. The Pistons probably aren’t losing sleep about it.

Sports is supposed to be fun.

The bland brigade is loud. Sometimes, like the Wolves last weekend, they get the algorithm to back them up.

Performing a virtue is way easier than putting beer in a skate.

But over time? They don’t win. They’ve never won. They didn’t win when teams stopped giving away calendars. They don’t win when you have to line up 4 hours early and not get a free hockey jersey for Ernie Clement. They don’t win if they don’t want me to AI myself into a Rogers ad with Ernie Clement. They won’t win the AI fight either.

They’ll just keep yelling slop at a feed that’s having more fun without them and posting “btw, none of our graphics are AI” while the Hurricanes sell 4,687 Beer Skates.

Let people put beer in a skate. Let people post an AI-made Quesadilla sports poster. Let mascots talk shit. Hell, let sports franchises post a sloppy AI photo every once in a while.

Remember. The poster makes you cool. You don’t make the poster cool.

Tools are tools. Fun is fun. Trying is trying. AI isn’t the problem.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE PAINKILLER

The Painkiller was invented in 1971 at the Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands. The bar’s named for the fact that there’s no dock — to get there, you jump off your boat and swim to shore. By the time you’re paying, the dollars in your pocket are wet.

Cut to 1979. A guy named Charles Tobias buys the rights to a defunct British Royal Navy rum recipe and starts a brand called Pusser’s. He wants the Painkiller for his rum. He goes to the Soggy Dollar and asks for the recipe. They say no.

So in 1989 he just trademarks it.

Pusser’s filed a U.S. trademark on the name and the recipe of a drink they didn’t invent and didn’t sell. Then in 2011 they sued a tiki bar on the Lower East Side called Painkiller. The bar was forced to change its name to PKNY, hand over its website and stop calling its own drink a Painkiller unless they used Pusser’s rum.

Bartenders organized a boycott. Two Facebook groups sprang up. Pusser’s didn’t budge.

The trademark stands today. Order a Painkiller anywhere in America and the legally correct version requires the rum of the company that didn’t make the drink, didn’t name it and tried to sue the people who did.

The Soggy Dollar still serves theirs with Cruzan. Fly to Jost Van Dyke. Jump off the boat. Swim to shore. Pay with wet money. That’s the original. You can also fire up the webcam and imagine yourself there.

The Soggy Dollar version:

• 2 oz dark rum (Cruzan, or whatever you’ve got that’s not Pusser’s)

• 4 oz pineapple juice

• 1 oz orange juice

• 1 oz cream of coconut

Shake hard with ice. Pour over crushed ice in a tall glass. Grate fresh nutmeg on top. Generously. The nutmeg is non-negotiable.

Garnish with an orange slice or a pineapple wedge. Have fun.

The Drink Cart is a newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Before Chester Cheetah, Cheetos had a mascot.

Nobody remembers him.

His name was the Cheetos Mouse.

He debuted in 1971.

For a puffed, extruded cornmeal covered in powdered cheese brand, having a stuffy, highfalutin voiced mouse as your mascot was a choice.

He showed up as an inexplicably snooty window washer. He rode a motorcycle through a mountain and the mountain crumbled from the Cheetos crunch. He showed up as a politician.

He ate a Cheeto in space and the moon fell apart. His plane disintegrated mid-flight.

None of this helped.

He was designed by Paul Coker. The MAD magazine illustrator. Same guy who designed Rankin/Bass holiday specials — Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, Frosty’s Winter Wonderland, Year Without a Santa Claus.

The guy who drew our childhood Christmas couldn’t move cheese puffs.

By 1979, he was gone. Eight years on the job. Approximately zero cultural needles moved.

Cheetos went without a mascot for the first half of the ‘80s. But the brand needed something.

In 1985, Frito-Lay hired DDB Needham Chicago to fix the problem. Creative director Brad Morgan sketched a sunglasses-wearing cheetah who stole Cheetos from strangers at the beach using elaborate schemes that always backfired. Spectacularly. With full commitment and zero self-awareness.

Stephen Kane wrote the scripts.

Richard Williams — the same Richard Williams who was animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit — drew the original 24 frames per second.

The voice was Joel Murray.

Bill Murray’s little brother.

The same Joel Murray who’d later play Freddy Rumsen on Mad Men. The alcoholic copywriter who could play Mozart with his own zipper.

A future fictional copywriter voicing a cheetah who steals snacks so a real agency could sell more snacks. Put that in your Cannes entry.

“It bought my first house,” Joel said about the Chester gig.

The mouse wore a suit and crumbled mountains for eight forgettable years. Chester wore sunglasses, committed petty theft and stayed for forty.

One was forgotten. One sold a billion dollars in cheese puffs.

The campaign structure was pure Looney Tunes. Chester spots someone with Cheetos. Chester devises a plan. Chester executes with complete confidence. Chester fails spectacularly. Reset.

Every commercial. For decades.

He’s Wile E. Coyote. The Cheetos are the Road Runner. The genius is that he never wins. He’s never threatening because he’s never actually a threat.

The original tagline: “It ain’t easy being cheesy.”

Which is remarkable because it’s self-deprecating about the product. Cheetos leave orange residue on your fingers. They’re aggressively artificial. They stain everything. Chester doesn’t pretend otherwise. He leans into the absurdity.

That honesty was the whole strategy.

Sales went from $200 million to $1.2 billion in Chester’s first decade.

THE CHEETLE

In 2008, Chester got a second act nobody expected.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners launched OrangeUnderground.com. Chester appeared as a puppet with a mid-Atlantic British accent, calling himself “Papa Chester,” encouraging people to use Cheetos to commit minor acts of revenge.

Plug the nostrils of a snoring man. Dump a handful into a neat freak’s cubicle.

Future Supernatural star Felicia Day plays a woman in a laundromat. A snarky customer tells her other people are trying to do their laundry too. Chester appears. Suggests she toss a handful of Cheetos into the dryer with the woman’s whites. She does. Chester vanishes.

