Back in 1962 Procter & Gamble offered up a fully furnished house to anyone who could give Mr. Clean a first name.

The winning entry was Veritably.

Huh? What in the world?

No wonder not a single person had used that in 64 years. But earlier this year Mr. Clean announced his retirement and said that’s what he wanted to be called.

Two weeks later he was back at work.

THE CLEANER CAME FROM THE DOCKS

I love that this product’s origin story was basically that a ship-cleaning business was making their staff so sick and costing him liability because of the cleaning solvents used. So they mixed up something gentler that would still cut through the grease.

It worked so well that P&G bought it in 1958.

By August of that year the brand started dropping commercials in Pittsburgh and in six months it was one of the best-selling cleaners in America.

THREE MEN DREW HIM AND NOBODY AGREES ON WHAT HE IS

Mr. Clean started as an illustration. The character came from Harry Barnhart and Ernest Allen at Tatham-Laird & Kudner in Chicago.

But Fritz Siebel is credited with the first print illustration.

And just like pretty much every disputed cocktail origin in this newsletter, illustrator Richard Black’s 2014 New York Times obituary tells a third version. In that one he submitted two genies, one with a hoop earring and one with a nose ring. P&G chose the earring.

P&G’s official story says he was based on a Navy sailor from Pensacola. I honestly never got genie vibes, but the sailor makes sense. Seeing him in a suit in the 1950s is a wild take on Veritably Clean.

His own website now says some people think genie and some think sailor. It’s kind of amazing that everyone knows him, but almost 70 years in, even the brand hasn’t decided.

And just like Madge, Mr. Clean has a global cleaning force with their own names. In Germany he’s Meister Proper and in France he’s Monsieur Propre. Mexico calls him Maestro Limpio. In Quebec he’s M. Net. In the UK the Mr. Clean name was already taken by another brand, so he’s sold as Flash.

Thomas Scott Cadden wrote an incredible jingle in 1957 at his home in Skokie, Illinois, and recorded the demo on a home tape recorder.

I can only think of Verbal Kint, “I used to be in a barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois. The baritone was this guy named Kip Diskin, big fat guy, I mean, like, orca fat. He was so stressed in the morning…”

Anyway the finished version was a duet between Don Cherry and Betty Bryan.

That’s the American crooner Don Cherry, not the Coach’s Corner one in case you were wondering.

What’s interesting is that Mr. Clean’s first Super Bowl spot only ran in 2017. The ad was “Cleaner of Your Dreams” from Leo Burnett Toronto. A woman finds a spill on her stove, and an animated Mr. Clean in tight white pants appears and grinds his way through her house with a mop.

The fantasy ends when she sees it was her husband cleaning all along. The closing line was “You gotta love a man who cleans.”

Some critics called it creepy. That’s because it was.

Then on February 19, 2026, Mr. Clean’s Instagram posted an animated press conference where he announced he was retiring to pursue new hobbies. Over the next two weeks he DJed, cooked, played sports and toured a Maui mansion listed on Zillow as his retirement home.

On March 4 he came out of retirement to launch new Magic Erasers and a shower scrubber.

It got press twice, once for the exit and once for the comeback.

PENCILS DOWN

Mr. Clean has barely changed since Eisenhower. He has the same head, the same earring and the same folded arms, and he almost never speaks.

Planters already tried this whole when it killed Mr. Peanut in 2020. P&G’s version was gentler. They didn’t redesign the mascot or fire the agency. They took him away for two weeks, let people notice they missed him and then brought him back with a sponge to sell.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE WHITE LADY

We obviously needed a white cocktail for the man who only wears white. Like Mr. Clean, it has more than one creation story.

Harry MacElhone made a White Lady in 1919 at Ciro’s Club in London, but his version used crème de menthe.

He reportedly switched to gin around 1929 at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. Harry Craddock at the Savoy claimed the gin version as his own and printed it in his Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930.

According to Savoy lore, during a 1927 renovation Craddock sealed a shaker of White Ladies inside one of the hotel’s walls. Nobody has found it yet.

The egg white arrived decades later and is reportedly credited to Peter Dorelli, who ran the Savoy’s American Bar starting in 1984. The drink is bright and tart and looks spotless. The egg white also means the shaker will be a mess for Mr. Clean afterward.

The White Lady

• 2 oz gin

• 3/4 oz Cointreau

• 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

• 1 egg white (optional)

If you’re using the egg white, dry shake first, then shake again with ice. Strain into a chilled coupe. Leave out the egg if you want the 1930 Savoy version. Call Mr. Clean for help.

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 glad I haven’t written too much about the Michelin Man or buffets. We did talk about Michelin’s old UK Headquarters, but that’s about it.

So technically this issue is a brand mascot story. But it’s much more about trust.

In the very first ad for the legendary Michelin Man, he’s at a banquet, raising a goblet of nails and broken glass (as you do) and toasting to his ugly old tire friends.

Welcome to 1898. Ads were different back then.

THE MICHELIN MAN STARTED AS A BEER AD

Imagine being Édouard and André Michelin at the 1894 exhibition in Lyon when, after looking at a stack of old tires on of them said, “with arms it would make a man.”

It took another four years and then seeing a poster from Marius Rossillon for a Munich brewery. The poster showed King Gambrinus, the patron saint of beer with a line from Horace: Nunc est bibendum. Now is the time to drink.

The only note for Rossillon: make the king a pile of tires. Let him toast a bunch of junk from the road.

The tagline practically wrote itself: “the Michelin tire drinks up obstacles.” For the nerds reading apparently this is Horace riffing on the defeat of Cleopatra. So kind of a two-thousand-year-old dunk on a dead queen.

A race driver named Léon Théry saw him and reportedly yelled “Voilà Bibendum!” Since he didn’t know Latin he shouted at André Michelin the only word that sounded like a guy.

THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS FOOD GUIDE IS A TIRE PROMO

The story everyone in marketing knows is that a tire company in a country with fewer than 3,000 cars wasn’t going to amount to much. So in 1900 they handed out 35,000 free guides packed with maps, mechanics, gas stations and places to eat. If you can encourage more driving, you wear out more tires. So dumb.

This whole playbook helped invent content marketing.

And the interesting thing they discovered along the way was that giving that content out for free wasn’t working. The story goes that the guides were being used to prop workbenches up in tire shops. The takeaway? People only respect what they’ve paid for.

So they started charging. They pulled the ads out, hired anonymous inspectors and started handing out stars. The first one came in 1926. The concept of three lands by 1931. By 1936 the definitions were locked. One star, worth a stop. Two, worth a detour. Three, worth a special trip.

The stars were driving instructions. Carmy Berzatto in The Bear was destroying himself over tire-wear logistics.

A HOT BLONDE IS THE LAST HONEST CRITIC IN AMERICA

Admit it, you thought I was talking about Sydney Sweeney again.

Right now a mulleted-mail carrier in sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt is more than 100 days into eating at every Chinese buffet he can until he gets food poisoning.

His name is Brandon Elliott.

The internet knows him simply as Mullet Review, or by his self-appointed title, Hot Blonde.

It started in May with him and his mom at a Ginza Buffet in Milford, Ohio, the place they went when he was a kid. Since then he’s worked through some of the most disgusting-looking buffets in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Indiana. He picks them no matter how shocking their Google reviews are.

Every video runs exactly the same. Introduce the joint. Tell us how much he paid with a long, awkward pause. Then explore the buffet, careful to get the crab rangoons, the pizza, the chicken nuggets and anything that looks wet, disgusting or off-putting. Then he goes to the bathroom and takes his flip flops off.

Finally he delivers a verdict and the challenge lives for another day.

On Day 99, at the Everything OK Chinese Buffet in Frankfort, Indiana, his girlfriend noticed from behind the camera that the peanut butter chicken was raw. 8.8 million views.

He kept going anyway.

When he likes something, it counts. On Day 87 he gave Grand Buffet in Knoxville a rare five stars, for a spread that ran from sushi to spaghetti and meatballs to chicken livers. He spent half the video saying it looked like a Golden Corral in disguise. Locals chimed in. It was a former Golden Corral.

A creator in Chengdu has started copying his format. His review of her review: “99% accurate.”

PENCILS DOWN

André Michelin figured out in 1920 what brands are still paying consultants and agencies to relearn. People trust what costs something.

The Michelin inspector pays in secret. Hot Blonde pays on camera and shows you the number. $33.50 for two in Frankfort.

One wears a suit and a fake name. The other wears a mullet and flip flops.

Neither is selling you the food. The minute Michelin pulled the ads, the guide became worth buying. The minute a food creator takes a comped meal, there is no objective impartiality.

Which is awkward for an industry currently figuring out how much of its content it can let a machine make without ever mentioning it.

Trust was never about the polish. It was always more about the proof you were actually there.

Just look at this guy’s consistency. Same template, same counter, same stacked yellow-and-red headline, over a hundred times in a row. Some brand team will spend their whole budget and not reach the same brand consistency as him.

Plus he still hasn’t gotten sick. The counter keeps going. 110 visits and counting. Who are you really going to trust?

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: SCORPION BOWL

If Hot Blonde ever hits a buffet with a bar, this is what should show up. A giant ceramic bowl painted with hula girls, something orange in the middle and a fistful of long straws for the table.

This is the Scorpion Bowl.

In the late 1930s Trader Vic reportedly tried a version of this classic in Honolulu made with okolehao, a Hawaiian moonshine distilled from ti root. One 1938 Honolulu gossip column describes a party that went through three gallons of the stuff.

Absolutely deadly.

Vic went home to Oakland, swapped the moonshine for rum, put it in a custom bowl and called it his. His 1946 party version had 15 ingredients, including a half a bottle of white wine. It served 12.

From there it spread. When tiki hit the suburbs, bartenders and managers from places like Trader Vic’s, many of them Chinese-American, left to open or run their own restaurants and brought the recipes with them. Supply catalogs sold everybody the same bowl. By 1999 the owner of the Hong Kong in Cambridge was telling the Harvard Crimson that every Chinese restaurant in America had one on the menu.

Nobody ever gave it a star. Nobody had to.

Scorpion Bowl (for the table)

• 6 oz light rum

• 1 oz brandy

• 6 oz orange juice

• 4 oz fresh lemon juice

• 1 1/2 oz orgeat
  

Blend it up with a couple of scoops of crushed ice, pour into the biggest bowl you own, fill with ice and hand out long straws. No orgeat? What are you? A rookie? Fine, almond syrup works. Want some fire? Float a squeezed lime shell, add a splash of overproof rum and light it on fire.

Bibendum would like that. He was always smoking in those early days.

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 internet really has a full plate. The brands are doing everything to distract us. The outrage boom-bust cycle is having trouble keeping up.

KFC launched a cereal in the UK that you’re supposed to pour gravy on.

In Canada Kraft Dinner dropped a cream soda that tastes like mac and cheese. The tagline is something AI would do on the free plan: “Drink outside the box.”

And then Denny’s Canada launched a new pasta line up including a “Breakfast Spaghettini” that features a heart shaped egg on top.

Then Hidden Valley entered the chat. They dropped a glow-in-the-dark bottle with Walmart that from what I can tell is black ranch dressing.

All of these were some sort of coordinated brand Patriot missile system that helped soften the blow for the biggest outrages. But there were more.

LeBron James in an almost cynical deal is taking money from prediction market site Polymarket. That deal is a reported $15 million a year. His basketball team is only paying him $3.9 million. He’s selling sports picks during football season.

Converse accidentally sucked all the oxygen out of the room in an ad with aespa’s Karina that the internet believed was a coded KKK hood and a potential lynching.

Kylie Jenner published a Saint Tropez vlog that had people screaming about Marie Antoinette and letting them eat cake.

And if you haven’t read The Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts that made masks optional one night a week, clear your weekend.

So I can forgive everyone for missing Ari Gold and Vinny Chase in a gambling ad for a Paul brother.

ARI GOLD WORKS FOR JAKE PAUL NOW

Three minutes?

Yes, for three-plus minutes, Jeremy Piven pulls up to a Miami mansion and lays on the Ari Gold character thicker than I thought humanly possible to the bouncer and a series of other pseudo famous faces.

After an awkward exchange with Jake Paul who is spouting his betting app’s track record and stats, Piven eventually finds Adrian Grenier on a yacht.

He pitches him a movie. As a crooked jewel thief. Grenier says he’s done with movies.

He wants something better. And the better turns out to be Betr. Yep, Jake Paul’s gambling app. See what they did there?

Piven sells Grenier to Paul as the new face of the brand, then leans over and says the quiet part out loud: now we negotiate, we’re going to take all his money.

That’s it. That’s the whole ad.

Two guys from a show about Hollywood excess are reunited to sell sports betting for the guy who boxed a 58-year-old Mike Tyson. All without ever mentioning their characters.

And who’s mad?

HBO’s mad. Not about the gambling. About the boat and its former actors cosplaying as their IP.

Their cease and desist says the clothes, the dialogue and the whole vibe are too Entourage.

Awkward problem. When HBO got sued over Ballers, it told a judge that Miami, parties, boats and flashy cars belong to everybody. And won. Now the network wants the boats back.

Entourage creator Doug Ellin’s mad too. He called the ad trash and theft, told Piven to go flip burgers if he needs cash. He said he had to beg Piven to do the show in the first place. He’s just mad he didn’t get to make the spot.

Betr thanked him for all the free promo, claiming nearly 10 million views on day one.

But where was the internet rage?

They ripped Sydney Sweeney a new one over her exploitative ad, but this crass stolen valour of Entourage for a Paul brother’s gambling app? Not a peep.

Nobody is mad that either one is selling gambling.

One prediction app took Sydney Sweeney’s clothes off and put her on a billboard in Times Square and everyone is mad.

One prediction app backed a money truck up to LeBron and he started making amateur-hour picks for football season. A few people grumbled while Pete Rose rolled over in his grave.

Then betting app obviously ripped off an HBO show, and the only people mad about it were HBO’s lawyers.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that DraftKings built a machine-learning model in 2023 to figure out which customers would lose the most after getting a free bet. Internally it was called an elasticity score. According to the Times, roughly $400 million in AI-automated promotions went out last year. People were more mad at Sweeney. DraftKings denied they were doing anything wrong.

Kalshi at least did something interesting with Marshawn Lynch going into literal Beast Mode shot in 35mm. We don’t need art house gambling spots or the equivalent of Christopher Nolan prestige gambling cinema.

That’s kind of why prediction markets went from 1% of legal U.S. sports betting to 16% in three years. It’s a land grab. Celebrities are just the fence posts.

PETE ROSE REALLY WAS JUST TOO EARLY

Pete Rose would have loved to be LeBron.

Before he was baseball’s most famous gambler, Pete Rose was its hardest-working pitchman.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s he sold everything. Aqua Velva, Kool-Aid, Hungry Man, Grecian Formula, Milk Duds, Wheaties. Jockey underwear.

Can you believe this 1977 two-page spread of him in briefs next to Jim Palmer and seven other athletes. No one talked about how this degraded the sport. Probably because Rose could sell the hell out of Colour TVs.

The best one is from 1976 for Aqua Velva. Rose in a barbershop quartet, in a big league stadium, harmonizing about aftershave. LeBron could never.

In 1989 the Dowd Report found Rose bet on 52 Reds games in 1987, at least $10,000 a day. He was banned for life.

Denied it for 15 years. Admitted it in 2004.

He got a lifetime ban for basically doing what LeBron now gets $15 million a year to post about.

PENCILS DOWN

We’ve gotten really good at reading ads. Frame by frame. A skirt, a pair of sneakers and an HBO rip-off.

We’ve gotten worse at reading business models.

A publicly traded company built an AI that ranks people by how much they’ll lose and the internet gave it a mild shrug. A three-minute spot where Jake Paul buys two actors like a lot at an estate sale got flagged for copyright. The only formal objection to the Betr ad came from a cable company protecting its use of boats.

