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.

When I started thinking about this series of advertising mascots, I had the Taco Bell Chihuahua higher on the list. But there are so many good ones.

So it would be just my luck, that when it came time to write it, the company would be under the gun for a contaminated shredded iceberg lettuce outbreak. Viva Gorditas!

As a brief aside, my favourite moment in a Taco Bell was once on a trip to see the Seattle Mariners a carload of friends got an ungodly amount of cheap tacos. When they called our number I treated it like Bob Barker had just called my name on The Price is Right. I’m sure those workers were confused. This is the power of the road trip and fueled by Mr. Pibb.

Homer had to deal with the cyclops. We have to live in a time navigating Tex Mex in the world of Cyclospora. I even have a lettuce spinner currently in my amazon cart, because I’m a savage when it comes to washing lettuce. Don’t worry the chain is acting “swiftly” and “acted quickly and proactively” That’s probably the last thing I want to hear from my trash taco brand.

And if you know anything about Chihuahuas or even a Jack Russell with a drop of Chihuahua blood in it, they carry the big dog energy of a giant just like in the Odyssey. Mix it with a Jack Russell and you have yourself a very determined little jerk.

So it’s good that the last time Taco Bell needed this many lawyers, a dog was involved.

MAKE A RUN FOR THE ORIGIN STORY

Picture this. It’s 1997. Titanic ruled the box office much like Christopher Nolan’s epic does today. Beanie Baby mania was sweeping the continent. The Burger Wars were still in peak form.

This was the perfect time for America to lose its mind over a very small dog with a big attitude.

Gidget, it turns out, was born in 1994. But our story begins in June of 1996.

That’s when Taco Bell licensing manager Ed Alfaro spots Psycho Chihuahua at a New York trade show. And yes, there is a whole documented legal case over a year. Trust me, I read it. It’s as boring as you’d imagine.

In 1997 TBWA Chiat Day presented 30 different campaign ideas. One was about a talking Chihuahua. The idea according to the legal filings was a, “Chihuahua dog passing a female Chihuahua dog to get to Taco Bell food.”

The creative team of Clay Williams and Chuck Bennett described the idea coming from a time where they, as the LA Business Journal told it, “were eating soft-shell tacos at their favorite Mexican food place in Venice several months ago, a Chihuahua streaked by the window hell-bent on some mission.”

This was shortlisted, tested and then chosen as the campaign. This despite Alfaro’s warning to Taco Bell’s lawyers (imagine for a second being in house counsel at Taco Bell. That could be a Netflix show right there).

You know what happened next. Full speed ahead. First stop a regional test in the summer of

1997 and then on to over 40 ads from 1998 - 2000.

THE ERA OF YO QUIERO TACO BELL

So there it was. A completely 1990s ad. A Chihuahua walks past another dog in favor of the world’s most uninspired tacos and then says “Yo quiero Taco Bell.”

People lose their minds. About a female dog, voiced by Carlos Alazraqui doing his best impression of a mix of Peter Lorre, Ren from Ren and Stimpy and a dash of Anthony Quinn.

More catch phrases would follow. Soon enough everyone was saying, ”Drop the chalupa.” Even the guys on SportsCenter.

Then Godzilla hit theaters in 1998. And the dog showed up with a box trap and a couple of tacos. The little dog said, “here lizard lizard lizard.”

USA Today’s Ad Track gave the campaign one of the highest scores it had ever measured. 47 percent loved it. 8 percent were as wrong as the meat in a classic taco. The dog would end up flying first class, ringing the opening bell at the NYSE and playing Madison Square Garden. There was even a spot with young Johnny Knoxville.

There were talking plush dolls, bobbleheads, keychains, dogs in #23 jerseys because it was the 90s. Respect. You would squeeze the paw and get the catchphrase. It all trades on eBay now for five to twenty-five bucks, sound box still working.

So did any plush from that decade appreciate? Not a chance. Probably worse than 1990 Topps baseball cards. There is a pretty heavy after market for 1990s Taco Bell sauce however. Only $159 if you’re interested.

PLOT TWIST

Behind the Taco Narrator: The Chihuahua campaign started out as a love story between America and a dog. But now the love was a boycott and the dog was wearing... a Che Guevara beret.

A sombrero. A bandido costume. Revolutionary headwear. On a Chihuahua. Selling gorditas? Outrageous. Civil rights leader Mario Obledo called the character despicable and degrading. Taco Bell heard the criticism, took a long hard look at itself and made a lot more commercials.