Slate called it “delightfully creepy.” They weren’t wrong.

The reason it worked: Frito-Lay had hired a neuromarketing firm called NeuroFocus to wire up Cheetos eaters and read their brain activity. The data showed that getting orange dust on your hands triggered a “giddy feeling of subversion.”

Of course the agency built a campaign around it. How could you not.

Cheetos discovered the only insight that ever mattered. People like being a little bit bad. They sold the orange fingers as a feature.

Cheetos gave the orange dust on your fingers an official name.

“Cheetle.”

Got it into Dictionary.com. It’s a real word now. You use it in Scrabble and win.

Inventing a vocabulary word for the thing everyone else would consider a product flaw is pure Chester energy. The flaw is the feature. The feature needs a name. The name is in the dictionary.

The cheetle is still driving a lot of the creative, even if Chester is taking more of a supporting role. But he’s still rocking it out 40 years later.

THE FLAMIN’ HOT MYTH

Here’s the best Cheetos marketing story ever told. It’s also a lie.

Richard Montañez, a janitor at the Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, California, invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Or so the story went. He took unflavored Cheetos home from a broken machine. Added Mexican spices. Cold-called the CEO. Pitched it in person. Saved the brand. Rose from janitor to vice president.

Frito-Lay let the story run for a decade because the story was better than any ad they could have made.

Then the LA Times investigated in 2021.

The product was developed by a team in Texas. Years earlier than Richard claimed. The CEO he said he pitched wasn’t CEO yet. A woman named Lynne Greenfeld actually led the team that named and launched the brand.

Nobody’s directing Lynne’s biopic.

Frito-Lay eventually said they “do not credit the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos” to Montañez. He sued. Settled quietly in 2025.

A snack company accidentally generated the perfect American rags-to-riches story and then had to deny it on the record.

The story was too good. And the story was too good because Cheetos are a brand that generates good stories.

Chester taught them that.

THE AD LESSON

Chester worked for 35+ years because he never pretended Cheetos were something they weren’t. The mascot mirrors the consumer’s actual relationship with the product.

Nobody eats Cheetos ironically. They eat them compulsively, get Cheetle on their fingers, feel mildly guilty and do it again.

Chester is that behavior with sunglasses on.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is make the mascot as addicted to the product as your customer.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE GARIBALDI

Two ingredients. Campari and orange juice. That’s the whole drink.

It’s named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian general who unified Italy in the 1860s. Campari is from the north. Oranges are from the south. The drink unifies them in a glass. A cocktail that’s also a geopolitical metaphor.

Try getting that out of a Bud Light.

The trick is the OJ. It has to be “fluffy” — aerated until it foams, almost like dessert. Dante in New York built a Best Bar in the World reputation on this exact drink. Bitter Italian aperitif on the bottom. Cloud of orange foam on top.

The same color as a Cheeto.

The drink Chester would order if he ever set down the cheetos for 5 seconds.

• 1 1/2 oz Campari

• 4 oz fresh orange juice

Pour Campari into a highball over ice. Run the OJ through a high-speed juicer or blender for about 30 seconds until it foams up. Pour over the Campari. Don’t stir. Let the foam sit on top like a crown.

No fancy juicer at home? Blend fresh OJ with a few ice cubes for 20 seconds. Strain. You’ll get 80% of the way there.

Go on, drink one for Chester. And the mouse.

The Drink Cart. A newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Wednesdays and Fridays

I keep coming back to this one ad. And also this completely fictional mid-seventies image of me in jean shorts absolutely shredding on a jet ski.

The ad? A humble 1975 Canadian Club print ad. The hero, just like me, is Jet Skiing past the CN Tower.

The ad is a full on narrative played out in four photos. A near-death incident with a speedboat. A girlfriend named Diane shouting “Look out!” A bucking-bronco metaphor. A cork-in-a-storm side-plot.

And a resolution where the couple toasts their survival with a Canadian Club whisky at the Sailor’s Pub at Ontario Place.

Over two hundred words of body copy. The bottle shows up for maybe six percent of the entire layout. The logo is smaller than the CN Tower.

Today this ad would die in round one of a focus group. The brief would come back with “trim to a single image, max 10 words, add a QR code.”

Instead, in 1975, Hiram Walker ran a fully narrated short story. With a plot. They trusted you to read it. They trusted you to care about Diane. They trusted you to finish the ad and think, yeah, a whisky at Ontario Place sounds pretty damn good.

This ad is part of the Canadian Club “Adventure Series” — a campaign that had already been running. Same formula every time. Some guy does something insane in a beautiful place, survives it and drinks a Canadian Club afterward.

I am in awe of this ad. Maybe it’s the idea that people would do things like this even before camera phones and social media. Maybe it’s just that it looks kind of rad, fifty years on.

I think about it more than I think about most ads running today.

THE 1975 TORONTO FLEX

The other thing I love about this ad is the stack of new things it’s casually showing off.

The CN Tower was brand new. Barely new, actually — it had topped out on April 2, 1975, when a big Sikorsky helicopter named Olga lifted the last 39 pieces of the antenna into place.

It didn’t open to the public until June 26, 1976. So when this ad ran, the hero was Jet Skiing past the world’s tallest freestanding structure, and most people had never been inside it.

Funny story, I’ve been in Toronto for 11 years now, and still haven’t gone up. Might have to change that this week.

The Jet Ski was brand new too. It was essentially meant to be a dirt bike on water. That concept is incredible when you say it out loud.

Kawasaki had launched the Jet Ski as a 1973 trial program and went into mass production in 1975. The ad above is from 1978. Their tagline, “Let the Good Times Roll,” launched in 1973 by J. Walter Thompson. It’s still their tagline today.

You’re looking at one of the earliest ad appearances of a new category of vehicle that barely existed five years before.

Kawasaki didn’t actually invent the personal watercraft. Bombardier did. The first sit-down Sea-Doo hit the water in 1968, and by 1970 they had a TV commercial running coast to coast featuring the 1969 model riding around with bottles of Fanta.