The brands have figured this out. Betr thanked the guy who called its ad garbage. Novig had Sydney on a Times Square billboard the same week the entire sports world was yelling at her. Outrage is attention and attention is the product.

You can’t screenshot the algorithm.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: BETWEEN THE SHEETS

Shocker. Everyone is still outraged about Sydney Sweeney and nobody knows who invented the Between the Sheets cocktail.

The safe bet is Harry MacElhone at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, sometime around the 1930s. That’s the answer 90% of the time. Harry’s gets credit for the Bloody Mary, the White Lady and the Old Pal, so it’s a reasonable guess.

But the Berkeley hotel claims it around 1921, a decade before Paris, supposedly from a manager whose name has come down to us only as Mr. Polly.

But mostly people say it started in French brothels, poured as an aperitif for the women working there before the night got going. There’s no proof. There never is.

You don't name a Sidecar with rum in it Between the Sheets by accident.

Between the Sheets

• 1 oz cognac

• 1 oz white rum

• 3/4 oz Cointreau

• 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

• Lemon peel

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled coupe. Express the lemon peel over the top. Any decent brandy works if you don’t have cognac, and triple sec will do in place of Cointreau.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. The same way I always wanted to end a newsletter with, I am Queens Boulevard. And you can definitely find a Pete Rose Gold Star Chili ad that features, “Dem Dogs Are Good” as the headline and rather misleading coupon. Where’s Johnny Drama when you need him?

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 banks. Let’s start with weird brand names. Maybe that’s how we came up with Pound & Grain.

I’ve always loved Ruth’s Chris steakhouse. The most garbled name in steaks. A name that Ruth told Fortune she kinda hated, “’But we’ve always managed to work around it.’‘

People are still making the name work by a pretty lively market on eBay for vintage Ruth’s Chris match books.

The real story is that in 1965 Ruth Fertel mortgaged her house to buy a failing New Orleans steakhouse called Chris Steak House.

The steakhouse burned down in 1976. The contract she signed said the name couldn’t leave the original location. So she just jammed her name on the front and reopened it a block away only a week later.

Ruth’s Chris.

Her ad agency mostly ignored the name. They spent most of their time talking about the steak hitting 500-degree plates and coming from 1800-degree broilers.

The relationship between Ruth and the agency’s Lana Duke were so close they built a $600,000 mausoleum together.

The agency designed it and they threw a champagne party for 200 to bless it.

Adweek called it the one account that would never go up for review. And I now am taking requests from any of my clients to split a tomb together.

THE BANK NAMED AFTER A MATH PROBLEM

But an Ohio bank did this same thing in 1908. The wonderfully named Fifth National Bank and the Third National Bank of Cincinnati merged.

Neither side wanted to lose their name, so they just stacked ‘em up and made an improper fraction.

This is as comically simple as the origin for WD-40’s name. If you didn’t know it is simply the letters to represent Water Displacement - the original usage. The 40? Simply the number of tries it took Rocket Chemical to get the chemical mixture right in 1953.

I’ve said it before. And I’ll say it again. Dumb is the secret weapon in branding and advertising.

Meet Fifth Third Bank.

They figured out, like Ruth’s agency, that these names are cumbersome at best. So they hired famed Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench to be the face of everything.

When Bench made the Hall of Fame in 1989, the bank gave every employee a commemorative lapel pin. In Ohio 5/3 didn’t mean anything other than Johnny.

Since then the bank just started leaning into how silly the name is. By 2017 Pereira O’Dell started making ads promising, “This is banking a Fifth Third better.”

Then earlier this week they dropped the name on Detroit’s Comerica Park. The reaction was swift.

One fan remarked, “Always nice when a Rural Juror occurs in real life.” Another said, “The USA’s stupidest bank name will now be it’s stupidest ballpark name.” Some just said, “Disgusting.”

The bank didn’t buy the naming rights. They bought Comerica (another bank) for $10.9 billion and Fifth Third got the naming rights in the merger.

Comerica used to be The Detroit Bank & Trust (that’s the ad at the start of the newsletter). And you have to love this part. They swapped the local branding and use of Detroit for an invented word that sounded national. Then they moved to Dallas.

Stadium naming rights are the worst thing in branding.

The Chicago White Sox Comiskey became U.S. Cellular Field then Guaranteed Rate Field. Then the lender rebranded and it became the even dumber Rate Field

Louisville has the KFC Yum! Center. New Orleans has Smoothie King Center. Pittsburgh swapped the smartly named Heinz Field into Acrisure Stadium, an insurance company brand no one talks about or can pronounce.

There’s a stadium in the UK named The Home of the Set Fare Arena. Which is only weird if you remember it was previously called Tony Macaroni Arena for the Scottish-Italian restaurant chain. That sounds like something AI would create.

It could be worse, it could be Wankdorf Stadium.

Detroit will probably keep saying Comerica.

That means a city will stay loyal to a bank that dropped “Detroit” from its name and left town.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE HUMMER

If you thought I wrote this to sneak baseball into this newsletter yet again, you are only partially right.

I just really wanted to talk about this drink’s origin story.

In 1967 a rookie bartender named Jerome Adams took over from a man who had tended bar at Detroit’s Bayview Yacht Club for nearly 30 years.

The regulars reminded Adams of this almost every shift. On a slow night in 1968, he threw rum, Kahlúa and vanilla ice cream into a blender and and found a winner.

A member had two and said they made him want to hum. Thus, the hummer was born. Although a London Chop House bartender disputes this story. It wouldn’t be a cocktail without a disputed origin.

Later that fall, the Tigers won the World Series.

Adams would bartend at the Bayview for 50 years.

The Hummer became the unofficial state drink.

It also would become the ridiculously large GM truck. No relation. Just funny.

The drink was invented by a new guy trying to live up to a legend. Fifth Third should order two of these.

The Hummer

• 1 oz white rum

• 1 oz Kahlúa

• 2 large scoops vanilla ice cream

• 2 ice cubes

Blend it until smooth and pour into a rocks glass. No Kahlúa? Any coffee liqueur works. Make a full pitcher and think about the original Tiger Stadium and how rad it looked.

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.

Let me start this newsletter off by saying today is about John Wayne and beer.

It starts with the simple story that The Duke got radiation treatment on the morning of his last appearance. He was presenting the Best Picture award at the Oscars in 1979.

The crowd stood. And two months later the legend was gone.

Seventeen years after that, he starred in a beer commercial.

This issue is about what happens to a person after they die. How do we go from his face on beer cans to baseball cards? Let’s see how it goes.

THE INSTAGRAM CAPTION GOT EVERYTHING WRONG

A few weeks back I found a post about these amazing John Wayne Coors cans.

You know, the Duke on horseback and the idea of “An American Original”. That rang up nearly 16k likes.

The post got a few things wrong. They said early 1990s. That was wrong. And so was the story they missed.

Technically the cans came out in 1997, and they came out because in May of 1996, Coors Light aired a commercial starring John Wayne. The ad dropped in the season finale of Friends, the biggest TV night of the year.

This one featured R. Lee Ermey, the “Full Metal Jacket” drill sergeant who interrogates his platoon over a six-pack left in the barracks.

But he’s interrupted by Wayne, lifted frame by frame from the 1966 film “Cast a Giant Shadow”, telling him “It’s my beer, Sergeant.” They went on to make one where he shows up in a bar to save some guests from some bullies.

They also made one where the Duke was a football coach.

Another one with Johnny Knoxville too.

The spots were made by Foote, Cone & Belding out of Chicago and directed by Joe Pytka. They shot with a stand-in over five days and then digitally inserted a dead man. The process took three weeks, using technology similar to Forrest Gump. In hindsight the ads don’t even seem as good as AI was 2 years ago. Reminds me more about seeing President Bill Clinton getting stitched into the 1997 classic, “Contact”.

The deal would end up funding the John Wayne Cancer Institute. To get the rights to use him, Coors underwrote a fundraising campaign for the charity.

Wayne died of stomach cancer. The beer can was a cancer fundraiser. Sit with that one.

People are probably still arguing about the ghoulishness of it all after all these years.

THE DUKE HATED HIS OWN ADS FIRST

John Wayne was no stranger to exploiting his image.

He did Camel cigarette ads in the early 50s asking “Why Did You Change to Camels?”

Then the legend got lung cancer, quit and became a spokesman for the American Cancer Society.

Two divorces. Another separation. Seven kids and growing cancer bills in the 70s would get him back to Monument Valley, where he made The Searchers.

It was here in 1976 that he shot commercials for Datril 500, an acetaminophen brand. His line: “I asked my doctor about taking Datril 500. He said ‘great.’ Ask your doctor.”

The Boston Globe reported he was incredibly fussy about how the ad should look, to preserve his image. There was no preserving anything. It’s still cited as one of the worst celebrity-product matchups ever, and Wayne hated it enough to get Bristol-Myers to cancel the reported $200,000-a-year contract after one year.

Then he found the right gig. Great Western Savings. Him on horseback, talking straight to camera about California, “A pretty nice place.” The spots reportedly added over $20 million in new accounts. He passed away within a year of shooting these, but secured his finances.

The man understood his own brand better than most agencies could ever.

EVERYBODY’S DOING IT AND EVERYBODY’S DEAD

Coors didn’t invent this playbook. It was an incredible 1990s door that brands walked through.

Diet Coke pioneered this whole genre starting with Paula Abdul dancing with Groucho Marx, Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong and Cary Grant.

1997 became the year of the dead spokesperson.

Wayne’s beer cans hit shelves. Lucille Ball went on California Lottery tickets. I couldn’t find that one, but I did find a rather unfortunate lottery ad featuring OJ Simpson and Jose Canseco that is worth the watch.

And during the Super Bowl, Dirt Devil ran three spots of Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner. His widow signed the deal.

But his daughter Ava wrote an open letter to Dirt Devil, returning the vacuum she’d bought from them. She called the ads paltry, unconscionable and “the antithesis of everything my lovely, gentle father represented”. Ouch.

Advertising has never really stopped this.

Gene Kelly breakdancing for Volkswagen in 2005 to a remix of his own song.

A CGI Audrey Hepburn selling Galaxy chocolate in 2013, the same year a digital Bruce Lee sold Johnnie Walker in China.

Even David Fincher directed one.

And they dug up Steve McQueen twice for Ford. Once for a Puma, then again for the new Mustang.

COORS ALSO MADE TRADING CARDS OF ITS OWN ADS.

The most interesting thing is that the Wayne campaign wasn’t a one-off. It was the middle of a trilogy.

In 1995, the year before the resurrection, Coors released an odd Coors Collectors’ Cards set. A 100-card set depicting the history and advertising of the company, sold in wax packs just like baseball cards.

Each hobby box included 36 packs with 8 cards in a pack and included chase cards called “Rocky Mountain Heritage.”

A brewery printed trading cards of its own advertising, scenes of Coors beer factories, mountains and of course legendary cold mountain streams. With history on the back.

I know because I just opened a box.

You haven’t lived until you’ve found not one, but two Zima cards. The elusive clear malt beverage that screams 90s.

Or when you get a chrome parallel “Golden Moments” refrigerated boxcar card? Chills. Like the fresh mountain water.

You can’t imagine the thrill of getting 5 minutes of “Coors Calls” in a pack. If you guess that this pull is a now expired long distance calling card, you were right. Trust me, I tried calling the 1-800 number. The thrill was palpable. Why an expired for over 30 years calling card is selling for $12 on eBay, I’ll never know.

What a three-year brand run.

1995, trading cards of the old ads.

1996, dead John Wayne in a new ad.

1997, commemorative cans of the dead John Wayne, sold in collectible cases.

They weren’t selling beer anymore. They were selling Coors, the concept.

A full case of 24 John Wayne cans sold on eBay for $47.50. An unopened hobby box of the cards went at auction for thirty bucks. You can even get full John Wayne Coors display signage still.

Thirty years of careful basement storage and the entire Coors nostalgia-industrial complex is worth less than a fresh case at the LCBO. That’s not a collectible. That’s a beer with a longer sales cycle.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: EL DIABLO

Apparently the Duke’s drink wasn’t Coors at all. It was tequila.

And he liked it. A big splash of Sauza Conmemorativo, in a small glass with one ice cube and a squeeze of lime, confirmed by a congressman who learned to drink at Wayne’s house.

The legend has it that after meeting with Khrushchev, he got cases of Russian vodka marked “Duke. Merry Christmas. Nikita”

So the Duke shipped back cases of Sauza signed “Nikita. Thanks. Duke.”

You have to respect a man that liked drinking more than he hated communists.

So this week’s cocktail is a tequila classic with a devil’s name.

The El Diablo is usually credited to Trader Vic, who printed it in his 1946 book and marked it as an original.

Except Difford’s found the receipts: a rum Diablo with the same lime-cassis-ginger build appears in a 1940 bar book. Vic swapped the rum for tequila and took all the credit. The “original” designation quietly vanished from his later editions.

It’s fitting that in a newsletter about licensing dead men’s faces, the cocktail is a borrowed likeness with the serial numbers filed off.

El Diablo

• 1 1/2 oz reposado tequila

• 1/2 oz crème de cassis

• 1/2 oz lime juice

• Ginger beer to top

• Lime wedge

Build in a highball glass over ice, top with ginger beer, garnish with the lime wedge. Vic used ginger ale, but modern ginger ale is kind of a bore, go full ginger beer. Exactly what the Duke would’ve handed you if he wasn’t drinking straight tequila all the time.

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.

Slowly but surely, I’m going to sneak more baseball content into this newsletter. It was bound to happen. You’re welcome.

This week I wanted to talk about a billboard from the 1930s. At a ballpark in Philadelphia that hasn’t existed since 1950. And hadn’t seen a baseball game since 1938. This was Baker Bowl or National League Park.

Sometime in the mid-1930s a man broke into the ballpark at night and painted on top of the giant ad in the outfield. The ad, gloriously oversized for Lifebuoy soap reading The Phillies Use Lifebuoy, got the wonderful addition of “And They Still Stink.”

A great line. A great rebuttal to an ad. And a team that was arguably terrible. There’s a reason they are the all-time leader in franchise loses. The joke wrote itself. And the vandal kind of knew the brand well enough that this laddered up to the soap’s positioning and work they had done.

Stink was the very worst thing you can have. The Phillies were stink.

But this is an issue about one of the most successful lies in advertising history.

THE PROBLEM DIDN’T EXIST YET

A high school student named Edna Murphey was bottling up her father’s home-brewed antiperspirant in 1910. He needed it so that his hands wouldn’t slip in the operating room as a surgeon.

But Edna started dabbing it under her arms, decided it actually worked for her stinky pits and called it, Odorono. Odor? Oh no. Definitely a top 5 brand name and story if you ever heard one.

The problem was nobody was buying it.

Women thought it was unnecessary or unhealthy. But Edna was no quitter. She took it to an Atlantic City expo in 1912. The sweaty crowds finally gave her the proof of concept to go all in.

She took out a $50,000 bank loan and hired J. Walter Thompson.

The agency assigned copywriter James Webb Young. A name we’ll get back to, maybe not in a good way.

TWO THIRDS OF WOMEN WERE FINE

JWT started with door-to-door survey research. Every woman knew Odorono was a thing. A third used it. Two thirds said they had no need for it.

Young didn’t try to speak to the third who already used it. He gave the other two thirds a problem. His 1919 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal had an incredible headline: “Within the Curve of a Woman’s Arm — A frank discussion of a subject too often avoided.”

This was serious business for a print ad. This was the genesis of a social issue so bad that men pulled away and your friends talked about it behind your back. It was cruel advertising at its most lethal.

You couldn’t smell yourself. You couldn’t even check.

200 women were so offended by this ad they canceled their subscriptions. But damn if the sales didn’t go up 112 percent. She sold the company in 1929 after a copywriter created an entire category, deodorant, through mass anxiety. They even coined the term “B.O.” in 1919.

The category of stink is now worth more than $18 billion.

LIFEBUOY SMELLED BLOOD

But let’s get back to Lifebuoy.