But behind the scenes, a darker truth was emerging.

The dog didn’t sell tacos. America wanted the dog, but not the cheap tacos. In the second quarter of 2000, same-store sales fell 6 percent, the worst in company history. The most famous animal in the country couldn’t move a damn chalupa.

In July 2000, the Chihuahua ride was over. The campaign was dead. The agency was fired. The president was replaced.

Who pulled the trigger? The activists, says Tom Kenny — yes, the voice of SpongeBob. The lawsuits and the bottom line were likely the real reason.

In June 2003 a Michigan jury ruled that Taco Bell had stiffed the two Grand Rapids guys who pitched Psycho Chihuahua back in 1996.

The number: $30,174,031. With interest: $42 million.

The court record contained one devastating detail — after being sued over the Chihuahua, Taco Bell just kept airing the Chihuahua ads. They didn’t care.

Desperate, Taco Bell turned on its own agency and demanded TBWA pay the bill. The agency needed a hero.

It got an entertainment lawyer named Doug Emhoff.

Yes. That guy.

Emhoff argued his client was just a third party caught in the middle. In January 2009 the Ninth Circuit agreed, unanimously. Taco Bell paid every penny. It was the biggest win of Emhoff’s career, and his reward was waiting.

Four years later, a blind date with the attorney general of California, Kamala Harris.

And so the first Second Gentleman in American history was forged in the fires of a talking Chihuahua.

The 90s never stop giving us wins. And nobody won bigger than the dog.

Gidget’s third act was better than most.

She scored a GEICO spot with the famous gecko. One mascot dynasty passing the torch to the next. Then she played Bruiser’s mom in Legally Blonde 2. She outlived her own case law by six months, dying in July 2009, age 15, after a stroke at her trainer’s home.

THE AD LESSON

Taco Bell actually stole an idea, got caught then paid 42 million for it.

Worse, the idea didn’t really work. They committed the crime and still didn’t get the bag. That’s the whole lesson in one sentence: fame is not a business result.

The dog was the most beloved character in America and the most expensive mistake in company history, all at the same time. Remember, if your mascot is more famous than your food, you haven’t built a brand. You’ve built a pet.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: MEXICAN FIRING SQUAD

The Mexican Firing Squad comes from Charles H. Baker. A professional drinker who ditched his chaperones in Mexico City and wandered into La Cucaracha Bar, run by American bartenders who’d fled Prohibition.

He later wrote it was a creation he “almost became wreck upon.” High praise from a man who drank for a living.

It’s one of the earliest tequila cocktails in English print. The Margarita didn’t show up by name until 1953. This drink was doing tequila before tequila was cool.

One more thing. La Cucaracha’s mascot? A cartoon cockroach. Tux, top hat, cigar. A bar selling Americans a good time through a beloved cartoon animal all sixty years before the Chihuahua. The playbook was right there. The cockroach just never got sued.

THE MEXICAN FIRING SQUAD

• 2 oz blanco tequila

• 3/4 oz fresh lime juice

• 1/2 oz simple syrup

• 1/4 oz grenadine

• 3 dashes Angostura bitters

• Splash of soda

Shake everything but the soda with ice, strain into a Collins glass over fresh ice, top with the soda. Garnish with a lime wheel, or go full 1937 with an orange slice, pineapple wedge and cherry.

I’d wash it down and marvel at the Avengers style ad to promote The Phantom Menace. featuring Gidget and Colonel Sanders and a girl from Pizza Hut.

Live Más friends.

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.

Spain beat Argentina 1-0 on Sunday. Extra time, Ferran Torres, MetLife Stadium. Messi walked off without the trophy, without the Golden Boot and without the Golden Ball. You can’t script it better.

This also means we can finally talk about the real tournament. The one Messi won months ago, before a ball was kicked.

Eighteen of the eighty major ad campaigns tested for this World Cup featured Lionel Messi. That’s 22 percent. Nearly a quarter of the tournament’s creative output bet on one 39-year-old man.

Here’s the thing nobody at those brands will say out loud.

He’s absolutely terrible at this.

THE MOST EXPENSIVE MAN TO EVER SAY NOTHING

Watch any Messi commercial. Actually watch one.

He doesn’t sell. He kind of appears. He looks slightly to the left of camera like he’s checking if his limo is here. Give him a line and he delivers it like a man reading his own deposition.

And brands pay a fortune for it.