Talking about Sailor’s Pub at Ontario Place was also new-ish.

Ontario Place itself had only opened in May 1971. The whole waterfront futurism — Eberhard Zeidler’s Bauhaus-trained vision of pods on artificial islands, a giant geodesic Cinesphere, all built with a breakwater made of sunken freighters — was the most Toronto thing Toronto had ever done.

Having a whisky at the new parking lot at Ontario Place isn’t going to have the same vibes. Even if we do end up deeming it, “Garage Mahal.”

So this Canadian Club ad is, structurally, a pile of brand-new Toronto stacked on one page. The tower that wasn’t open yet. The vehicle that barely existed. The waterfront that opened four years earlier. All of it on the cover of a whisky ad sold internationally. A city showing off.

Now we can barely decide if we are charging or not charging for FIFA World Cup fan fests this summer.

But it's not the only Canadian whisky and Jet Ski ad from the 1970s. Lord Calvert took it to a whole new level.

RIP SAILOR’S PUB

The specific spot name-checked in the ad — “Sailor’s Pub, Ontario Place” — was a real place allegedly. I found a button and some vague recollections of how great it was.

It’s full name: Sailor’s Pub at Stoodleigh Mariner’s, in the Marina Village section on the west end of Ontario Place. Blue modular roof. Deck overlooking the marina. The kind of spot you could, in theory, sit at with a whisky on a summer night while sailboats bobbed in front of you.

My greatest memory of old Ontario Place is being attacked by geese. Not getting a shot at a Canadian Club on the rocks on the Sailor’s Pub deck. Never happened. The geese were territorial. The geese had their own agenda. Namely it was trying to snack on our dog, Renly.

Ontario Place’s main attractions closed in 2012. Sailor’s Pub shut. The building was still standing out there — abandoned, blue roof intact, slowly getting weathered, until the Therme Group mega-spa started doing whatever it’s doing.

In 1975 Canadian Club sold Canadians on sipping whisky at a waterfront pub that, fifty years later, is now gone and behind a construction fence.

THE HIDE A CASE STORY

Okay. The best part of this campaign isn’t even the ad I started with.

In 1967, Hiram Walker’s ad agency, McCaffrey and McCall, launched a promotion called Hide A Case.

The idea: hide actual cases of Canadian Club in extreme and exotic places around the world, then publish cryptic print ads with clues about where they were, and dare people to go find them.

Between 1967 and 1991, twenty-five cases were hidden. Most have been found. Roughly five are still out there, depending on who's counting and whether you trust the agency's records or the people still digging. The locations were absurd.

Mount Kilimanjaro. Angel Falls, Venezuela. Atop a skyscraper in Manhattan. The Great Barrier Reef. The Arctic Circle. The Swiss Alps. Death Valley. The site of the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona. Loch Ness. Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile. Lake Tanganyika. The Yukon. Lake Placid (buried there in 1979 to tie in with the 1980 Olympics).

The stories are better than any ad copy.

The Angel Falls case was found months after it was planted by newlyweds who were going to Venezuela instead of Acapulco until they boarded the plane. She thought she was going to the beach. Instead they hacked through the jungle getting bitten to death. He found the case behind a rock. Their marriage presumably still exists.

The Kilimanjaro case wasn’t found until the mid-70s, when a journalist on an expedition literally stumbled over it.

The Manhattan skyscraper case took hunters thirteen weeks to locate.

The Arctic case is considered permanently lost. Blizzards. Ice movement. It’s probably sitting under a hundred feet of compressed snow.

The Yukon case is a comedy. The first one they tried to hide was found by a group of Boy Scouts before the contest had even been officially announced. So Hiram Walker had to send another team out to hide a second Yukon case. That one was never found either.

The Lake Placid case is my favourite story. McCaffrey and McCall formally wrote to the Olympic Committee asking for permission to hide a case of whisky on the Mount Van Hoevenberg bobsled and ski trails. The Olympic Committee said no. The agency then asked the Adirondak Loj. Also no. So they hid it somewhere else entirely. That case is still missing. A New York liquor store owner named Tim Robinson spent fifteen hours digging in a field near Lake Placid in 2020 based on interpreted ad clues. He found nothing. He’s still looking.

The ads ran in Life, Look and Playboy. The copy on one read “We left a great gift idea up near the North Pole. A case of Canadian Club.” Another: “Devil’s Backbone Reef hides the world’s strangest shipwreck... and a case of Canadian Club.”

Just a clue and a dare. I’m guessing legal wasn’t as involved as they are today.

AND THEN THE CAMPAIGN ACCIDENTALLY INVENTED JAMES BOND

Here’s where it goes from good ad campaign to historically iconic.

Michael G. Wilson — Cubby Broccoli’s stepson, the guy who’d eventually run the Bond franchise — was flipping through a Playboy in the mid-70s. He saw a Canadian Club ad featuring a skier named Rick Sylvester launching off what the ad claimed was Mount Asgard on Baffin Island. Sylvester skis off a cliff, pulls a parachute, floats down.

Wilson showed it to Broccoli. They decided to make this the pre-title sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me.

They hired Sylvester — who wasn’t a pro stuntman, just an adventure skier who’d done a version of this jump for fun off El Capitan in 1972 — to do the stunt for real on Baffin Island. It cost five hundred thousand dollars.

Most expensive single movie stunt in history at the time. Christopher Wood added the Union Jack parachute. Only one of three cameras actually caught the jump. One take. Uncut.

When that parachute opens over the Baffin Island mountainside and the Bond theme kicks in, you’re watching a moment that exists because a whisky ad ran in Playboy.

A Canadian whisky campaign inspired the most iconic opening in British spy cinema.

The ad was also, incidentally, faked — the El Capitan footage from one of Sylvester's early-70s jumps was the real jump, the Mount Asgard claim in the Canadian Club ad was staged. The Bond version shot in Baffin was the real version.

Bond unfaked it for history during the most faked Bond era.