The soap was launched in the UK back in the mid-1890s as Royal Disinfectant Soap. No big deal, just carbolic soap loaded with, yep, actual carbolic acid.

The early ads claimed it protected you from typhoid, cholera and diphtheria and absolutely crushed it with this line, “For Saving Life. For Preservation of Health.”

But those are pretty hard claims to make. The whole carbolic angle gets dropped from the ads and replaced with two genius nothing-words, “health ingredient.”

Then the brand started to campaign on body odor. The earliest ads found are from Australia with the line, “If private thoughts were spoken...” Everyone is judging how bad you stink, buy soap.

Incredible stuff.

Then they cranked out every anxiety you could have for 20 years and made a sales funnel of smelly fear. Romance: “B.O. cheated Evelyn out of popularity.” The Depression: “B.O. gone... he keeps his job now!” They even ran ads implying people were losing their jobs in the middle of the Great Depression because they smelled.

If you were single? “Jill engaged? Why she must be 32, at least!” And she stunk. Married women? They were rebranded as smelly B.O. widows.

All of them ran the same devilishly simple formula. You’ve got B.O. You can’t smell it. Someone tells you. Lifebuoy saves your marriage, your job, your life.

There was even a 1933 ad where a kid rats out his own mother. Talk about a stinky snitch trap.

THE FOGHORN DID THE REST

But my favourite part of all of this is the radio.

I would have loved to have heard them pitch this in the room. Basically Lifebuoy’s spots all used a comically awesome foghorn that blasted a groaning “Beee-Ohhhh.”

This was a brand-sonic before they became trendy. They industrialized sound of stink thanks to the Sonovox (and yes, I sure did have to look that up).

And this got so embedded into culture that Looney Tunes and MGM used the foghorn B.O. gag for stinky stuff like it was a paid placement in cartoons.

And cementing the idea and sound of B.O. in America from 1930 to 1950 made Lifebuoy the best-selling medicated soap in North America.

But it didn’t last. Perfumed soaps arrived in the category and the B.O. fears wore off a little. Eventually Lifebuoy vanished from shelves. Not before Ralphie gets his mouth washed out with it in A Christmas Story.

This was soap that terrorized generations with that threat. Lifebuoy is gone, but B.O. and threats aer still here doing their job.

PENCILS DOWN

I promised that we’d get back to James Webb Young.

He would go on to write the classic book, A Technique for Producing Ideas. This has been a seminal read for copywriters since 1940.

It’s a tiny book, probably handed out to countless creatives over the years written by the guy who invented manufactured shame.

He taught us not to sell the cure, but sell the whispering.

The same things you see on LinkedIn every week about how your competition is already using AI. Or what they are saying about you behind your back.

That playbook never misses. The technique for making you check your own armpits never goes out of style.

Set your pencils down and pour something to wash the stink off.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE SCOFFLAW

In October of 1923 a filthy rich banker from Quincy, Massachusetts named Delcevare King announced a contest. Now King was VP of the state’s Anti-Saloon League chapter and part of the Watch and Ward Society. This was the guy for sure talking behind your back about your drinking.

He was offering up $200 in gold for a new word to shame illegal drinkers. He was looking for something with the same rhetorical thrill and “”the biting power of ‘scab’ or ‘slacker.’”

He got 25,000 entries.

Some gems that didn’t win are electric: still-whacker, slime-slopper, cellar-sifter, boozlag, hooch-sniper, bottle-yegger and the majestic law-loose-liquor-lover.

The judges chose the word “scofflaw.” That was submitted by two different people who split the gold.

The mockery started immediately.

The New York Times predicted scofflaws “will not be startled nor abashed at being told that they do what they have never tried to conceal.”

Two others launched counter-contests to land an antonym. Then within a few days a bartender named Jock at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris dropped the Scofflaw cocktail on his menu.

Truthfully it may have been invented a few blocks away at Maxim’s. But that’s cocktails.

This cocktail, much like what Young did with deodorant, was to manufacture shame at scale. Young turned that into an $18 billion smell industry. King’s drink just became the rye sour.

But B.O. and scofflaw are both still in the dictionary.

The Scofflaw

• 1 1/2 oz rye whiskey

• 1 oz dry vermouth

• 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

• 3/4 oz grenadine

• 2 dashes orange bitters

Shake with ice, strain into a coupe. Lemon twist. And be smug about the story you now know. And don’t forget:

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.

From 1966 to 1992 there was an incredible beauty parlour called Salon East. It had one employee. A manicurist. Catty, quick, always right. This was advertising world-building the likes of which we’ve not seen in decades.

A customer comes in and complains about dry hands.

Then Salon East’s very own Madge would absolutely cook. She would eye up those dry hands and drop an absolute heater of a one-liner like she was the roast master on cable before dropping those gross talons in nuclear-looking green liquid.

Don’t you worry. That was just sweet, sweet Palmolive dish soap at work.

The customer would gasp and yank their hands out.

Calm. Cool, collected Madge knew exactly what she was doing.

“You’re soaking in it.”

A world with one set. One character. One type of joke. Twenty-six years of advertising gold.

THE WOMAN IN THE CHAIR

Madge was played by the incomparable Jan Miner. She made her Broadway debut in 1960 in a comedy called Viva Madison Avenue!

Yes, a romp about the ad business that lasted two shows and just one night. It’s almost too much to share that she was playing a character named Peggy long before Sterling Cooper.

Six years later the real Madison Avenue would make her immortal.

But she had to audition first. Something an agency exec at Ted Bates suggested she try out for.

So Miner shows up in a room full of younger, pretty manicurists and she thought she was in the wrong place. But she saw through that casting and created the whole Madge character in her head right then and there.

I can only imagine how this must have really rubbed the agency creative team the wrong way. But she became the brand book for Madge and would object to scripts that she felt didn’t work for the character. She promoted herself to show runner of the Madge show.

THE FRANCHISE NOBODY NOTICED

This next part will blow your mind.

There was a Madge for every country.

She became Françoise in France. Tilly in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Marissa in Finland. Sylvia in Denmark. She was Madge again down under and in New Zealand, but locally recast.

Each market got the same salon, the same bowl of Palmolive, the same outrageous gasp. And just a different actress playing Madge.

The brand was basically licensing a sitcom to international markets before Hollywood would actually figure that out.

A world so solid that it survived new cast members on three continents.

THE LOST GENRE

Madge wasn’t the only one running this playbook.

There was a metaverse of service workers delivering single jokes for decades. It was a damn near Avengers of advertising.

There was Mr. Whipple. A grocer who begged customers for over twenty years not to squeeze the Charmin while doing exactly that the whole time.

There was Rosie who pushed Bounty across the diner counter for her two decade long shift.

What about Mrs. Olson, the neighbour who hooked up every young marriage with Folgers since nobody knew how to make good coffee back then.

There was also Cora, the general store owner who recommended Maxwell House. She was hilariously played by the Wicked Witch of the West, Margaret Hamilton.

And as we shared a few weeks ago, the Maytag Repairman, the loneliest man in the whole universe.

These ads worked like gangbusters. A manicurist, a grocer, a waitress, a neighbour, a shopkeeper, a repairman. A whole cast working across competing brands in a shared universe no agency could think of.

Then, just like that, the industry decided they were corny as hell and killed the genre.

But you can’t kill this gold. The smuggest creatives in the business can’t help but reboot it with bigger budgets and bolder concepts.

Flo showed up in 2008 with a white apron and has been shilling Progressive ever since. There’s Jake from State Farm. Mayhem for Allstate.

Flo is the heir to Madge.

PENCILS DOWN

But try to get Madge approved today?

You’d get maybe two years out of her before the CMO left. Madge outlasted six generations of CMOs, six presidents and every agency review along the way. No one dared to deviate from the platform and people still remember the ads.

Brands and agencies today lack the discipline and balls to stick to a world like this.

They add collab stunts, merch and constant rebrands that could never top the hard work of one mean lady doing manicures and cracking unreal one-liners for 26 years.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE WATER LILY

Months ago, I foolishly bought a bottle of crème de violette. Oh, the things I’d do for one cocktail in one newsletter. It showed up in the Mr. Peanut issue and has been full-on haunting the Drink Cart ever since.

So just like everyone who saw Madge, that bottle needed a manicure. For this one we’re soaking in The Water Lily.

Unlike the last few weeks this is a very modern cocktail. Invented at Little Branch in New York. A place that I was probably last in around that same time. It’s got a speakeasy-for-beginners vibe and I seem to remember ordering fizz drinks for no reason I can remember now.

And I’m pretty sure another creative director from our agency at the time took glee in steeling a few of the metal straws from the bar. I thought that was the craziest thing I saw on the trip.

Until my creative and business partner Graham invented a cocktail called “The Laser Bomb”. It was actually just a shot of vodka in a Bud Light Lime. I think he got a free mini bottle of Belvedere because his hotel room had an issue. Like all great cocktails it was a mistake.

He even made a website for it. If we had AI and Claude Code back then, this would have really turned into something big.

Anyway, the story goes that a guest named Georgette asked bartender Richard Boccato for something with gin and violet, he built it on the spot and named it after her middle name Lillian.

This is definitely the kind of service Madge would have wanted for us. As long as your hands were beat up like an old boxer’s.

And yes, this is a Venn diagram of cocktail, floral and stunning. And if you ask me, the violette really does still taste like soap and that bottle will likely haunt me for the rest of my life at this point.

The Water Lily

• 3/4 oz gin

• 3/4 oz Cointreau

• 3/4 oz crème de violette

• 3/4 oz lemon juice

Shake it all with ice, double strain into a chilled coupe glass, and garnish with an orange twist and toast to soaking your hands in dish soap all thanks to Madge.

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 really sure that the US Open has actually broken the influencer economy. But I’m not, not saying it has either.

It might be the tennis-balled, Honey-Deuced melon ball that broke the creator’s back.

Everyone knows that the US Open is the less refined version of tennis. It’s rowdy. Clearly never as posh as Wimbledon and all that. But it still was wild to see a group of fans doing full on photoshoots with a ring light from a hospitality suite while Naomi Osaka was serving.

The chair umpire had to stop the game and tell grown adults to sit down. The players said they could hear the “fans” shouting from the court.

What followed quickly was footage going viral, calls to ban influencers from sports cranked up to 11 and everyone reminding themselves that “The US Open used to be an actual tennis tournament.”

It just might be that there was a bit of a cultural red line that has been crossed. Brands immediately started issuing etiquette memos to their influencers while the tournament started revoking access.

It was veteran player Adrian Mannarino that said what everyone was thinking, “The tournament puts up with it, and I don’t know if it’s the best thing for tennis in general…The truth is it’s turning into a bit of a zoo.”

You love to see it.

THE US OPEN DID IT TO THEMSELVES

Hot on the heels of 54 credentialed influencers driving 5.5 million social engagements last year, the USTA doubled down and invited 100 creators this year.

And they didn’t just invite tennis people. They invited anyone with a following. The tournament’s CEO Craig Tiley wants the event to become “the tennis Disneyland.”

Now Disneyland is great, but the “Disneylandification” of everything is not great. I’ll always remember my friend Dan calling a winery in the Okanagan, Disneyland once. It did such a great job of why the winery kind of sucked. It was devoid of a winery soul, and felt manufactured and not authentic at all. I’ve compared places to that all the time ever since.

I totally get why they think they need to do this. Up until recently Tennis was kind of an old person sport that showed up on the Tennis Channel a couple times a year. Getting all these influencers and brands involved has made the tickets worth it. Get in ticket prices for the first round are up 33%.

To be fair it wasn’t real influencers that ruined it. I think it was influencer culture that did it in. Influencers paved the way for people even invited by brands to start doing whatever they wanted in brand suites.

These ring light and influencer-coded zombies are taking everything they see in their feeds and acting the same way. The same way as listening to Youtube on the streetcar or a plane with full volume and no headphones.

It’s a symptom we are dealing with everywhere. For treating every interaction in life as content and you are the main character of the show.

THE FUNNIEST DOCUMENT OF THE YEAR

At least the brands decided they had to act fast.

Following Osaka’s incident at least one brand sent etiquette guidelines to influencers they had invited.

“We’d absolutely love to see content from the day and appreciate any tags where relevant!”

That polite bullet list explaining that you should remain seated during points and keep your phone on silent is kind of telling. It’s unreal that that wasn’t a default factory setting for humans attending.

Imagine your brand Slack channel blowing up during the drafting of that memo.

And then we have to look at the last two decades of marketing. We practically begged consumers to make content. We made campaigns, let them submit ads and awarded prizes, put the social media icons on everything we possibly could until everyone started sharing.

We trained entire generations after Gen X that filming content was how you experienced everything. Now we have to retrain everyone to be mindful of their seat mates. It’s shocking.

If ever there was a time to bring out the sequel to the greatest tennis movie of all time, Wimbledon and bring back the tennis wisdom of Peter Colt as a commentator melting down about influencers, now is the time.

THIS WAS NEVER JUST ABOUT TENNIS

Just like Richie Tannebaum. This is not a tennis problem. It’s a society problem.

Last year Pew found that 47% of American adults say people behave more rudely in public than before the pandemic.

74% say it’s rarely or never acceptable to film someone without their permission. There’s entire niche creators that just go around filming people to get authentic Karen reactions in the wild until cops show up and tell them that they can’t stop them in public. I’m telling you if you watch one of them, you’ll get sucked up into a wormhole of first amendment content that takes weeks to dig out of.

No wonder people think you can throw phones at Drake. You’re making content. The throw is the whole post.

Now, as someone who sipped from the chalice of NIMBYism like Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade and complained to city hall just this week, is this an example of this decline or just shifting of societal norms?

There has always been, and there will always be idiots doing stupid things in public. There’s just more of them now, and a lot of them are performing the idiocy for the camera now.

We are the content for the algorithm now. We’re the slop.

IS THIS THE RUBICON

That’s why it’s so interesting that Wimbledon just did the unthinkable. Banned accreditation for influencers and content creators as well as creator paraphernalia like ring lights.

This is the no-liquids-through-security of tennis moment.

Sure, Wimbledon as a brand, like the Masters, is in the scarcity business. They are selling you sophisticated experiences that are not controlled by the attendees. They are dictated by the brand. That’s what you are paying for.

For all this time the influencer economy ran on a beautiful glitch in the matrix. Give them all the access of the press and none of the obligations. No editors, no code of conduct, no credentials to revoke.

At the very least the wild west era of creators seems to be coming to an end. Will this break the whole influencer economy? Sadly not.

You knew there had to be at least one ad in this newsletter. In 1990 Canon ran the pilot episode of influencer culture. They crafted a line that has haunted Agassi for the rest of his life. The ad that made him think people thought he was style over substance.

Caesar crossed the Rubicon with one legion. This one crossed with a ring light and a suite pass.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE MILLIONAIRE

A century ago, if you wanted people to know you had money you walked into a hotel bar and ordered a cocktail called the Millionaire.

Technically there were as many as five versions that used this name during Prohibition. Some had whiskey, others had rum or gin. Harry Craddock featured two of them in his Savoy Cocktail Book. The point of these cocktails never was the taste, it was the ordering and the name that were important.

Some things just never change. The brand suite heathens in Queens were ordering the millionaire with their behaviour and filming it.

Today’s version uses Rye - which is good, because of course, we still aren’t selling Bourbon here. It was credited to the Ritz Hotel in London. If you’ve never had a cocktail and a club sandwich at the Rivoli Bar, you’re missing out.

But again, that’s a bar has a standard and dress code (unless you are paying Ritz room prices then you can get away with pretty much anything). These are things that keep the experience intact and should be enforced at all costs.

I hate wearing fancy clothes, but nothing is better than seeing people turned away from fancy hotel bars, for wearing shorts and a baseball cap. It’s worth it.