Ads are pretty incredible aren’t they?

THE COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: COLA OLD FASHIONED

It had to be Canadian Club inspired. It had to be something that pairs with fifty plus years of men almost dying on Jet Ski and then sitting down to a stiff drink.

It had to be in a shirt this hideous. The fever dream of whatever Ozempic AI thinks I need.

So: a Canadian Club Cola Old Fashioned.

Coca-Cola bitters on a Canadian whisky is my move. CC has a slightly softer, sweeter profile than American bourbon, and Coca-Cola bitters play off the caramel and vanilla notes without overloading it with sweetness.

You get an Old Fashioned that reads like a memory of every road trip where you bought a Coke at a gas station and a Canadian Club at a duty-free. Which is, on balance, a fine place to land.

Cola Old Fashioned

• 2 oz Canadian Club

• 1 tsp demerara or rich simple syrup

• 3-4 dashes Coca-Cola bitters (I made them myself - it was a three month wait to try them just for this)

• Orange peel

Stir over ice in a mixing glass until properly chilled. Strain into a rocks glass over one big cube. Express the orange peel over the top and drop it in.

Drink it somewhere with a view. A patio counts. A kitchen window counts. On a Jet ski does not count. After a Jet Ski, yes. We’ve been over this. The jean shorts are just a suggestion at this point.

The Drink Cart. A newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Wednesdays and Fridays

In 1965, a Leo Burnett copywriter named Rudy Perz sat at his kitchen table trying to figure out how to sell something.

In 2026, a Pound & Grain copywriter named Jackson Murphy sat at his desk and AI’d himself into a Pillsbury commercial and achieved a lifelong dream.

But, enough about me.

Perz was briefed on refrigerated dough.

Tubes of raw biscuit batter.

Not the most inspiring creative challenge in the world in 2026. Probably insane in 1965.

Here’s the business context that gets left out.

Pillsbury was getting absolutely lapped.

Betty Crocker and General Mills had figured out convenience food. Cake mixes. Ready-to-bake everything.

Pillsbury was still selling flour while everyone else was selling time back to housewives.

Leo Burnett had just won the refrigerated dough account that March. Perz had to come up with something fast.

He popped a can. Imagined a little figure climbing out. A dough boy. Poppin’ Fresh.

The pitch practically wrote itself.

The first sketches came from Martin Nodell — yes, the same Martin Nodell who created the original Green Lantern for DC Comics in 1940.

He left comics in 1950, drifted into advertising and eventually landed at Leo Burnett as an art director.

One of the most important superheroes in American comics and one of the most recognized brand icons in American advertising. Same guy.

It wasn’t all magic. His early Doughboy sketches looked too much like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

A former Disney animator named Milt Schaffer came in and fixed it. Gave him the chef’s hat. The neckerchief. The blue eyes. Enough personality to stop being a ghost.

Perz originally wanted him animated as a 2D cartoon.

Then he saw the stop-motion titling sequence on The Dinah Shore Show and changed his mind.

Cascade Studios in LA built a puppet. Plaster. Foam. Ball and socket armature inside. Five bodies. Fifteen interchangeable heads with different expressions.

Total cost: $16,000. Which is about $160,000 today.

For one puppet.

For the record he’s 8¾ inches tall. He weighs 14 ounces.

These details have been officially maintained by General Mills for 60 years. Nobody asked. They keep them on file anyway.

They hired voice-over actor Paul Frees. More than 50 actors auditioned. One of them was Paul Winchell — the original voice of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Tigger almost became the Doughboy.

He was the Doughboy for 21 years. Until his death in 1986.

The first commercial aired November 7, 1965.

It was called “Dancing Fingers.” 30 seconds. Pillsbury Crescent Rolls.

His first words: “Hi! I’m Poppin’ Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy!”

Pillsbury approved 13 more out of the gate.

Within three years he had an 87% recognition rate among American consumers.

Pillsbury was getting 200 fan letters a week.

At his peak, 1,500 requests for autographed photos. And again, this was for a puppet selling refrigerated dough.

He shot ads with a young Maureen McCormick making cookies pre-Brady Bunch.

A few years in, Leo Burnett hired a copywriter named Carol H. Williams. She took over the account and wrote the campaign that made him a household name — “Say Hello to Poppin’ Fresh Dough.”

On her watch they added Poppie Fresh, the Doughgirl, because the Doughboy was showing up on too many products and there was real concern he was getting diluted.

And Poppie never got poked in the belly. Too much of an optics problem — a giant masculine hand jabbing a small female character without her consent.

In 2017 she became the first Black woman creative inducted into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame. Poppie was just one of the reasons why.

The Doughboy family rolled out through the early 70s. Poppie in 1973. The rest in 1974. Son Popper. Daughter Bun-Bun. Grandparents Granpopper and Granmommer. Uncle Rollie. A dog named Flapjack. A cat named Biscuit.

I do not remember Flapjack or Biscuit.

By 1999, Ad Age ranked him sixth among the top 10 advertising icons of the 20th century.

He’s appeared in over 600 commercials for more than 50 products. He’s been an opera singer, a rapper, a rock star, a ballet dancer, a skydiver and a professional skateboarder.

He’s fluent in French, German and Hebrew. He’s played harmonica, bugle, accordion, electric guitar and violin — at a level General Mills describes as “virtuoso.”

In Germany he’s Teigmännchen — The Little Dough Man.

In Israel he’s Efi — a nickname meaning “cute little baker.”

In Latin America, El Masin — The Little Dough.

In 2005, he showed up for the Super Bowl in a MasterCard “Icons” spot alongside the Jolly Green Giant, Mr. Peanut, Chef Boyardee, the Morton Salt Girl, Count Chocula and Charlie the Tuna — ten mascots having dinner together. He was the one who got poked.

From 2009 to 2017 he moonlighted in GEICO commercials. He kept the giggle.

In Super Bowl LIX (2025) he showed up again for Instacart alongside Mr. Clean, the Kool-Aid Man, the Old Spice Guy and the PuppyMonkeyBaby. Sixty years in and still booking Super Bowl work.

Somewhere in the early 2000s, an anonymous writer sent a fake obituary out into the early internet.

“Veteran Pillsbury spokesman, The Pillsbury Doughboy, died yesterday of a severe yeast infection and complications from repeated pokes in the belly.”

The eulogy was wall-to-wall bread puns.

He “never knew how much he was kneaded.”

His later life “was filled with turnovers.”

He was “not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes.”

The California Raisins were at the funeral. So was Captain Crunch. Mrs. Butterworth. Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy.

It went viral — pre-social viral, the chain email kind — and has been circulating for 20+ years. Nobody knows who wrote it.

The Doughboy has outlived his own fake death by longer than most careers last.

Even Gary Larson made a comic with him once.

In 2001, General Mills acquired Pillsbury from Diageo in a $10.4 billion deal. Which meant the Doughboy now worked for Pillsbury’s biggest historical competitor.

He turned 60 last November.

The belly poke has never stopped.

THE AD LESSON

Rudy Perz had to make people care about a tube of biscuit dough.

His answer was to make the product into a character that people felt genuine affection for.

Not just awareness. Affection.

Strong enough that they wrote letters. Strong enough that they bought dolls. Strong enough that a stranger wrote a fake obituary full of bread puns and the internet shared it for 20 years.

Sometimes you don’t sell what the product is.

You sell what it feels like to have it in your house.

FRIDAY DRINK CART COCKTAIL: THE CLOVER CLUB

Pink. Foamy. Soft enough to give when you poke it.

Born in Philadelphia in the 1880s at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. The Clover Club was actually a men’s club where lawyers, journalists and businessmen met in the hotel bar and eventually got a drink named after them.

It was one of the most popular cocktails in America before Prohibition. Then Prohibition killed it. Then the cocktail renaissance of the 2000s dug it out of the grave.

It tastes better than anything this pink has a right to.

The Clover Club

• 2 oz gin

• 0.75 oz fresh lemon juice

• 0.5 oz raspberry syrup (or 4-5 fresh raspberries muddled with 0.5 oz simple)

• 1 egg white

• Raspberry for garnish

Dry shake everything without ice for 15 seconds to build the foam. Add ice. Shake again hard until cold. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Drop a raspberry on top.

The whole drink is about what it feels like to poke it. The foam holds its shape for a moment, then gives. Soft. Pillowy. Giggling optional.

The Clover Club is older than the Doughboy by about eighty years. Which feels right.

Some things just survive.

The Drink Cart. A newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Wednesdays and Fridays

Yes, I’ve AI’d myself into a fictional movie scene with Jon Hamm in 18th-century frocks to talk about a dried mango company called Mangones.

It’s the first thing that has given me true joy in the past 72 hours. And this is what they call int he newsletting business, a long walk. So get comfy.

So a mango company with all of 1,625 followers with a bio reading, “taking down Big Snack” declared the end of the advertising industry.

“Claude Design is actually insane. It’s so over for agencies. Pack it up, apply to trade school.”

The evidence attached was a pretty generic sales email.

In the replies, someone asked how he’d done it. Was it just a text prompt or did he feed the AI some inspiration?

“Yeah, uploaded our brand book, fonts, logos, product shots, colors and gave context on the sale we are running.”

Oh the cruel irony. He declared agencies dead using work an agency made for him.

The classic coal shipped to Newcastle, repackaged as coal he’d invented. (again, the coal reference will come)

A designer replied that the email looked like “a $49 WordPress theme from 2014.”

Another noted it was basically what every e-commerce agency produces for email. Mangones, wounded, fired back: “Did you just shit on the design?”

Which is the whole thing, really.

A guy declares an entire industry over, then gets personally hurt when someone points out his revolutionary output looks like the industry at its most average. The same industry he just told to apply to trade school.

If I had a dollar for every time an agency was declared over because of something somebody said on the internet, I’d be Timothy Dexter.

WHO THE HELL IS LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER?

And there we are. Who is Timothy Dexter?

Dexter was an 18th-century American merchant from Newburyport, Massachusetts who in 1802 self-published a 32-page book about how great he was. This is a man who would have cooked with X and Substack.

The book had no punctuation. It had dozens of misspellings. It had rants about his wife, who he’d started calling “the ghost of my wife” because the feeling was mutual.

It was called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, and Dexter was, by almost every available metric, an idiot.

One of my favourite reads, Messy Nessy covered him in Volume 770 of her weekly internet dig and said someone should make a movie about him. She’s right.

And I think the movie’s already been made. We’re all living in it. Jon Hamm was made to play this role.

Because the thing is — Dexter was rich. Absurdly stinking rich. A few years before publishing the book, he’d shipped coal to Newcastle, the English mining town, during what turned out to be a miners’ strike. This kind of things happened to him over and over again until he was so rich he wrote a book.

When readers complained the book had no punctuation, Dexter published a second edition with a full page of nothing but commas, periods, semicolons, question marks and exclamation points. Along with a note telling readers to “peper and solt it as they plese.”

THIS IS WHAT THE LAST 30 DAYS FEELS LIKE

Stuart Heritage wrote a piece in The Guardian about how ChatGPT has a tell: a linguistic tic it can't stop using, “it’s not X, it’s Y.” Self-improvement isn’t a trend, it’s a lifestyle shift. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

It’s in Facebook posts, Peloton scripts, TV dialogue, your coworker’s Slack message. Even Don Draper used it, “It’s not a timepiece,” he says. “It’s a conversation piece.” Every LLM sentence that passes as thought has that same rhythm. It’s the punctuation page of 2026. The em dash of the moment. A pile of confident commas pretending to be an argument.

Meanwhile somebody asked Chipotle’s customer support chatbot, a cheerful little thing named Pepper, to help them reverse a linked list in Python before placing their order. Pepper complied. Wrote the function. Noted the O(n) time complexity. Then politely asked what they’d like for lunch.