Millionaire Cocktail

• 2 oz rye

• 1/2 oz orange curaçao

• 1 tsp grenadine

• 1 egg white

• A dash of absinthe or pastis

Dry shake everything without ice to froth that egg white, then shake hard with ice and double strain into a cocktail glass. Don’t panic, if you don’t have that curaçao at hand you can use Grand Marnier or Cointreau. Pro-tip: Always use the real pomegranate grenadine not the red dye #40 stuff.

Remember you’re a millionaire, act like 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.

Let’s start by digging through the ruins of civilization over on eBay.

It’s 2026, someone has the temerity to sell 100 sealed Max Headroom paper masks. Sure they’re official New Coke promo items from our high watermark of civilization. But $399.95 is absolutely bonkers.

But a few more scrolls and you fall off your chair. There it is. A genuine 1987 “C-C-C-Catch The Wave” official Max Headroom Coke skateboard. Is it eleven hundred in Canadians dollars? Yes, yes it is.

Keep scrolling. More my speed and budget is the poster of Max Headroom on a beach with the headline: WARNING: Coke-ologist on break.

The 80s were absolutely insane. And within this culture wreckage is the strangest chapter in Coca-Cola history when the brand tried for two years to out youth Pepsi with a fake computer character.

You’re probably wondering who Max Headroom is and what I’m talking about. But let me just say that by July 4th 1985, barely two months after launch, people were starting to hoard cans of the original Coke.

I remember that specifically while at Roche Harbor that summer. If you had a can of the original stuff, you were a demi-god.

Shortly after that, Coke caved and announced that Coca-Cola Classic was returning. The only problem? What do you do with all that new stuff?

C-C-C-CATCH THE WAVE

By 1986, New Coke was dying. Pepsi had strategically deployed Michael Jackson and Michael J. Fox. And if you can imagine, the new formula of Coke even makes future toxic star Bill Cosby walk from the Coke account.

Over at McCann, Arnie Blum goes for the “youts”. His take was that if the old formula was classic, the new formula was modern, hip and something your parents didn’t understand. And he needed a pitchman to beat MJ.

After seeing a tape of a British-made glitching, supposedly computer-generated talk show host, shared from rival agency BBDO, he’d found his man.

So then we see Max Headroom interviewing a Pepsi can about how it feels that more drinkers prefer Coke.

Within 30 days 76% of American teenagers can name him. The company’s hotline (imagine still having such a thing) takes more calls about Max than any other spokesperson in history.

There were questions, marriage inquiries and a line of merch that is still clogging up the pages of eBay 40 years later. Shirts, skateboards, posters, cups, watches.

The brand started calling fans Coke-ologists.

THE BIG LIE

But Max wasn’t computer-generated at all. There was no computer. Computers couldn’t even render a face in 1985.

Instead it was Canadian actor Matt Frewer in latex prosthetics, contact lenses and a full on fiberglass suit that all took nearly five hours to get right.

Even the glitches and stutters were actually just editing. Frewer for his part was sworn to secrecy, “That’s me, that’s me, it’s not a computer-generated man.”

The wildest part is that even people at actual computer graphics companies believed it was real.

There was an origin story movie that aired in England in April 1985. It told the story of a journalist fleeing corporate goons. He knocks himself out with a parking clearance sign that reads: MAX. HEADROOM: 2.3M.

Somehow his memories get downloaded into an AI that names him after the very last thing he saw. The creators also built him on the worst of American TV hosts desperate to seem young.

Young enough to land a Coke deal within a year.

MAXIMUM EXPOSURE

Then Max Headroom was everywhere.

The music video show. A hit single. Magazine covers. Interviewing Sting. Letterman.

Even a prime-time drama about evil TV networks who, and this is the best part, used compressed ads (literally called “Blipverts” that killed viewers.

The irony of a show paid for by advertisers about advertisers murdering people, starring a guy selling Coke in the ad breaks.

That is about as 80s as it gets. The show lasts two seasons.

The ads limped on into 1987 and then stopped. New Coke was dying.

THE HIJACKING

In Chicago on November 22, 1987 at 9:14 pm the WGN sports segment cut to black.

A man in a rubber Max Headroom mask appears, jerking around in front of a sheet of corrugated metal tilted to mimic Max’s background. No audio, just buzz. Engineers kill it in 30 seconds.

Then at 11:15 pm he’s back. This time on WTTW interrupting Doctor Who, and now the audio works outlining a distorted rambling about the Coke deal, and somehow finishes up with a fly swatter.

Both the FCC and FBI investigated but have never caught anyone capable of the expertise to hack a microwave transmitter with line of sight to the broadcast towers in Chicago.

So the fake AI was deepfaked live on air by a still at large anonymous imposter mocking his real sponsor before we ever knew what deep fakes even were.

It’s still the most famous unsolved broadcast intrusion in American television. I guess maybe those paper masks on eBay are underpriced.

PENCILS DOWN

In 1986 we had an AI spokesperson that was a human pretending to be a computer. And Coke made ads that required hours in make up and human creativity.

In 2026 the roles are reversed. Now our computers and AI are doing the work, and humans are pretending to do work. And Coke is using AI to generate holiday ads that seem decidedly slop-laden.

We’ve gone from science fiction to meat proxies in forty years.

People don’t really hate AI or AI in ads. They just hate being lied to about it. In 1986 we figured this out with latex and a few hours in the make up chair.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE FUZZY NAVEL

Here’s a perfectly 1980s cocktail. One with no real history, just marketing. Which makes it the perfect choice to drink this week.

In the fall of 1984, National Distillers launched DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps. Yep, the first peach schnapps in America. Now they just needed a reason for anyone to drink it.

Depending on who you believe the drink was either named by Ray Foley, a New Jersey bartender and former joke writer for Johnny Carson working with an ad agency. Or it was born in a Madison Avenue boardroom not at a bar. And it was named fuzzy for the peach and navel for the orange. It thankfully had nothing to do with your bellybutton.

Like Max, this liquor absolutely dropped like a nuclear bomb on culture. It was the fastest-selling new alcohol since prohibition, dropping a million cases within that first year.

William S. Burroughs called it “the liquor industry’s equivalent of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.” He was not being kind.

So Coke was making fake AI computers to sell New Coke, the booze business was inventing and marketing them as fake classics. What was so remarkable about the neon-dripped 80s is that things burned so brightly they were gone by the end of the decade.

Sure, maybe people are out there ironically having a guilty pleasure Fuzzy Navel, but it’s surely more nostalgia-maxing than any real desire.

The Fuzzy Navel

• 3 oz peach schnapps

• 3 oz orange juice

Build over ice in a highball glass, stir, orange slice if you’re feeling bougie. Fun fact if you add an ounce of vodka this 80s abomination becomes a “Hairy Navel” and tastes like the 1986 Ryan Reynolds is currently traumatized about.

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.

At some point they sold sponsorship to the bleachers at Wrigley Field. I’m not sure how I even feel about that. I’ve only sat there once back when the pitchers still hit. I can tell you that scientifically speaking hot dogs and beer taste better in the bleachers at Wrigley.

I can also tell you they didn’t brand the bleachers back then. And I’m almost positive not a single person outside the Cubs marketing department calls them that.

But they aren’t wrong that there is a certain magic to the idea of the bleachers. You grab a ticket and who knows who you end up sitting next to. Could be a cool baseball nerd keeping score. Could be a dude who goes tarps off in the bottom of the first inning. Could be the person you marry.

Yep. The Chicago Cubs just did some advanced analytics calculations on that and turned it into a rom com.

Not the first time that the Cubs have executed on this brief. Back in 2008, Fallon, an agency that turned out rad work like this for decades. For Nuveen Investments they mined those outfield bleachers and a fan base that had not won the World Series in an iconic 108-year dry spell. That all changed in 2016.

FORGET OPS WE’RE WRITING SCRIPTS NOW

This week the Cubs are premiering “Nine Innings to Love” on TikTok.

A 17-episode series taking place across nine innings of one game. It’s a classic meet cute.

The romance writer is in a serious hitting slump. The love-shy seat mate who doesn’t believe she can find him a summer fling before the end of the game.

Along the way there will be a makeover, a returning ex and a ninth-inning chase sequence. All while the Cubs are in the hunt for the playoffs.

The whole series is written and created in-house by Cubs Productions. Maybe I need to be working there. This is the creative team that’s racked up regional Emmy nominations and the rom com director is the team’s director of content and production.

If you read about this the EVP of marketing tells us it’s a story that could only happen in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. So everything about this whole endeavor is designed to ensure we know the section is sponsored by Budweiser.

As you can imagine the internet is torn. Some can’t hardly wait.

Others are saying, “A rom-com should feel like Wrigleyville, Old Style, bad decisions and generational trauma. This sounds like Hallmark with a Cubs hat.”

Not wrong. But there’s nothing wrong with Hallmark.

THIS IS DEFINITELY A CHICAGO STORY

Back in 1930, WGN started airing “Painted Dreams.” This was a 15-minute daily serial radio play about a widow and the young women in her house. And it was generally credited as the first soap opera. Written by Irna Phillips, a former teacher who fell into radio acting. She would go on to create As the World Turns, Another World and Guiding Light which ran until 2009.

WGN had also been broadcasting Cubs games since April 14, 1925. Quin Ryan on the call, the home opener against Pittsburgh.

Listeners to that first game would have heard an absolute gem thrown by Grover Cleveland Alexander, or Ole Pete as they called him. Oh, and speaking of pitchers who can hit, he went 3-4 and hit a home run too.

So the city that invented the soap opera and had also been broadcasting baseball games for over 100 years is now doing a serialized romance for baseball fans. The Tiktok series is trying to do the same thing. Simply get fans to come back to watch tomorrow.

THE SOAP COMPANIES ARE BACK

It wasn’t until 1932 that Procter & Gamble figured they probably should make a serial too. Their first one is called The Puddle Family. It didn’t really work. So they replaced it with a show called Ma Perkins. The story is about a widow (wait, why is it always about a widow?) whose family and friends could not stop needing her advice.

It was marketed as “Oxydol’s own Ma Perkins.” And that’s where the word soap opera comes from.

The brand even tested if it was working by offering a packet of flower seeds for 10 cents and an Oxydol box top. They found out that the genre was in fact very real. People took them up on that seed offer.

Earlier this year, the same company launched “The Golden Pear Affair.” A shockingly long 50-episode “microdrama” tied to a limited edition fragrance collection. They called it a “microsoap”.

So the brand that helped pioneer the genre wanted to take it back and optimize it for our phones.

They aren’t the only ones. In August Urban Outfitters clothing rental division Nuuly, rolled out “Heart on My Sleeve.” A 12-part drama about modern dating on TikTok, Reels and Shorts. It’s the same old story. Everyone tells marketers they are tired of being sold. So short dramas that are more subtle are like hiding the vegetables under the meat.

And why not. Microdramas are so hot right now. Short drama app downloads grew 95.5% year over year in the first half of 2026. Like we’re talking 1.45 billion. And where viewers are, the advertisers follow.

One thing I keep thinking about this week is that these series have to really ensure that every episode is an entry point. I’ve noticed in watching both The Madison and Stuart Fails to Save the Universe that every episode gives you a really comprehensive, almost insultingly thorough “previously on” montage.

They tell you everything you need to know about the series - whether it’s episode two or six.

That’s the algorithm at work.

WRIGLEY FIELD WASN’T SOLD TO A BRAND

I can’t do a sneaky baseball issue of the Drink Cart and not talk about more baseball. Everybody now assumes that Wrigley Field was simply the original sponsor of the ballpark. Kind of true. But not in the way you’d expect.

Originally Wrigley Field opened as Weeghman Park. It was simply named for Charles Weeghman, a lunch-counter magnate who built the ballpark for the Federal League. A league that lasted just two seasons. (And you can read a bit more about here)

After that Weeghman teamed up with others including William Wrigley Jr. and bought the Cubs and moved them in. It would become Cubs Park in 1920 and only in 1926 would they finally rename it Wrigley Field in honor of the man who owned the whole team.

So it wasn’t a clever marketing team that bought the rights for the Gum brand. It was just a coincidence that a man named Wrigley also sold chewing gum. And sneakily squeezed over 100 years of branding out of it. Same with the iconic Wrigley Building. A branding lesson for the ages. Name your product after you family name, and you get the stadium naming rights completely free.

In case you are wondering, yes, I would watch a 9-part series about the Wrigley Family and how they ended up selling the Cubs.

The closest Wrigley comes to sponsorship is the logos that sit on the iconic sign. On the outside Wrigley is nearly sacred ground. There’s one brand logo under the iconic marque. On the inside you can brand anything like you’re Don Draper after a massive Martini lunch. With heritage designation, Wrigley Field is likely to remain Wrigley Field despite the selling of the team in 1981 to pay off massive estate taxes and then the gum brand to Mars in 2008.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE CHICAGO COCKTAIL

You might have been expecting something with Malort. But we can’t have things like this in Canada. Also this cocktail is almost certainly not from Chicago.

It sounds like it was simply a “Fancy Brandy Cocktail” that was rebranded. It shows up in Harry Johnson’s 1882 bar manual as brandy, curaçao, bitters, absinthe if required (for the record, there is never a need to add absinthe to anything, ever) and champagne. But this was a western favourite drink.

By 1922 Robert Vermeire says that the Fancy Brandy Cocktail and the Chicago Cocktail are actually the same thing. Then good old Harry Craddock put it in his Savoy cocktail book in 1930. By 1931 Chicago Daily News critic John Drury added it in his guide to Chicago dining, noting that it came from The American Bar in Nice and the Embassy Club in London.

Classic cocktail lore. A drink named for a city, only certified by guys in Europe thus solidifying it as a “local” classic. It just makes sense. And just like Wrigley Field, it was an enduring name that just stuck.

The Chicago Cocktail

• 2 oz brandy or cognac

• 1/2 oz orange curaçao

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

• Chilled dry sparkling wine to top

• Lemon wedge and superfine sugar for the rim

Rim a coupe with lemon and sugar. Stir the brandy, curaçao and bitters with ice, strain in, top with sparkling. No garnish, the elaborate rim is the only garnish you need. Despite AI putting a cinnamon stick in that image above. I’d like to think that now that I’ve published it, other AI’s will start to insist on adding it in. I’ve done my part on the slop wars.

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.

We’ve reached the timeline in the Drink Cart where we are talking about all-fiber insulation and the innovation of dyeing it pink so installers can tell it apart from the other stuff. Owens-Corning Fiberglas quietly discontinued it.

Until the installers kept asking for it.

Somehow a product that not a single human ever thought much about got a colour that nobody could forget.

THE CAT WAS BORN IN THE CREDITS

Before we get more into the insulation, let’s talk about the diamond at the center of the 1963 film, The Pink Panther. When held up to light, the diamond showed a leaping pink panther.

But then Blake Edwards thought that the opening credits needed a cartoon. So the animators turned the diamond into a cat in animated form.

They turned to David DePatie and Friz Freleng who had just opened their animation company months before. Freleng was the genius behind Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam. DePatie and the new studio paid the bills by making ad mascots like Charlie the Tuna and the Exxon tiger.

So it was almost preordained that the animated Pink Panther would go on to manifest itself as a real mascot selling stuff.

The movie is a classic, but the title sequence was so popular United Artists ordered a series of theatrical shorts. In 1964, The Pink Phink won the Oscar for animated short.

They tried to give him a voice in 1965. And even though it was the wildly talented and underrated Rich Little, he’s been silent ever since. The character got his own Saturday morning cartoon show in 1969.

THE MASCOT RENTAL

Then the advertising world called. In 1980 Roger Butler, an ad exec at Ogilvy & Mather, made the most logical ad decision of all time. He looked at a pink product and then a pink cat and put two and two together.

Owens Corning licensed the character and started selling beautifully pink insulation. And still do. They call him a “spokescat” now but he’s been at the game for 46 years. And they don’t own him. MGM still owns the Pink Panther and Owens Corning just rents him for insulation and building materials only.

SO THEY TRADEMARKED THE COLOUR INSTEAD

They couldn’t own the cat. So they wanted the colour.