Chipotle is paying the LLM bill. Some coder got a free computer science tutor. The screenshot went so viral that within a week, fake versions started circulating of McDonald’s’ Grimace bot doing the same bit, a French SEO guy tweeting “stop paying for Claude AI, McDonald’s AI is free and answers all questions, even if they’re not about the BIG MAC.”

On TikTok, an AI-generated show called Fruit Love Island — exactly what it sounds like, anthropomorphic strawberries and bananas doing a Love Island parody became the fastest-growing account in TikTok history.

3 million followers in nine days. Ten million views per episode. The creator claims each two-minute episode took three hours to make. A creator named Joy Ofodu had been making a real version of this with actual performance and got 5 million views on her series. The AI knockoff cleared 300 million. Figure that one out.

A New York Times investigation earlier this year found that 40% of videos YouTube recommends to children after they watch the terrifying in its own right, CoComelon are now AI slop: horses hatching from eggs, misspelled alphabets, warped faces. All of it was making money.

The cultural high point (and I use “high” loosely) came on April 12, when the sitting US president posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus healing a dying man.

He later told the press he’d thought the meme depicted him as a doctor. Not Jesus. A doctor. This is a man looking at a page of punctuation marks and sincerely telling us he sees a comma.

BUT THAT’S WHEN I HAVE TO STOP MYSELF

Richard Shotton posted a photo of a San Miguel ad, “SPANISH SUMMER NO MATTER WHEN,” a woman in a red dress sitting on the roof of a small house (or she’s a giant), a fan, a seagull with nowhere to go, a disembodied hand clutching the bottle, a typeset that looks like three different agencies couldn’t agree on what day it was.

His caption: “While AI is creating ads like this the dangers of the convergence still seem a long way away.”

Which is the reminder. We didn’t need AI to make slop. We’ve been making it all along.

The New York Times ran a piece about a TikTok genre called “day in my life” videos — 25-year-olds filming themselves doing office tasks and narrating them like they’re performing surgery. Typing. Packing a “snacky” lunch. Taking “night showers.” Retiring to the “man attic” to game.

A creator named Hubs became so popular for glorifying his 9-to-5 that he quit his 9-to-5 to post about it full-time, and the comment sections are split between people calling it “modern enlightenment” and people calling him an “NPC.” No AI involved. Humans filming other humans performing confident nothingness for other humans to watch.

Then yesterday and I can’t make this one up — Prego (yes the jarred pasta sauce brand) announced the Connection Keeper.

A $20 bundle, landing in time for Mother’s Day, containing a jar of pasta sauce, a conversation prompt card deck, a USB-C charging cable and a “screen-free recording device” so your family can preserve their dinner table conversations forever.

A pasta sauce brand has decided to solve the connection crisis by mailing you a microphone. No AI in sight. Just humans selling other humans a microphone and a jar of red sauce.

We’ve been told for three years that AI would make everyone smarter. What it actually did was hand everyone Timothy Dexter’s pen. Polished. Confident. Grammatically fine.

But we have nothing important to saying. Dexter had his pen in 1802. San Miguel’s agency has one. Hubs has one. Prego has one. Even the Mangones guy has one.

AI didn't invent the confidence-without-substance business model. It just made it 10,000 times more efficient.

The smart brands in 2026 aren’t the ones using AI best. They’re the ones who figured out that being legibly, confidently, obviously dumb is now a viable strategy.

The reward system is broken in the exact same way it was broken for Dexter. Reality was doing his marketing for him.

The difference is Dexter didn’t know he was winning. These brands do. And that’s the part I can’t stop chewing on.

Is calculated idiocy still idiocy?

Somewhere out there, a dried mango company is telling an entire industry to pack it up, using the industry’s own brand book to do the telling.

We’re not entering a new age of idiots. We’re in the second edition. The page of punctuation got added. Everyone’s shaking commas onto the page just like the em dash.

Only some of them know what they’re doing. It’s all fine.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE VANDERPUMP NO. 5

Vanderpump Villa Season 3 dropped recently and Lisa’s left the Italian sun behind and set up shop at an English country estate called Rosecroft Park, with Stassi Schroeder as “resident chaperone” and a full rotating cast of reality TV refugees from Love Island, The Challenge, Made in Chelsea and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

It’s ten episodes of hospitality staff trying to serve five-star dinners to people who built their careers refusing to behave at dinners.

Which brings us, naturally, to Lisa’s signature cocktail. And maybe why AI gave Jon Hamm a wig and not me. Completely unfair.

The No. 5 is served at Vanderpump à Paris in Vegas in a full-size Chanel-style perfume bottle. You pour it into a coupe yourself. The name is a wink, the presentation is a wink, the whole menu is a wink.

Which makes it perfect for this week. Because after everything above about brands winning with confident nonsense, here’s a cocktail that figured out the trick legitimately.

Lisa Vanderpump has been selling rum and cognac with a spritz of Chanel energy since the first day she opened a bar. The drink underneath is good. The drink on top of the drink is theatre. Some people call that slop. Others call it an empire.

The No. 5

• 1 oz Cognac (Pierre Ferrand 1840 or any decent VS)

• ½ oz Diplomático Mantuano rum (or any sippable dark rum)

• ½ oz Malibu or another coconut rum

• ½ oz St-Germain elderflower liqueur

• 1 oz fresh pineapple juice

• ½ oz fresh lemon juice

• ¼ oz pear liqueur (Belle de Brillet is the move — or sub pear nectar if you don’t keep it)

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake hard with ice. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a thin pear slice or a lemon peel, twisted over the glass and dropped in.

Perfume bottle optional, but if you’ve got an empty Chanel on the vanity and a steady pour, live your life.

The drink should land floral and tropical up front with the cognac and Angostura doing structural work underneath. If yours tastes like a pina colada that went to finishing school, you nailed it.

The Drink Cart. A newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Wednesdays and Fridays.

In 1928, the Jolly Green Giant wasn’t jolly.