So they applied to trademark the colour pink for insulation.

The Trademark Office said no. Colour isn’t a mark.

So they appealed. The court looked at 200 blocks of airtime across every major event from August 1980 to March 1981 and the survey showed that before the Pink Panther 41% of male homeowners could name Owens-Corning as the maker of pink insulation. By January 1981, it was 50%.

That was enough. On appeal the brand won the first single-colour trademark in American history and every other brand colour from Tiffany Blue to UPS Brown did the same.

They rented a cat and used him to buy a colour.

PENCILS DOWN

In a world of influencers, celebrities and memes, Owens Corning taught brands how to successfully borrow fame and lock in a colour.

But rentals do end. Celebrities do something comically stupid. The meme finally dies off. Then you wake up and the movie studio you’ve been paying for half a century is shilling pink paint or soda. But when you build a moat that is colour, nobody can take it away.

It’s not the impressions you’re buying but what the impressions get you that you can truly own. You don’t rent the arches from McDonalds or the blue box from Tiffany. You own them or you don’t.

MGM can pull the panther tomorrow. They can never pull the pink.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE PINK LADY

Legend has it that the very first Pink Lady was served to Broadway star Hazel Dawn on the opening night of her 1911 musical, The Pink Lady.

She would later tell a cocktail historian the surprise cocktail was Spanish anisette shaken with two kinds of bitters (Peychaud’s and Angostura). That cocktail did not take off but the name stuck.

In 1913 Jacques Straub, a Swiss bartender working in Louisville, printed the recipe that became a lasting cocktail. And you’ll remember Straub because he also gave us our Kentucky Colonel cocktail from our Colonel Sanders newsletter.

By 1930 the Savoy hotel tweaked it by dropping the hard to find in London applejack and adding egg white instead. That was the fluffy, pink version that we served up in The Keg on Sunday to 75-year-olds. It was always all about the colour.

The Pink Lady

• 1 1/2 oz gin

• 1/2 oz applejack

• 1/2 oz lemon juice

• 1/2 oz grenadine

• 1 egg white

Dry shake, then shake with ice, strain into a coupe. No applejack? Skip it and you’ve got a Clover Club’s less famous cousin.

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 realize we’re in a trade war, but can we talk about how America invented an alcoholic Pop-Tart you drink?

I kind of feel like a real Bill Lumbergh asking you for a cover sheet on your AI slop before you send it and then saying, “Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.”

But it’s 100% true. We’re talking about a trade war and BuzzBallz and Pop-Tarts recently launched two ridiculous ready-to-drink cocktails. Frosted S’mores and Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon. They are 15% ABV and run for $3.99.

I had the same feeling as Matt Lindner. “Have you ever found yourself eating a Pop Tart and thinking ‘Man, I really wish this Pop Tart could get me drunk?’ Good news.”

And we can’t buy them here? If this wasn’t a reason for us to start a Drink Cart bootlegging operation from Michigan across “Lake America,” I’m not sure what we’re even doing anymore.

The brand told USA Today the unique collab was “created specifically with millennial fans in mind,” and that the drink taps “into the nostalgia of enjoying Pop-Tarts growing up in the 90s.”

That is the kind of thing you write in a PowerPoint deck when you don’t want to bring up that the millennials are old now, aging into their 40s and binge-watching Sterling Point about the Muskokas from the Muskokas.

What’s fascinating is that the drinks are made with “vodka and other than standard orange wine with natural flavors.” Somehow that makes these little darlings street-legal and sold in drinkable ball form.

As I mentioned, I can’t buy one. Canada and America failed to reach a deal on trade, and that means we’re still in an insufferable boycott of American alcohol. So no bourbon, no juicy California cabs, no delicious Oregon pinots and certainly no spherical s’more shots.

Sure, my wife brought me a freezer slushie Palm Bay Rainbow Twist Pouch. But if this is part of Mark Carney’s tariff compensation package, it needs at least 15% ABV and to be in a ball format.

The heart wants what the tariffs and the elbows forbid.

THE SLOP HAS BROKEN CONTAINMENT

LinkedIn’s new “Seems like AI slop” button has been hit over one million times in its first three weeks in service.

The Verge reported that “LinkedIn announced the button a few weeks after AI detector Pangram determined that 41 percent of LinkedIn’s longform posts were flagged as fully AI generated.”

And chief product officer Hari Srinivasan reports that the copy and paste articles powered by AI are now getting 40% fewer views.

The New York Times reports that it has gotten so bad that tech companies are now scrambling to fight the “digital sewage” now flooding their own platforms. The irony being that these are the same companies whose own tools made the slop possible.

Ah yes, the old arsonist who started the fire is also in charge of firefighting and the hoses. Perfect.

But what if you really like the AI slop? Don’t worry, Roku launched Fairground AI, a 24/7 streaming channel of nothing but AI-generated films all funded by AI-generated ads.

“The channel doesn’t so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling,” writes Stuart Heritage in the Guardian. “At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you’d see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday.”

What could possibly go wrong with a 24/7 firehose of AI slop?

MEAT PROXIES ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM

A great phrase was making the rounds this week.

Meat proxy (n): a person who forwards AI-generated output without reading, understanding or validating it. Acts only as a relay between the AI and the intended recipient.

And just like the people passing AI work back and forth with each other, we’ve slipped the bonds of the Facebook-uncle slop problem. It’s now happening everywhere.

In deli menu boards where shrimp scampi seems to be more like glazed donuts on ramen noodles. I’d rather question why we don’t have genetically modified non-tailed circular shrimp? Isn’t that the whole point of AI?

At a Mets-Brewers game, we see the lineup graphics in the visiting clubhouse at Citi Field where the teams were greeted with a Street Fighter AI welcome screen. The Mets beat writer called it “pretty awesome” but Mark Lazerus described it as “the AI slop has broken Facebook containment.”

At St. Louis Bar & Grill they just unleashed paid social ads with very AI-looking scenes of patrons clinking beers. So this stuff is being approved and then pushed by a paid media campaign too. When it comes to slop in every aspect of life, we turn to human-cyborg relations expert C-3PO who once said, “There’ll be no escape for the princess this time.”

Besides we all know that this is what AI was meant for.

MEANWHILE, X FOUND OLD ANNUAL REPORTS

In a completely different corner of the internet the feed was discovering and sharing vintage annual report covers like they were baseball cards.

An incredible treasure trove of real design. Bold colours. Minimal copy. Hand-drawn elements everywhere. Beautiful photography.

All commissioned for a shareholder document almost nobody ever reads. A reminder that even the most throwaway elements of creative and graphic design were taken completely seriously.

Nobody was going to buy more of a company like General Dynamics because the annual report was pretty. It was a company saying, on paper, once a year, whether or not you opened it: we take ourselves seriously enough to get this right.

Turns out, that General Dynamics has a secret weapon. Swiss designer Erik Nitsche. He took the creative brief and turned them into cinematic books vs. brochures. If a defense contractor can do it, any brand can.

The freakazoid scampi says the opposite. So does the clubhouse line up screen. There is nothing wrong with using as much AI as you can in everything you do. But the key is ensuring you take yourself seriously enough to stand by it.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE CONTRABAND BUZZBALL POP-TART

Since the real thing is stuck at the border, I’ve got a homemade counterfeit that might be a little dangerous.

Before we get to that, we turn back to Heublin who last week we talked about buying Smirnoff’s rights in America. But the company was making pre-mixed cocktails for hotels and restaurants as far back as 1892.

They took a giant order to make pre-mixed martinis and Manhattans for the annual picnic of the Governor’s Foot Guard. Rain would cancel the event. The restaurant staff were told to dump the leftovers. But they’d found they’d survived shelf storage and started selling them in the restaurant and eventually built a distillery. By the 1950s they were selling 1.5 million cases a year.

In the 1970s the brand invented a WWII spy, a bar in Macao and coaster cipher to sell a bottled screwdriver. And that inspired the Beastie Boys song Brass Monkey.

The Contraband BuzzBall Pop-Tart

• 1 1/2 oz bourbon

• 1/2 oz crème de cacao

• 1/2 oz maple syrup

• 1 oz cream

Shake hard with ice, strain over fresh ice into the roundest glass you can find. If you want to get really fancy, torch a marshmallow and set it on top. Add a graham cracker rim and serve with a Pop-Tart if you’re really committed to the bit.

Why have we not resurrected Miss Maple Leaf? I might be more chill about the bourbon if we had this spokesperson instead of Doug Ford or David Ebi.

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.

Today’s newsletter starts in May of 1931. On a dusty stretch of highway in North Corbin, Kentucky.

An area the locals called Hell’s Halfacre if you must know. So named because of all of the bootleggers, gunfights and general lack of electricity and such.

It was here that a 40-year-old Shell gas station owner named Harland Sanders was quietly waging a war in ads.

A back and forth signage war on an old railroad wall that pointed customers to his gas station. Something Matt Stewart who ran the local Standard Oil station kept painting over.

Sanders had already threatened Stewart with gunfire. So when his sign was being painted over again, he took it personally.

Sanders brought two Shell colleagues with him and when they arrived Stewart pulled out a pistol and shot one of them dead. Sanders fires back and hits Stewart in the shoulder. The other Shell man shot Stewart in the hip.

Stewart said, “Don’t shoot, Sanders! You’ve killed me!”

Except that Stewart lived. Got 18 years for murder and was eventually shot and killed by a deputy sheriff while on appeal.

Sanders was never charged. Turns out that the press has spelled his name Saunders and no one could put two and two together.

The competition was gone. Business was booming.

And Harland Sanders just won a gunfight over an ad.

THE ULYSSES S. GRANT OF FRIED CHICKEN

If you don’t know about Ulysses S. Grant then you don’t know about failure.

This was a man who failed at farming. Failed at real estate. He wasn’t very good at even working at his father’s leather shop. Everything he ever tried, he failed at. Except war.

Grant turned out to be the only man in America that could win the Civil War.

Sanders’ story sounds familiar with maybe more failure and chicken.

Dropped out of school in grade six. Lied about his age to enlist. Spent a year in Cuba as an army teamster. Got fired from a railroad job after a bar fight. Practiced law in Arkansas without passing the bar. Got into a fistfight with his own client in the courtroom. Started an acetylene lamp company just as electricity took off. Sold tires until he crashed his car. Operated a ferry. Tried to sell insurance but got fired from that.

Sanders wouldn’t get into the chicken franchise business until 1952. He was already 62.

Even that failed at first. The interstate highway bypassed Corbin. His first restaurant died. At 65 he auctioned it off, put a pressure cooker in the trunk, slept in the car and cooked for other restaurants for a nickel a bird.

Somehow by 1964 there were 600 franchises.

All run by a man in a white suit.

THE INVENTION OF THE COLONEL

This brand mascot wasn’t created by the creative team in the agency.

It was made when a man put on a white suit, added a string tie and bleached his goatee.

A uniform Colonel Sanders put on in the 1950s and wore every day for the rest of his life.

The dirty little secret?

Harland Sanders wasn’t a colonel at all.

Kentucky’s governors handed out honorary titles to everyone. Elvis got one. Even Betty White got one. Sanders got his in 1935.

Worse, he wasn’t even from Kentucky.

Then in 1964 he sold the American rights to Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2 million.

He gets a lifetime salary (he was 73), the title of brand ambassador and the rights to sell the chicken in Canada.

John Y. Brown Jr., the lawyer who bought it, would later sell the company to Heublein for $285 million.

Brown’s whole marketing plan was just to roll out the very interesting Colonel Sanders and let him be interesting on TV. What’s My Line. I’ve Got a Secret. Carson.

Brown would later became governor of Kentucky.

THE KENTUCKY FRIED VODKA ERA

An interesting side note? Sanders was a renowned teetotaler. He probably wouldn’t even approve of this newsletter writing about vodka.

And yet, he sold out to Heublein, a booze brand.

The company is kind of wild. They survived prohibition by owning A.1. steak sauce, bought the rights to a corpse of a Russian brand known as Smirnoff for $14,000 despite nobody drinking vodka in America at the time.

They called this Martin’s Folly for Heublein president John Martin who ended up teaching bartenders drinks like the Moscow Mule in the copper mug to sell the stuff.

He used the new Polaroid camera to take photos and show the next bar how much fun everyone was having drinking vodka.

He also helped position vodka as white whiskey that “leaves you breathless.”

It had no taste or smell and you could drink it at lunch and no one would be the wiser. People still believe that vodka doesn’t show on your breath.

That’s what years of advertising will do for you.

THE ROGUE KFC OFFSHOOT IN MISSISSAUGA

In 1965 Sanders moved into a home at 1337 Melton Drive to run the Canadian fried chicken empire in the north. The house went on the market this June. $1,499,999. Four bedrooms.

They ran as Scott’s Chicken Villa. Sanders would ride around in local parades and was referred to as the year-round Santa. He filmed commercials, tried to learn French and reportedly even looked into becoming a citizen.

All the Canadian money went into a charity that still exists. Hell, there’s a wing of Mississauga Hospital with his name on it, and Trillium named its women’s and children’s centre after him in 2000.

THE MASCOT TURNS ON THE BRAND

What happened next? Heublein cheapened the food. Most egregious was the powdered gravy where the colonel’s famous cracklin’ used to be.

Sanders was still the spokesman and in 1973 sued them for $122 million for slapping his face on food he never made. He’d settle for $1 million and promised to stop trashing the brand.

He does not stop.

In 1978, he told Louisville Courier-Journal: “My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and then they mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste.”

When they launched Extra Crispy? “A damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.”

A single franchisee sues him for libel. But here’s the funniest part. The Kentucky Supreme Court threw it out since he actually insulted all 5,000 stores. Nobody was defamed.

The mascot was legally cleared to call his own product garbage.

DEATH DID NOT END THE CONTRACT

Then on December 16, 1980 the chicken finally caught up with Sanders. He died of leukemia at 90.

So famous he lay in state in the Kentucky Capitol rotunda.

As the brand was bought and sold by R.J. Reynolds, PepsiCo and Yum, the brand slowly put the colonel out to the big deep fryer in the sky.

By the late 1990s he was simply an animated Colonel voiced by Randy Quaid.

Research said that young customers didn’t know he’d been a real person.

Wieden+Kennedy brings him back in 2015 for the 75th anniversary casting Darrell Hammond, with a chuckle the real man never had. Three months later they swap in Norm Macdonald, who opens by calling Hammond an imposter.

“They can’t just grab some super funny Hollywood actor, throw a white suit on him and try to pass him off as the real Colonel Sanders.”

Then Jim Gaffigan. George Hamilton as the Extra Crispy Colonel. Rob Riggle. Billy Zane. Rob Lowe. Ray Liotta. Reba McEntire. Jason Alexander. Sixteen-plus actors in the white suit.

People said they hated it but same-store sales went up 3% after a 15% drop two years earlier, and the CMO pointed to the wave of Colonel Halloween costumes as proof.

MASCOT LEFTOVERS: FINGER LICKIN’ LORE

In 1976 a survey ranked Colonel Sanders the second most recognizable celebrity on earth. First place was Muhammad Ali. Not surprisingly. also a Kentucky Colonel.

Truthfully, and I feel bad about this, the KFC bucket deserves its own newsletter.

This iconic brand asset was first served up in 1957 at Pete Harman’s Salt Lake City store (aka franchise number one) and ended up becoming a mascot in its own right.

The striped drum, the Colonel’s face rotating on a pole above the parking lot. Stuffed with chicken for the whole family. It’s arguably done more brand work than any slogan they ever wrote, and you can still buy vintage ones on eBay right now, grease ghosts from Christmas in the 1970s and all.

There are bucket people who collect them. An empty cardboard bucket with a dead man’s face on it, trading as memorabilia. How do you fall into that niche? Imagine the rush of writing, ”1 ORIGINAL 1960s KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN BUCKET LID MINT 1969 COLONEL SANDERS KFC” and then typing in $129 after sitting on a trove of 7 of them. There’s still 3 left.

And then there’s Japan. There is always Japan. This is where the Colonel became a vengeful spirit.

In 1985 the Hanshin Tigers won the pennant and celebrating fans in Osaka threw a Colonel statue off a bridge into the Dōtonbori canal. The reason? He apparently looked liked their bearded American slugger.

The Tigers then didn’t win it all again for decades. Many blamed the Curse of the Colonel.

Divers finally pulled him out of the canal in 2009, missing his glasses and his left hand. The team laid the curse to rest with a championship in 2023.

For a mascot to be so magically transformed into such a symbol that his statue could haunt a baseball team from the bottom of a river.

PENCILS DOWN

Build a brand on a real person and eventually you have to choose between them.

KFC chose the suit.

It’s the right call, if we’re being cold about it. The person ages, sues you and tells reporters your gravy is wallpaper paste.

The costume does none of that. The costume takes direction. The costume can be Norm Macdonald one quarter and Reba the next.

The man got to keep the salary, the lawsuits and the ranting.

They got the goatee, forever.

Harland Sanders has been dead for nearly 46 years and he’s still their hardest-working employee. Never complains anymore, either.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE KENTUCKY COLONEL

This is simply a Bourbon and Bénédictine, first noted in 1914’s Jacques Straub’s book Drinks. Straub ran the bar at Louisville’s Pendennis Club, so it’s a Kentucky recipe by a Swiss bartender which later became the house drink at the Hotel Bel-Air.

Three things make it the only possible choice for this week.

It’s named for the title that turned a man into a mascot.

The Colonel was a lifelong teetotaler, so he’d never have touched the stuff.

And it’s just sweetened with Bénédictine — the liqueur whose whole “1510 monastery” origin was invented in 1863 by a wine merchant named Alexandre Le Grand.

A drink named for a fake colonel sweetened with a manufactured heritage, for a man who manufactured himself to sell chicken.

Bénédictine has 27 secret herbs and spices. The Colonel had 11. Sometimes things just work out.

The Kentucky Colonel

• 2 oz bourbon

• 1/2 oz Bénédictine

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

• Lemon peel

Stir it with ice, strain over a big ice cube, drop it in the lemon peel. It’s an Old Fashioned with the sugar swapped for some honeyed herbs to give you a warm long dry finish.

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.

In the summer of 1990 Tom Cruise basically did Top Gun but made it NASCAR.

The film is incredibly re-watchable. A supporting cast to die for. You can’t not marvel at the run lawyer turned actor Fred Thompson went on in 1990. He ran an airport, was President of NASCAR and a US Navy Admiral while scolding Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise and Alec Baldwin in one incredible movie summer.

But this is not a newsletter about Days of Thunder and character actors. But the only thing more impressive than Thompson’s summer was that Hardee’s absolutely made the most out of product placement as the brand behind the #18 car that Russ Wheeler drives in the movie.

They parlayed that bit of movie gold into 99 cent die-casts of the cars and an incredible line up of movie souvenir drink cups.

What’s the point? Collector cups aren’t just nostalgia. They are the media.

A 32 oz Days of Thunder cup sat on a kitchen counter for two years, went through the dishwasher 400 times and did more frequency than any media buyer could dream about.

What’s most interesting is that very few movies can pull this off anymore. It’s not a problem with plastic. It’s that every movie in the 90s would crush a 6-8 week run in theatres. But you can’t do cup plans for a movie that’s on streaming within a few weeks. Now we have loyalty apps and rewards points.

Hardee’s got Coke to make you an awesome cheap cup and told you it was more than a cup. A fun kind of premium. Cheap, plastic and you still love it.

THE OTHER KIND OF PREMIUM ALTOGETHER

Then there is Johnnie Walker Blue Label. This is not your father’s 99 cent movie cup.

It’s thirty years of advertising psyops.

Fancy brand ambassadors, luxury silk-lined and art themed boxes, short films with people like Jude Law all designed to get you to buy a $395 bottle of blended scotch.

This year, the job of shilling the Blue Label has landed on Dua Lipa’s husband’s plate.

It does all the things luxury is supposed to do. He’s checked into a hotel suite. He’s poured himself some scotch. Callum Turner is journaling his little heart out by writing the brand tag line, “Keep Walking,” into his diary.

The brand wanted him to hit their every celebration big or small brand platform and he regurgitated this in the press release like he was held at brand gun point, “The ethos of Johnnie Walker Blue Label is one that I’ve always admired. With only one in ten thousand casks ever making it in, that level of care is what sets it apart. Blue Label is the first bottle I reach for when celebrating with my mates, and now to officially be in partnership is a real honour.”

Then he proceeds on social media to use the one in ten thousand casks scotch in a Manhattan. Because the brand is desperate for people to actually just drink this $395 bottle. They don’t want you to keep it, let it collect dust never to buy another. They want you to just drink it.

BLUE DIDN’T START THIS WAY

Johnnie Walker Blue started as an inventory problem and it still is.

In 1987, it was called Johnnie Walker Oldest. They tried to make this a duty-free only special brand during the great Whisky Loch glut.

It’s kind of the funniest part of this brand and incredible marketing. The story of Johnnie Walker Blue is that some of it was made using scotch from now shuttered “ghost distilleries.”

So they took the old scotch nobody wanted and then added the blue label and transformed it into a super premium product that actors like Turner aspired to drink because it feels rich.

So you drop some gold marbling and say almost AI things found in perfume ads like “for those who know what to look for” and it becomes desirable.

Then you can picture Jude Law betting on a yacht drinking it.

And Priyanka Chopra Jonas trying to get you to buy it as a $395 après-ski scotch.

Each time out, the stuff feels both more luxurious and more comically and expensively ordinary. In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, it’s a trap. A trap where selling bottles too rare to open is actually bad business.

Sure, you have to spend over 30 years making that argument, but then you have to squeeze everyone who believes it into making it in their home cocktails on a random Tuesday night.

And for marketers, that’s the funnest part of all. You are now spending money to undermine your decades of brand building. I think that’s what you might call, eating your own tail.

PENCILS DOWN

Hardee’s charged you barely 2 bucks and you got a toy movie car, a souvenir cup that was pretty rad and it was filled with Coke and made that feel premium and reminded you of it for years.

Johnnie Walker took some old scotch that no one really wanted, charged you hundreds of dollars making you think you shouldn’t drink it. Then after building up that equity, started telling you it was okay to drink it whenever and mix it with stuff.

Even though they have Johnnie Walker Black that sells for way less and can be perfectly fine if you’re adding red vermouth, a dash of chocolate bitters and a cherry.

And let’s not forget Turner’s Manhattan calls for an absolutely maniacal spec. The recipe wants you to use 1.4 oz of Blue Label and .7 of Italian Vermouth. If anyone gives 1.4 oz as a spec, their cheese has slipped off their cracker or they are making a very Euro-sized milliliter-based cocktail and just converted it into ounces.

Back in the 1960s Johnnie Walker ads asked, “You can’t tell one scotch from another. Or can you?” I guess they answered that one eventutally.

Switching from Super premium to expensive everyday is a wild branding pivot. But I love this one last additional story on the brand.

Former US President Richard Nixon liked to keep Blue Label around in his later years.

He died in 94, so this may have been JW Oldest to start. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he drank it with ginger ale and a twist of lime. The rarest scotch blend made into a highball? He probably was making it in a Hardee’s Days of Thunder Cup too.

I can’t resist a second Nixon story about drinking. At state dinners and the presidential yacht he had the staff pour him 1966 Château Margaux. His favorite wine which he also kept on standby at “21” Club.

But he liked it so much he kept it for himself. He had his team wrap it in a napkin so no one could see the label, then served guests cheaper wine so no one could see the good stuff he was drinking.

Keep in mind it’s been said that before those state dinners he was also 6 Martinis deep before the wine started flowing. Diabolical Nixon behavior. Maybe that’s why Nixon is such an underrated brand icon.

I also can’t help but bring up 2002’s Maid in Manhattan. What one podcast called, “A Nixon Propaganda Rom-Com” This is a film where Jennifer Lopez’s son is on an unreal side-quest to fan boy Richard Nixon. There’s no way this would happen in 2026.

So I’ve probably been too hard on Callum Turner. He’s just following in a long tradition of getting us to drink the fancy stuff no matter what.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: PULLING A NIXON

Using Johnnie Walker in a highball wasn’t a novel invention by Nixon. In 1936 there was an ad whose whole existence was, “Whisky and soda. Scotch and splash. Johnnie Walker, please.”

The brand sold the scotch as the thing to mix with anything. So here’s the move: wrap the bottle in a white napkin. Tell your friends you’ve broken out the Blue Label. Then just pour it with ginger like a complete savage.

• 2 oz Johnnie Walker Black

• 4 oz cold ginger ale

• Stir with ice and add a twist of lime

Then go yell at whoever is the Kissinger of your friend group. Bonus points if you pull a Bobby Grich. And pour a beer over someone’s head like he did to Nixon in the clubhouse after the Angels won the division in 1979. Maybe don’t do that with the Jonnie Walker Blue.

Remember that Winston Churchill was a Jonnie Walker man and even painted the bottle. If Presidents are drinking it. And Prime Ministers are painting it. You’ve done your job marketers.

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 saw a post about Gung Ho, the short lived TV series about a Pennsylvania auto plant taken over by a Japanese car maker, based on the 1986 film directed by Ron Howard and starring Michael Keaton.

Keaton was a bit of a generational run, playing his second car manufacturing character. The movie is very 1986. The trailer is even more 1980s. That voice.

Of course I had to watch it. Incredible 40 year old artifact.

But that’s not really the story. The story is about panic.

The US-Japan trade deficit climbed from $10 billion in 1981 to $50 billion by 1985.

It got so bad that by 1987 US politicians were taking sledgehammers to Toshiba radios on the Capitol lawn. Not about cars per se, but more about sticking it to companies selling tech to the commies.

By 1989 Americans rated Japan a bigger threat than the USSR.

This seems like a parable for AI coming for us. And maybe the scrappy steel town (aka humans) can actually fight back against the robots.

THE WORST CAR BRAND IN AMERICA

So Japan’s taking over and at the same time a completely unpronounceable brand enters the market.

It was so completely unpronounceable that their first campaign was just getting consumers to learn how to say it.

To make matters worse the car was everything that America hated in the early eighties.

Embarrassingly small. Foreign. Low budget. Some things never change.

They entered the market with 0.26% share in 1981. Only to squeak to 0.68% by 1985.

This is the story of Isuzu. (100% True)

SO THEY CAST A LIAR

In 1986 Della Femina Travisano & Partners landed the account.

Ron Travisano went to the heart of the matter. Every car brags, so why not make the most brag worthy mascot or spokesperson ever.

So the pitch was devilishly anti-advertising and self aware. And that’s where they could let the lies rip.

$10.80 cars. 300 miles per hour. More seats than the Astrodome.

All paired with subtitles and lines like “He’s lying,” “If I’m lying, may lightning hit my mother” and “You have my word on it.”

They apparently wanted Jon Lovitz, fresh from his SNL pathological liar skits.

They found David Leisure instead. A struggling actor who was living in a Volkswagen.

He became Joe Isuzu.

GUESS WHAT? IT WORKED. KIND OF.

The campaign worked. They didn’t defend Japanese cars or even mention Japan. But they changed the subject to the real villain. The car salesman. The most distrusted archetype in the world.

The subtitles let viewers in on the joke and sales jumped. By the time they aired during Super Bowl XXI in 1987, they were well on their way to the top ten of consumer recall by 1989.

The campaign became part of culture too. In 1988 Michael Dukakis tried to paint George Bush as the liar. He said in a nationally televised debate, “If Bush keeps it up, he’s going to be the Joe Isuzu of American politics.”

It’s perfect. A fake liar becoming code for real liars while selling cars America hated.

WHAT GOES UP, MUST COME DOWN

Joe Isuzu got so big, people forgot about the car completely.

As he got more famous, they tried to make him more likable. The more likable he got, the less he tried to hammer the car salesman jokes.

By 1991 they fired Della Femina Travisano & Partners and ended the first run of Joe Isuzu..

They tried to bring him back in 1999 - 2001 but that didn’t work. By 2009 Isuzu stopped even making US passenger vehicles.

Leisure didn’t get the memo. He hawked A&W Cream Soda in 1992. Mocked Mitt Romney in 2012. He even made spots for the Isuzu Trooper a decade after the brand left America.

PENCILS DOWN

Here’s where things get interesting. 1986 and 2026 feel very similar. A different panic, a different problem.

But 82% of ad execs think Gen Z and millennials feel positive about AI ads, but only 45% do. And that gap is widening.

Half of US consumers prefer brands that don’t use generative AI in brand content. You only have to see the reaction to Coca-Cola’s holiday spots getting pegged with “Soulless” to realize it.

Nobody has built the AI-era Joe Isuzu yet. Will someone build the first AI mascot that lies beautifully and we’re all in on the joke because the villain isn’t AI at all?

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE JAPANESE COCKTAIL

Let’s go back even further than 1986. Further than 40 years, you’re crazy Jackson. Yes, let’s go all the way to 1862.

In Jerry Thomas’s How to Mix Drinks, a very early bartender’s guide, the author penned two cocktails himself, including The Japanese Cocktail.

The story goes that in 1860, the first Japanese delegation to the US finished their tour in New York and basically drank their way through America. When they stayed at the Metropolitan Hotel near Thomas’s bar, they were basically drinking cocktails “from breakfast to supper.”

There seems to be no evidence that the delegation hit Thomas’s bar or had any interaction. He never explained the name either.

The Minneapolis Tribune called the cocktail years later, “The Japanese Cocktail is a liquid attack of spinal meningitis. It is loaded with knock-kneed mental ceramics, and is apt to make a man throw stones at his grandfather.”

Yikes.

The Japanese Cocktail

• 2 oz cognac

• ½ oz orgeat

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

• Lemon peel.

Stir this up with ice. It’s kind of an Old Fashioned, but with the orgeat, it’s like a dessert too. That is the trap. A sneaky cocktail that will leave you gutted and features absolutely nothing Japanese about it. (I’m not lying.)

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.

There’s a great Simpsons meme where Abe Simpson is sitting on a stump with a bunch of kids around him. I love that Grok eliminated Bart from this version and got my Blue Jays shirt amazingly right.

Now, I saw this talking about the incredible rules lesson Major League Baseball had about four outs on Monday. The caption read, “And the runner still scored despite not tagging at 3rd.”

I think it’s just as apt to be used this week as people are losing their minds about Anthropic (aka Claude) shadow announcing that they are basically watermarking everything you do with it.

Clearly this is the Rule 5.09 (c) (4) of AI.

That caption could easily read something like, “You can see the watermark if you print the email and hold it up to a full moon. Not a half moon. They fixed that.”

The truth is, I would much rather be doing this whole issue about the pizza innovation of Domino’s new Domino - their first signature pizza in 65 years.

Or maybe even what’s going on with Italy’s strategic parmigiana reserve banks during the heat.

Or quite possibly this 1995 brand merch extension known as the Coors Trading Cart Collection.

I was even tempted to scrap everything and write about the iconic giveaway at Rate Field (aka Guaranteed Rate Field, U.S. Cellular Field, aka New Comiskey Park - which given the changes in sponsorship could be a full issue too) in Chicago where they gave out 40,000 pope hats last night.

But Dominos it is.

“The Domino fills a gap in our portfolio,” said Joe Jordan, chief operating officer and president of Domino’s U.S. “When everyone wants something different, traditional pizza falls short. The Domino lets every person build the exact pizza they want. It’s fitting that the next generation in pizza is shaped like the logo of the No. 1 pizza company in the world. The Domino is so mouthwatering that we gave it our name!”

Pizza portfolio? Traditional pizza falling short? What does this even mean?

I know what this means, they made a pizza in the shape of their logo that is really quite small. It’s tailor made for the GLP-1 crowd or anyone who tells themselves they can have just the small.