He wasn’t even green.

He was an orange caveman in a bearskin, hunched over a giant pea pod.

And before you even ask, I’m not AI-ing myself as the Green Giant. Even I have limits.

So back to Green Giant.

Angry, maybe. Threatening, kind of. Described at the time, charitably, as terrifying.

1928 seemed maybe a bit too generous to advertisers.

They already had a solid canned vegetable mascot, right?

He existed because a small canning company in Le Sueur, Minnesota had discovered a new variety of jumbo pea.

So big and tender that none of the established brands wanted to sell it. What a time to be alive.

So the Minnesota Valley Canning Company made up a name, Green Giant. Then they bolted a cave monster to the label for maximum effect.

In 1935, you know what comes next. It’s always the copywriter.

The account landed on the desk of a copywriter at Erwin, Wasey & Company in Chicago.

His name was Leo Burnett.

He looked at the angry orange cave dweller. He decided the problem was simple.

The giant wasn’t jolly.

He added the word. Changed the bearskin to leaves. Straightened the posture. Gave him a smile.

Minnesota Valley liked the revision so much they eventually renamed the entire company after it.

When Burnett left to start his own agency that same year, the Green Giant account came with him. One of the founding clients of what became Leo Burnett, Chicago.

Imagine being on such a generational run creating Tony the Tiger, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Toucan Sam and the Jolly Green Giant?

He made everything that way. Found the one true word and the whole thing changed.

There’s a reason his company was billing over $100 million a year by 1959.

The Giant’s first TV appearance we’re a disaster. He sort of moved. He apparently frightened children.

The “Ho, Ho, Ho” wasn’t added until 1961.

A Chicago session singer named Elmer Dresslar Jr. walked into an audition. Was told nothing except to stand at a mic and do a low laugh.

He did.

That was it. That sound ran for decades.

They introduced frozen vegetables and gave JGG red scarf to keep him warm in the freezing temperatures.

They added Little Green Sprout in early 70s because the Giant had one problem. He was too big and too iconic to really give a voice to. He couldn’t sell products directly. He could only loom and Ho, Ho, Ho.

Sprout was the talking proxy. He’d ask questions. The Giant would just watch over the valley.

A genuinely odd two-mascot structure. The authority figure communicates exclusively through size and laughter. The little guy does all the actual explaining.

It worked.

The Giant got so embedded in culture that in 1964, The Kingsmen (yep the “Louie Louie” guys) had a top 10 hit with a novelty song about him.

Green Giant initially objected. When it hit #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, the brand took the win.

A 55-foot fiberglass statue was erected in Blue Earth, Minnesota in 1979. A local radio host commissioned it because travellers kept telling him they wanted to see the Giant.

No landowner near the new I-90 would donate frontage for it. So at the freeway’s dedication ceremony, he hoisted the Giant from a crane by the armpits as a publicity stunt. The Giant got a permanent base the next year.

Still draws 10,000 visitors.

In 1999, Ad Age ranked the Green Giant third among the top 10 advertising icons of the 20th century. Behind only the Marlboro Man and Ronald McDonald. Ahead of Betty Crocker, the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger.

Third.

For a guy who sells canned corn.

Then you know what happened? Oh you know.

Green Giant merged with Pillsbury in 1979.

Pillsbury then sold to General Mills in 2001.

General Mills decided $585 million in annual vegetable sales was only 4% of their business and not worth the focus.

So they sold to B&G Foods in 2015 for $765 million.

B&G sold the canned line to Seneca Foods in 2023. Then the frozen line a few years later

The complete brand is now at Seneca Foods in Fairport, New York.

Four ownership changes.

But he’s still here.

THE AD LESSON

Leo Burnett looked at a frightening orange cave monster.

And applied his phrase: 'There is an inherent drama in every product. Our No. 1 job is to dig for it and capitalize on it.'

For Green Giant, the inherent drama was one word. Jolly.

That’s the whole intervention. The product didn’t change. The peas didn’t change. Just the one word.

Suddenly the monster had a personality. The personality had a brand. The brand had a company name, a pop song and a 55-foot statue in Minnesota.

The lesson isn’t about softening a brand. It’s about finding the word that transforms how everything else gets read.

Sometimes the brief is just: find that one word.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: GREEN CHARTREUSE SOUR

Ho, Ho, Ho. Yes, we’re making a green drink.

Made with a French liqueur that gets its green from actual chlorophyll. The recipe has 130 herbs in it and two Carthusian monks are the only people who know what they all are.

• 2 oz Green Chartreuse

• 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

• 1/2 oz simple syrup

• 1 egg white

Dry shake to whip the egg white. Add ice, shake hard, double-strain into a coupe. Foam on top is the look.

Herbal, bracing, actually green. Made by monks who capped production in 2019 because they’d rather pray than scale.

The Giant would respect it. So sip that sour and watch the Jolly Green Giant in action.

The Drink Cart. A newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Wednesdays and Fridays.

Just a few weeks after shaming their CEO to step down for daring to not share a plane accident in French, Air Canada announced something this week with breathless excitement.

The press release called it a “comprehensive redesign showcases a distinctly Canadian experience rooted in comfort, care, and connection.”

They named the whole thing “Glowing Hearted.”

I’ve always hated Air Canada. This story just adds fuel to that.

Yeah, lie-flat seats, 4K OLED screens, bigger overhead bins, Bluetooth audio. Honestly, all fine upgrades. The kind of thing you’d actually want on a transatlantic flight if you were suckered enough to have to fly on this airline.

But you see, “Glowing Hearted” is not about that kind of stuff. It’s about the design in the air. The thing a 27-year-old will be asked to present at a stakeholder meeting with a straight face.

Air Canada’s EVP Mark Nasr said — and I am quoting directly — “We’re setting a new standard for how Canadians and the world connect with our brand.”

Mark. Buddy. You put bigger screens in economy seats. Simmer down a bit.

The press release tells us, “The new cabin design is inspired by Canada, creating a thoroughly modern space that evokes a sense of calm.”