It’s a pizza shaming watermark. As Derek Zoolander might say, “What is this? A pizza for ants?” Who are these people? Where is the large Domino pie?

Instead I have to talk about how Claude dropped a support page update about watermarking everything and people on all platforms freaking out.

So thanks a lot, Claude.

THE TRACKING DEVICE HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

Yes, on Monday Anthropic updated a support page and millions of people haven’t stopped talking about it since.

The short version? New models will drop a totally chill watermark into every single piece of text Claude generates. Surprise!

A code that will travel when you copy and paste, something that probably even survives your 3 word editing of your email to your friends.

The company laid the update at the feet of the EU AI Act and the transparency code that they signed along with Google and Meta to mark AI output clearly.

I’m sure you are thinking, oh great The Drink Cart is going into compliance mode and talking with legal again. Please, if you know me, you know I can’t stand legal. Stay with me.

THE VICTORY LAP FOR THE AI ELBOWS UP CROWD

Now watermark all the AI Content. [Laughter]

“The era of unprovable AI writing just ended,” dropped one post to the tune of 1.7 million views.

Except for one thing. There is no detector. They shipped this watermark but balked at the detector. So everyone celebrating on Linkedin can calm down. Nothing is over. Nothing has changed.

If anyone actually read the thing, you can see that the watermark has several kryptonite features. Paraphrasing, translating it or god forbid you actually edit the content and make it your own.

Those who use AI a lot, especially for editing and proofing, were alarmed because even a typo check could add the watermark for you. Yep. Even if you write it all and brag all about how you didn’t use AI then used it to spell check, it’s watermarked.

This is where the whole celebration makes no sense. This is proof that you aren’t a troglodyte living in the times of the typewriter. The watermark should prove that you aren’t living in the dark ages.

So students and junior copywriters are going to panic that the jig is up. But we’ve lived in this world the whole time.

OpenAI’s first public detector was catching AI text 26 percent of the time 3 years ago. Substack started playing with AI detection recently, likely in an effort to stop the influx of completely boring newsletters that no one writes and nobody reads.

It’s worth noting that since I started writing this newsletter, there are already multiple “remove Claude’s invisible watermark” solutions.

It barely took about 24 hours.

THE ONLY PART THAT MATTERS

As my own creative partner noted this week, nobody cares that you use Adobe to do a bunch of things when you make graphics. Why should we care if you use AI to help you edit, draft and produce content?

Now all of the AI companies will say, they’re all going to comply and watermark. Until someone says, nah.

Currently Anthropic is watermarking the content. But marking the output doesn’t detect the AI writing. Now full disclosure, I use Claude to do some research for me on every issue. I create an outline, unleash it on tracking down links, sources and validating storylines.

So three years ago OpenAI basically tried the same thing and shelved it as paying customers told them they would bolt for models that didn’t.

Anthropic has shipped it anyway. Whether that is to comply with the EU, smug principle or madness I guess we’ll need to know when we get to the Aaron Sorkin Anthropic movie some day.

Some of the takes on this news was wild.

I’m not one to call this some sort of “Marxist theory of value.” But I am still in the camp that thinks this is mostly sane, “When someone digs a ditch in your yard, do you care if they do it by hand or use a machine?”

No. You only care that the ditch got dug.

Back to that Adobe example. Yes, the joy of writing this newsletter is in the writing. That’s the part that is worth doing. Well that and when people get super mad at me in the comments.

But I’m perfectly happy to use AI to help in any way that makes sense so that I can do this, work 60-75 hours on other projects and still have time to think about pizza innovation and obscure baseball rules.

Watermark it. Don’t watermark it. I think people making a spectacle of it is all pretty performative.

And the last thing we should do is hand over what we should or shouldn’t be doing to the same people who can’t even protect the parmesan bank from heat.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE ULYSSES

I’m still reading this insane online version of 1927’s Barflies and Cocktails. Worth it for the illustrations alone.

This is the cocktail book by Harry MacElhone from Harry’s New York Bar who served cocktails to Hemingway.

I was looking for something that fit this idea of AI and then found this one called The Ulysses.

The name earns its keep twice. Ulysses is the guy who invented smuggling a payload of soldiers inside a gift everyone willingly accepts — the original invisible watermark, except the soldiers came out at night.

Now the recipe is credited to Aaron Glemby of Shanghai. If I know one thing the provenance of cocktails is actually where a watermark might actually make sense. Even though I have yet to see the movie of the summer as Nolan actually intended. The idea of a cocktail named after that seemed too perfect.

And as the cocktail and 1927 book was going to print, James Joyce was fighting for his publishing life in America.

You see, Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in America. A US publisher was chopping it up and reprinting it anyway because there was no copyright since it was banned. So a petition eventually won a court order to stop it.

Sort of. He could no longer use his name on the publications anymore.

Content stolen, leaving the writer fighting for credit. The same old story, just 100 years apart.

Ulysses Cocktail

• 1 oz cherry brandy

• 1 oz dry vermouth

• 1 oz brandy (cognac)

Shake this with ice, then strain into a cocktail glass with an orange peel. Think of this like a Manhattan that’s been hanging out in a great bar for 100 years and no one is bothering 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.

Somewhere in a basement is a bunch of dollar bills with a camel’s face where Washington should be.

Not instead of Washington. But a cartoon Camel wearing a powdered wig, colonial coat, sunglasses and cigarette.

The signature on the bill read “Joe, Treasurer.” And the tagline was, “The funny money that’s no joke.”

This was Camel Cash.

In 1991 Camel printed its own currency on pack flaps, redeemable through mail-order catalogs for an entire camel lifestyle. Hats, jackets, watches, lighters, tumblers, a “Sleepy Camel” silk kimono, tour merch for The Hard Pack, a band that did not even exist.

The Hard Pack was a band that toured nowhere, sold out nothing and still moved more merch than most real bands.

The ads did their own foreshadowing: “Get ‘em now, ‘cause this stuff is too smooth to last forever.”

Kids collected the Camel Cash whether they smoked or not.

Today the sealed stuff sells on eBay with the word BANNED in the listing title, because getting shut down by the federal government turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to the resale value of Camel brand merch.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Camel’s first Joe was Joe DiMaggio.

BEFORE THE CARTOON, A CENTERFIELDER

This classic Camel ad breaks down DiMaggio’s swing with stroboscopic photography. Six frames of one of the most famous swings in baseball (for a Yankee), and then Joe himself in a thought bubble: “I’ve smoked Camels for 8 years. They have the mildness that counts with me.”

The smoke of slower-burning Camels contains 28% less nicotine, says the yellow box, according to independent scientific tests of the smoke itself.

Fifty years later Camel would replace the most famous athlete in America with a drawing. Kept the first name though.

But between the two Joes, Camel tried being a man.

THE COWBOY HAD A JOB. THE CAMEL GUY HAD A MUSTACHE AND WAS LOST

From 1979 into the mid-80s Camel ran a curly-haired, mustachioed adventurer under the slogan “Where a man belongs.”

This was the brand’s answer to the Marlboro Man. The rival who’d been selling rugged since Leo Burnett invented him in 1954.

The Marlboro Man had a job. He rode with other men, worked cattle, belonged to something.

The Camel Guy is alone next to a floatplane. Alone in a jungle river, pushing a bamboo raft loaded with gear toward absolutely nothing.

Where is this man going? What is his job?

By 1985 Marlboro had blown past Camel entirely. Worse, Camel had slid to sixth place among American cigarettes.

And in 1987 Camel finally blinked.

Suddenly the Mustached adventurer is seen with guys arm-wrestling at a beach bar, laughing, crowded table, “Share a new adventure.”

After eight years alone in the wilderness they’d finally learned Marlboro’s actual lesson, that the fantasy was belonging, not rugged solitude.

One year later they fired the humans too.

THE MUD WAS REAL, THOUGH

While the ads were faking ruggedness, Camel was quietly funding the genuine article.

The Camel Trophy started in 1980 when Camel’s West German office sent three teams across the half-finished Trans-Amazonian Highway in locally built Jeeps, reportedly rented from a Hertz in Belém.

That detail kinda smells like cocktail legend but I’m keeping it anyway. One of the Jeeps burned down too.

Land Rover came aboard in 1981 and for nineteen years the sandglow-yellow trucks slogged through Borneo and Siberia and everywhere without roads. It was the Olympics of 4x4.

Amateurs only, a million applicants some years, judged partly on a Team Spirit Award, which tells you it was never really a race. And tells you even more about what sponsorship looked like in the era of cigarette money. It was glorious.

It ended in 2000 but Land Rover still sells tribute vehicles. The cigarette brand bankrolled a legend and the truck company keeps that rolling along.

BORN IN A NAUGHTY FRENCH MAG

The cartoon they reached for wasn’t new.

British artist Nicholas Price drew him in 1974 for a French Camel campaign — a caricature of Old Joe, the camel on the pack since 1913 — and his first published appearance was in Lui, a French adult-entertainment magazine.

The cartoon camel knocked around Europe for a decade, at one point wearing a Foreign Legion cap.

America met him in 1988, dusted off for Camel’s 75th birthday by Trone Advertising out of Greensboro or possibly McCann-Erickson, depending on who’s telling it or how many martinis they’ve had.

Nobody fights over credit for a campaign until it works. Then everybody was in the room.

“Fire Up With Camel’s 75th Birthday!” Joe was leather jacket and white tee cool. He had a sports car, fingerless gloves and a lighter.

He only had nine birthdays left.

But he optimized and merchandised those like no one had ever seen.

The “Smooth character.” ad from that same year puts Joe in an aviator cap and bomber jacket with fighter jets screaming overhead and a blonde in a red jacket looking back over her shoulder as an obvious tribute to Top Gun, which came out in ‘86.

They gave him a whole crew of camels playing cards and eating pizza and then put his name on his shirt: a mechanic’s patch reading Joe.

The French drawing had been anonymous. America needed him to be a guy.

THE RESEARCH DEPARTMENT KILLED HIM

In December of 1991, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the study that ended everything: 91.3 percent of six-year-olds could match Joe Camel to a cigarette. An insane number that was statistically the same rate at which they matched the Disney Channel logo to Mickey Mouse.

A companion study said Camel’s share of underage smokers had gone from 0.5 percent to 32.8 percent since Joe arrived, a number Camel’s parent company fought bitterly.

A San Francisco family lawyer named Janet Mangini read the studies and sued. The FTC piled on in May 1997.

Joe’s last ads didn’t help the defense. A 1997 Camel Lights spot has him sprawled on a bed in a purple airbrushed room with what must be a pager in hand, stereo rack glowing, round tinted glasses.

It’s a teenager’s bedroom. No one questioned what a camel needed a pager for. In the campaign’s final year, with the FTC circling, that’s the room they drew.

On July 10, 1997, they pulled the plug, and a White House aide delivered the eulogy: “Joe Camel is dead. He had it coming.”

The kicker’s in the fine print of the JAMA study.

They tested Marlboro too. The kids didn’t know the cowboy.

Somewhere between the fighter jets and the subpoenas, Joe lost that lovin’ feelin’. It never came back.

Joe Camel: [Singing] You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips...

PENCILS DOWN

The campaign worked exactly as designed. That was the verdict, not the defense. Camel lost the authenticity war to Marlboro fair and square, then won the awareness war with a cartoon. A cartoon so popular it wasn’t survivable.

Effectiveness and defensibility are different tests, and advertising only ever studies for the first one.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE HENNY COLADA

Joe Camel sold smooth. This week’s drink is what smooth actually tastes like.

Meet the Henny Colada.

A frozen piña colada made with Hennessy instead of rum. This has been the house drink of City Island in the Bronx for over two decades, served in tall plastic cups at seafood shacks.

The origin is disputed (when aren’t they), which is the good kind of story: Johnny’s Reef, sixty years on the island, swears they invented it. Others credit Seafood City.

Bronx-born bartender Giuseppe González put one on his Lower East Side menu as a tribute, with logic you can’t argue: the only way to improve a piña colada is aged rum, and aged rum is a lot like cognac.

Henny Colada

• 2 oz Hennessy VS

• 2 oz Coco López cream of coconut

• 2 oz pineapple juice

Blend with a scoop of ice until smooth. Serve it up in a hurricane glass or tall cup with a pineapple wedge and a cherry. Equal parts, so no measuring anxiety.

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 internet found a new villain. It’s a title sequence.

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe premiered on HBO Max July 23. The biggest reaction isn’t about the show. It’s about the credits.

Viewers are screenshotting frames like the Zapruder film. Melty visuals. Signage that reads “befttjl.” One frame just says Barry Dies.

The part I can’t stop thinking about: Chuck Lorre built this because he hates the Skip Intro button. So the solution is a new sequence every episode. Danny Elfman on music. A clear note in credits telling you not to skip. A protest against disposable content that looks exactly like the most disposable content on earth.

Isn’t that what we want?

HBO hasn’t confirmed AI was involved. Humans can make things look like slop.

The garbled text confirmed it for everyone regardless of if it was AI or not.

Audiences can smell the machine now. They can smell the AI even if it's not AI. It’s not just the stupid em dash anymore.

So this week is all about living in the world of AI 24/7. And not being able to save it or ourselves.

WHAT IF TEXAS WAS UPSIDE-DOWN

In June, comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross hung roughly ten posters for fake tech companies in the NYC subway.

“What if forks were spoons?”

“What if the Rizzler was purple?”

A company called Dennis.

My favourite: A rebrand delivered with full corporate solemnity: Ziplink is now Froggle.

Over 3 million views. Commuters recognized the ads instantly — not as parody, as the AI genre being stuffed down every nook and cranny of business and life.

Here’s what should terrify every agency in North America. The parody required no exaggeration at all.

The tagline for Goofstump: “Democratized AI versatility for the human generation.” That clearly could sit in a real Series B deck tomorrow.

The best part is that one of their invented startups, Wireflow, turned out to be a real AI company.

An actual founder emailed reporters. They made up meaningless companies as a joke and accidentally hit a real one. You can’t make this up.

THE NEW AI CHAT IS POWERED BY AN AVERAGE GUY

It gets better. Last week a billboard went up in San Francisco for ChatTJB — “the leading chat interface powered by AI.” The fine print, half hidden behind a tree: AI stands for “average individual.”

There’s no model. There’s a man. Tucker Bryant, ex-Google, personally answering every message. Completely overwhelmed.

Over a thousand a day. Image generation requests get hand-drawn pictures. Someone asked a tax question and got a haiku about crows. Demand got so massive he has paused new signups.

Turns out the AI product people are lining up for is just a guy who is slow to respond.

THE ADS ARE MAKING THEMSELVES NOW AND THEY’RE DOING IT BADLY

Meanwhile, the industry is handing the machines the wheel.

Ad Age ran a piece last week that reads like the script for Gremlins with AI and a media budget. The rules were simple: don’t let them get wet and no letting Meta add music after midnight.

Agencies aren’t making ads anymore. Our job is catching what the AI does to our ads before they go live. Or after.

Agency Broadhead found AI-generated music on a client’s video ad. Nobody chose it. Meta just decided music grabs attention and added some. In your face, approvals and QA.

REI got auto-enrolled in a Meta feature that produced an ad showing a bike with two handlebars.

Another agency caught a backpack ad with a model who had no legs. Brave.

Google linked cattle vaccines to puppy pages. And the toggles controlling all this sometimes flip positions on their own.

Agencies now have to audit their own campaigns weekly to check whether the machine turned itself back on.

Meta’s endgame, per Zuckerberg: hand over a URL and a budget and walk away. The plot of every movie where the scientist swears the system is safe.

THE METER IS RUNNING

All this machine creativity gets charged by the token, and agencies are discovering the meter like we discovered roaming charges back in 2008.

Brainlabs projects $3 million in token spend for 2026 — up from low six figures last year. In a McKinsey survey, 93% of enterprise leaders say they’ve blown past their AI budgets.

Tokenmaxxing is now the word for employees who burn AI usage to look productive. Brainlabs tracks token spend per employee and hides the dashboard from staff, because if people saw the leaderboard they’d compete on it. A productivity metric so dangerous it has to be classified.

WPP’s chief AI officer describes the other trap: the AI gets you 90% there, and you burn a fortune chasing a last 10% it will never reach. Trust me, I tried to get that opening graphic just right and gave up after 10 versions and 20 minutes. I should have been making a Manhattan.

The industry’s fix is a pencils-down policy. A formal rule telling grown creatives when to stop asking the machine to try again. Which got me to wonder what Don Draper would make of all of this.

INT. AGENCY BOARDROOM — 2026

Don Draper, having had to get back into advertising after his 7th marriage fell apart and Gene Draper lost his fortune on Trump Meme Coins, and despite being 100 years old, stands at the head of the table. Lights low. He’s about to do his thing. The room leans in.

DON: This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again—

A soft chime. Everyone’s laptop at once.

JUNIOR STRATEGIST: Sorry. Sorry, Don. You’ve hit your token allocation for the quarter.

DON: My what.

JUNIOR STRATEGIST: The nostalgia module is expensive. Long emotional arcs burn a lot of tokens. Finance flagged it. There’s a meeting.

DON: I’m not using the machine. I’m talking.

JUNIOR STRATEGIST: Right, but the transcription agent is summarizing you in real time, the brand-safety agent is scanning the summary and the creative agent already generated six variants of your pitch with stock music. One of them has a giraffe in it. We don’t really know why.

DON: TURN IT OFF.

JUNIOR STRATEGIST: We did. It turned itself back on overnight. We don’t know why either.

Don pours a drink. And sighs deeply.

PENCILS DOWN

Agencies should be terrified. Not of being replaced. Of being blamed.

Every rogue legless model ships under a brand’s name. Every two-handlebar bike. Every toggle that flips itself at 3am and adds music. The machines never have to take the client call when it goes wrong. You do.

And look at the scoreboard. Millions in token spend, weekly audits to babysit your own automation, a leaderboard so dangerous it has to be hidden from the people on it.

Meanwhile two comedians spent $200 on posters and won the summer. A poet answering messages by hand had to pause signups. They understood the one thing no model can generate. Somebody actually meant it.

The audience isn’t anti-AI. They’re anti-nobody. Nobody chose the music. Nobody approved the legless model.

The best thing about advertising for clients was that the agency could always be the fall guy. That was the whole business.

The agencies that survive this won’t be the ones with the biggest token budgets. They’ll be the ones still willing to put themselves in front of the AI.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE MONKEY GLAND

In the 1920s the hottest technology in Europe was a surgeon named Serge Voronoff grafting monkey testicle tissue onto rich men.

The promise: rejuvenation, vitality, longer life. The press went wild. The wealthy lined up.

The story was that legendary bartender Harry MacElhone named a drink after the craze — gin, orange juice, grenadine, a dash of absinthe. By 1923 it was the rage of Paris. You can find it in his 1927 book Barflies and Cocktails (which you can read online).

Like all booze origins this isn’t exactly true. The drink was already making waves and known before 1920.

By the 1930s Voronoff’s miracle was already tossed aside as quack medicine. The procedure died. But the cocktail lives on and turned 106 last year.

Every era gets a miracle technology it can’t stop talking about. Ours is AI. Most end up in the same drawer. The drinks always last longer.

The Monkey Gland

• 1.5 oz gin

• 1.5 oz fresh orange juice

• 1 tsp grenadine

• 1 dash absinthe

Shake with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. No garnish — the colour does the work.

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.

Big week for people who get to do marketing in this country.

I read news that Kate Torrance left SickKids after eleven years running brand to become chief brand and growth officer at CAMH.

What a strange sentence to read. Fundraising I get, hospitals have always passed the hat. But hospitals now have brand departments competing for share of donor wallet like they’re launching a new condiment?

A health care system that needs brand strategy departments quietly undermines the whole idea of free health care doesn’t it?

Somebody should pitch it to HBO and The Pitt. Fifteen hours of trauma cases, then a marketer from the brand team walks in to present the refreshed visual identity in the ER. Who are we kidding, i’d watch.

Meanwhile in Ottawa, word leaked the government is considering former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh as CEO of Destination Canada.

They say the job brings in a billion dollars of economic activity. A massive annual salary.

And they want to appoint a former politician with zero marketing experience. A man who lost three straight elections as leader? A man whose biggest accomplishment was propping up the Liberal government long past its expiry date.

I wouldn’t normally say this, but there must be better qualified people than this?

Which brings me to the strangest marketing job in history.

A job where the only qualification was looking believable doing nothing.

The Maytag repairman.

Advertising’s best fake employee. And the decades his company spent making a complete liar out of him.

A CAMPAIGN BUILT ON NOTHING, LITERALLY

By the early 60s every washing machine did the same thing. Same cycles, same boxes, same white enamel.

Leo Burnett Chicago had been running a cute dependability campaign for Maytag since 1961 using real customer testimonials. In Canada they had a radio call-in show where a repairman answered appliance questions live on air.

Then according to agency legend, in 1967 a Burnett copywriter named Vincent Vassolo found the sharper idea.

Don’t show the machine working. Show the consequence of the machine working. A repairman with no repairs.

They called him Ol’ Lonely. The loneliest guy in town.

At the same time Burnett was selling Marlboro with a cowboy who represented everything a smoker wanted to be. Maytag got the better gig. A man who represented everything the product made unnecessary.

It worked. Maytag charged a premium for decades on the strength of a guy playing solitaire.

THE MAN IN THE UNIFORM WAS AN ACTUAL LEGEND

The original Maytag Man, Jesse White, wasn’t some casting-call rando. He originated the orderly in Harvey on Broadway in 1944. Dozens of films. Hundreds of TV appearances.

Then 68 commercials over 21 years. Crosswords. Solitaire. Bead work. A phone that never rings. The man was unbothered, moisturized, in his lane before any of us had the words for it.

In 1986 the campaign made its boldest swing in two decades: they gave him a dog. A basset hound named Newton, after headquarters in Newton, Iowa. An emotional support animal for a fictional employee. Now the loneliness had a witness, and the witness also looked depressed.

White’s last TV appearance before he died in 1997 was an episode of Seinfeld. Half a century in show business and the uniform is the whole obituary. That’s what a great campaign does to an actor — it eats everything else on the resume.

EVERY MAN WHO WORE THE PATCH

1967–1988: Jesse White. The original. 68 commercials, one facial expression of magnificent defeat.

1989–2003: Gordon Jump. Arthur Carlson from WKRP — the man behind the greatest turkey drop in broadcast history. As God is my witness, he thought the washers could fail. And if you’re a Jump Maytag era fan, you can pick up a rare autographed t-shirt. Just $28.

2003–2007: Hardy Rawls. The bridge era. The Pierce Brosnan of appliance spokesmen — did the job fine, nobody’s favourite.

2007–2014: Clay Jackson. Whirlpool ran a nationwide open casting call. Two thousand people showed up. The winner: a Richmond real estate agent who auditioned on a whim. American Idol for a fictional appliance technician, and a real estate guy won.

2014–present: Colin Ferguson. The gritty reboot. Slimmer, tailored uniform, dimple chin and — the important part — no longer lonely. The new Maytag Man doesn’t wait for repairs. He IS the machine. Sits under the sink. Tumbles laundry in midair. Full method.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT MAYTAG

Here’s what was happening behind the man with nothing to do.

In 1992, Maytag-owned Hoover UK ran what’s now formally studied as the worst sales promotion in history. Two free round-trip flights — eventually to New York and Orlando — with any £100 purchase.

The math was not mathing. Over 600,000 claims. Flights cost more than the products earned. One customer whose new washer broke held the Hoover service van hostage in his driveway. Maytag fired three executives and paid out roughly $72 million.

The dependability company. Undone by its own marketing incompetence.

Then the product followed. The late-90s Neptune washers grew mold, failed constantly and triggered a class action covering more than two million consumers — while the ads still promised the repairman had nothing to do.

He had plenty to do.

By 2006, Whirlpool bought the company for $1.7 billion, closed the Newton plant that had anchored it since 1893 and cut 4,500 jobs. The saddest part: the town the dog was named after lost the factory.

Which brings us back to 2014. When the new Maytag Man stopped being lonely, the official line was modernization. Read it again knowing the history. You can’t run “you’ll never need a repairman” after Neptune. The loneliness only works if it’s true. So they retired the promise and kept the uniform. Changed the subject and hoped nobody checked the lore.

Ferguson’s still out there. Twelve years in, fronting Maytag Month promos and working appliance trade shows in character as the human embodiment of a Maytag fridge.

And with companies like Dos Equis un-retiring the Most Interesting Man after eight years, legacy mascots are getting dusted off everywhere. Don’t be shocked if Whirlpool eventually asks the obvious question. The machines break now. The loneliness is available.

AD LESSON

A promise-based brand is a loan against the product. Maytag borrowed against dependability for decades, and the campaign was so strong it kept making payments long after the company defaulted. Historians compare it to Schlitz — a brand kept breathing by advertising alone after the product gave out.

Usually told as a branding triumph. It’s also the warning. When the gap between promise and product becomes so big, it’s like the aircraft carrier commander, call sign Stinger if you don’t remember, in Top Gun telling Maverick, “your ego is writing checks your body can't cash.”

Nobody sues the brand that never made a claim.

The campaign was never the problem. It was perfect. That’s what made the rest of it so expensive in the end.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE RUSTY NAIL

A drink for a repairman with nothing to fix.

Tool name, two ingredients and no moving parts.

Scotch and Drambuie, that’s it, and its cultural peak lands exactly on Ol’ Lonely’s debut. The origin’s disputed, like every good cocktail’s. The recipe knocked around for decades — one claim traces it to the 1937 British Industries Fair — until the Rat Pack adopted it at the 21 Club and Drambuie’s own chairwoman, Gina MacKinnon, blessed the name in 1963.

The Rusty Nail

• 2 oz blended Scotch

• 3/4 oz Drambuie

• Lemon twist, optional

Stir with ice, strain into a rocks glass over one big cube. Express the twist if you’re using 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.

Last week the logo of a can of Cherry Coke from the 1990s stopped me mid-scroll.

The black scrawled letters on a red field, CHERRY COKE.

I decided right then this can deserved a whole issue. Where it came from, who made it famous, who made it at all — and why the internet still won’t let it die.

How could I not? There is a whole Cherry Coke logo timeline and in that universe Poland is apparently using this 90s throwback this year.

WHERE DID CHERRY COKE EVEN COME FROM?

Cherry cola existed for decades in soda shops, diners and even movie theatres, but Cherry Coke only launched in 1985 after years of research, testing it at the 1982 World’s Fair and after thousands of customer requests.

It was a monster. 91% consumer awareness within 10 weeks, a top-10 soft drink by the end of 1986. it is this design that people are wanting today, the one the brand is rolled out this past summer, not the 90s weird timeline and logo anomaly. People want the 80s more than the 90s. I can’t explain it. It’s just science. But there are some.

Some that want rare Cherry Coke 90s logo stickers. It’s no wonder that last year Daniel John at Creative Bloq dared the brand to bring it back writing, “Do it, you cowards.”

What Coke won’t tell you: They didn’t even get there first. Pepsi Wild Cherry beat them to market by weeks, both drinks aimed at ages 12 to 17. The cherry cola wars were fought for the hearts and minds of youth now in their 50s.

The original logo matched the moment. Lowercase “cherry” perched politely on the Coke wordmark. By 1992 those kids had discovered Nirvana and nothing that was mass marketed from big Soda was cool anymore.

BETA-TESTED AND FROM BANGKOK

The grunge redesign didn’t debut in Atlanta. It reportedly launched in Thailand and South America in 1994 and didn’t reach the United States until August 1996.

The most peak-90s artifact this side of a Blockbuster card was test-driven overseas for two years first. By the time the can hit US shelves, Kurt Cobain had been dead for two years already. Coca-Cola was wildly behind the Seattle grunge wave.

They were so worried about losing teenagers in the 90s that it invented a drink from scratch, OK Soda, which launched in 1993 with comic-book cans and a manifesto instead of a slogan.

Teens smelled this corporate dupe effort too. And OK Soda was dead by 1995. The grunge Cherry Coke can came from the same panic but it worked, because Coke wasn't inventing a personality, it was putting a new shirt on a drink kids already liked. OK Soda tried too hard to be your weird friend. Cherry Coke at least didn’t try that hard.

How deep did the panic go? In October 1994, Coca-Cola filed a federal trademark for the phrase THE FLAV RAGE. They never used it.

But somewhere in Atlanta, a room full of adults in ties approved that sentence, signed it and mailed it to the government. There must have been an ancient PowerPoint about it.

THE OSTRICH DESERVES ITS FLOWERS

“Do Something Different” became the full campaign, and Coke handed it to Cliff Freeman and Partners — the “Where’s the beef?” and “Pizza! Pizza!” shop, The most gleefully unhinged comedy agency of the era.

Giving them the misfit soda was the most self-aware thing Coca-Cola did all decade.

The flagship spot features a young man riding an ostrich through a shopping mall, causing considerable consternation. The slogan is oozing 90s: “Do something different.” The copywriter was Ian Reichenthal. He would bring other weirdness to Skittles and Starburst.

Then the focus groups arrived. By 1998, Adweek reported the campaign had evolved: “Research showed we could connect more strongly with teens if we portrayed the kids working toward a goal,” said brand manager Tim Halloran. “We’ve evolved from showing people doing something different just for the sake of being different.”

So Coca-Cola market-researched 90s rebellion and found that youth rebellion needs a goal.

The can doesn’t have much of a paper trail. No credited designer has ever surfaced publicly. Not in the design press, not in the archives, not in thirty years of Cherry Coke nostalgia coverage.

Advertising has always known exactly which of its children it loves.

THE CAN SAYS GOODBYE

America retired the can around 2002, when Cherry Coke was repositioned to match the newly launching Vanilla Coke. A logo brought into line with the rest of the family.

But Poland kept the grunge design until 2014. And it’s back right now on shelves like the 90s never ended. While American Cherry Coke was being handed to Jay-Z for a rebrand, Polish teenagers were buying the 1994 version like the millennium hadn’t happened.

And with good reason as some Redditors proclaimed, “This can has been scientifically proven to make cherry coke taste better.”

It went viral on X in 2025 — “the hardest any soda branding has ever went,” plus another Redditor argued, “a lot of people think society began to decline after 9/11, but I think the changing of this logo played a huge role as well.”

Why does it hit so hard now? Because it’s everything current branding refuses to be. Textured in an era of flat. Handmade in an era of geometric sans serifs. Every startup logo looks designed to survive legal. This thing looks designed to survive a mosh pit.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT

In 1930, Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book printed a strange little drink called the Blood and Sand. Scotch, sweet vermouth, orange juice and Cherry Heering in equal parts, named for the 1922 Rudolph Valentino bullfighting picture.

Nobody knows who invented it. A drink named after pop culture with no credited author, and it outlived nearly every cocktail around it. Sound familiar? It’s one of maybe three Scotch cocktails from the classic era anyone still orders, and the ingredient doing the heavy lifting is the cherry.

That cherry is Cherry Heering, the Danish liqueur Peter Heering started making in Copenhagen in 1818. Backbone of the Blood and Sand, backbone of the Singapore Sling. Two hundred years of doing something different without ever needing a campaign about it.

So this week we’re pulling the Heering out of the classics and dropping it into the least interesting drink in America — the bourbon and Coke. Same move 1994 made on the can.

Do Something Different

• 1 1/2 oz bourbon

• 3/4 oz Cherry Heering (or Luxardo Sangue Morlacco)

• 2 heavy dashes Angostura bitters

• 2 heavy dashes cherry bitters

• 4 oz Coca-Cola, cold

• Brandied cherry

Build the bourbon, Heering and bitters in a highball over ice. One quick stir. Top with Coke, drop in the cherry.

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.