I can hear you asking, “what does Canadian mean to Air Canada”

The answer, apparently, is glowing. And hearted. And if I’m being honest kind of bland and grey. That must be the luxury part? But I am forgetting that the “signature red stitching and bespoke fabrics provide a subtle Canadian touch paired with a palette of greys and stone.”

Sure those in the fancy areas are also, “greeted by a wave-like entrance monument, inspired by Canada’s waterways and anchored by the Air Canada rondelle cast in bronze.”

What are they even talking about? I do not need a welcome monument on my plane.

There was a time when airlines just had good names and used words like Fantabulous. Bonanza Air Lines launched in Las Vegas in 1945 with one Cessna and a dream of connecting the Southwest. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot.

By 1960 they were the first all-turbine airline in America. Here’s the best part. They called their DC-9s “Funjets.”

Not Joyful Skied Jets. Not Warmly Elevated Travel or even Glowing hearted.

Funjets.

They flew Las Vegas to Reno, Phoenix, LA, Salt Lake City, eventually Mexico. Then Howard Hughes bought them, Delta eventually absorbed the whole lineage and that was that.

Funjets. Two syllables. The opposite of whatever Air Canada is trying to call innovation.

That energy. The earnest, effortful, slightly over-explaining itself, runs through everything Air Canada does. And I say that as someone who has been apologized to by Air Canada while being delayed dozens of times.

The seats will be fine. No one is every going to say, “oh, have your flown in the new Glowing Hearted cabins?” Never. The name will haunt the brand manager for the rest of their career.

BEAVER LUMBER: A CANADIAN LOGO EULOGY

The logo says everything.

A beaver. A Green apron. A tool box. Yellow background. Absolutely unmistakable. The kind of identity that takes forty years to build and eighteen months to throw away.

Beaver Lumber started in 1906 in Winnipeg, after the Banbury brothers came down from Saskatchewan and bought up a bunch of other lumber stores. They needed a name connected to wood. Someone said “Beaver.” That was that. 94 years as a Canadian institution.

At its peak, 138 stores. Hardware. Lumber. Building supplies. The place your dad went on a Saturday morning and didn’t come back until 2pm.

Then Molson bought it.

The beer company. In 1972, for $40 million.

Why on earth did a beer company buy this and at the same time also own Aikenhead’s Hardware. Their plan was to merge the two chains and build a national hardware empire.

This is a real thing that happened. Canada’s most beloved brewery spent the better part of two decades in the lumber and hardware business.

Then Home Depot crossed the border.

Molson saw what was coming and made the only sensible call: sold Aikenhead’s to Home Depot in 1994 for $200 million. Then sat on Beaver for five more years, watching it retreat from cities to smaller towns, closing its big urban stores one by one. In 1999, they sold the rest to Home Hardware for $68 million.

By the end of 2000, the name was gone. Stores became the very on the nose, Home Building Centres. The green and yellow beaver gone.

The real tragedy isn’t the brand death. It’s the ownership sequence. A beloved Canadian hardware chain, built over 90 years, ending up as a line item in a brewery’s failed diversification strategy.

Molson didn’t kill Beaver Lumber exactly. But they were just holding the keys when Home Depot showed up.

RIP to a fine logo. And we didn’t even get Beaver Lumber lager? So dumb.

MARV THRONEBERRY: THE ORIGINAL SELF-AWARE SPOKESMAN

In 1975, a phone rang at midnight in Fisherville, Tennessee.

Marvin Eugene Throneberry picked it up. An ad executive on the other end offered him a job. A Miller Beer ad. They wanted athletes. They also, apparently, wanted Marv.

This was a strange call to receive.

Throneberry had been out of baseball for over a decade. His defining moment — and he had several — came in 1962, when he was the first baseman for the New York Mets. The expansion Mets. The ones who lost 120 games, a modern record that stood for over 40 years.

In one game, Marv hit what should have been a bases-clearing triple. Called out for missing first base. His manager, Casey Stengel came out to argue. An umpire walked over and said, “Casey, I hate to tell you this, but he also missed second.” Stengel, reportedly: “Well, I know he touched third because he’s standing on it.”

That’s Marv. His initials were MET. His fan club had 5,000 members who wore shirts that said VRAM, Marv spelled backwards and they chanted “Cranberry, Strawberry, we still want Throneberry.”

McCann-Erickson’s “Tastes Great / Less Filling” campaign was ranked by Ad Age as the eighth best advertising campaign in history. They filled it with legends. Mickey Mantle. Whitey Ford. Bob Uecker. Rodney Dangerfield. And then, at the end, they put in Marv.

His line: “If I do for Lite what I did for baseball, I’m afraid their sales will go down.”

That’s it. That’s the whole pitch. The results are impeccable.

In another spot, sportswriter Frank Deford sits at a bar waxing poetic about a beloved baseball icon. Billy Martin sits next to him, assuming Deford means him. Deford slides the beer to Marv. Marv looks at Martin: “Cheer up, Billy. One day you’ll be famous just like me.”

When he died of cancer in 1994 at 60, the New York Times ran a full column.

The lesson? Self-deprecation, delivered straight, is more charming than almost anything else. They didn’t ask Marv to pretend to be great. They paid Marv to be exactly himself.

ON THE DRINK CART: THE MILE HIGH RUM PUNCH

Since Air Canada just named their new cabin design the impossibly smug “Glowing Hearted” we have to be inspired by flight.

Flight attendants have been mixing rum, orange juice and cranberry in plastic cups at 35,000 feet for decades and calling it Crew Juice or simply a really great Friday.

This is the real Air Canada cabin experience. You have to drink to get through it.

It’s deadly simple:

• 2 oz rum

• 2 oz orange juice

• 2 oz cranberry juice

• Ice

Pour over ice. Stir. Done. If by some miracle you have an orange slice handy and you want to feel fancy, you do you. You’re not getting that fancy in the air.

The Drink Cart. A newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Wednesdays and Fridays.