Top-tier FIFA sponsorship runs 80 to 100 million dollars. Messi costs a GOAT premium on top. What are they buying? Certainly not a performer. They’re buying 632 million Instagram followers standing next to their logo for six seconds.

That’s not a pitchman. That’s a ghost billboard with a beard.

THE SUMMER OF MESSI, A GUIDED TOUR

The work is where it gets funny.

Michelob Ultra, “The Superior Match.” BBDO New York turns a hotel lobby into a pitch. Pulisic, Dest and Robinson against Messi, Lautaro and Nico Paz. Ochoa in goal. Cameos from Ronaldo Nazário, Alex Morgan and, for reasons known only to a creative deck somewhere, Billy Bob Thornton. (I know, I know he drinks the stuff in Landman but that still doesn’t mean you need to put him in this spot.)

Everyone gets to be funny. Pulisic talks. Thornton drawls. Messi’s job is to be Messi in the vicinity of the beer. The 15-second cutdown is called Lobby Nutmeg — other people dare each other while Messi executes one move in silence. The creatives know. They stopped writing him dialogue the way you stop assigning homework to the kid who isn’t going to do it.

And God bless the press release. Messi’s official quote: “I always have a great time on set with Michelob ULTRA.” I’ve never read a sentence that sounds more like it was generated by the licensing agreement itself. No human said that. Impossible.

Lay’s, “No Lay’s, No Game.” The official snack of the World Cup surrounds Messi with actual charisma — Beckham, Thierry Henry, Alexia Putellas, Suárez, in a full on Steve Carell spot. Same architecture: let the ensemble generate the entertainment, cut to Messi for the money shot holding the chips. Why is he even at a watch party? Was this foreshadowing?

In Adidas’, “Backyard Legends” Messi is helped by Chalamet, Bad Bunny, Yamal, Bellingham, Trinity Rodman. Everybody acts. Messi kind of appears.

You know the drill.

Every one of these campaigns is a machine built to extract value from a man who contributes nothing except existing somewhere near the product. The ensemble casts aren’t creative ambition. They’re compensation. Every Billy Bob Thornton is load-bearing creativity.

The industry has quietly engineered an entire genre of advertising around the fact that its most expensive asset cannot advertise. And I could do almost the same newsletter about Beckham.

Don’t flip the coaster just yet. The Messi ad back catalog is even better.

THE RÉSUMÉ NOBODY READS

Messi will appear next to absolutely anything.

2017: a blockchain phone. Sirin Labs, a startup whose paid Facebook post had Messi claiming he was “usually busy trying to decentralize defenses.” The phone was called the Finney. You’ve never met anyone who owned one.

Then the full crypto era. A reported 20 million from fan token firm Socios. The face of NFT game Sorare.

Then Saudi Arabia. Paid tourism ambassador since 2022 — a gig he took so seriously that PSG suspended him for skipping training to fly to Riyadh for promo events. Read that again. He got suspended from soccer for advertising. And you wonder why the world was cheering for Spain on Sunday?

And the crown jewel. In 2016 Messi and his father were caught up in some tax fraud allegations in Spain for hiding the income from his image rights. Shell companies in Belize and Uruguay, moving the money from his Adidas, Pepsi and Danone deals. The greatest athlete-endorser of his generation, with a little fraud on his endorsement income specifically.

Then the sports drink. Last year Prime sued Más+ by Messi and put the quiet part in a legal filing: Messi didn’t create the drink at all.

I. Am. Shocked. Their filing claimed the White Claw people showed up with a finished product and Messi licensed his name, image, signature and likeness.

Prime meant it as an insult. It’s the whole Messi Economy. He’s not a pitchman. He’s a rights package for you to mold or sell whatever you want.

The suits got dropped in January, presumably once everyone realized they were arguing about which beverage was more authentically fake.

THE LEGENDS TEST

Athletes selling out isn’t the crime. The crime is doing it this badly.

Michael Jordan is the standard. “Be Like Mike” worked because Jordan on camera was magnetic — the smile sold harder than the script. He carried a feature film. Jordan Brand became a multibillion-dollar annual business because the product was mythology you could wear. Jordan gave brands a performance. Messi gives them attendance.

Peyton Manning is the craftsman. A goofy quarterback who understood the assignment so completely he built a second career out of being good at commercials. Athletes can act, they just have to put in the work.

George Foreman is the honest version of the Messi model. Sold his name outright — Salton paid nine figures in 1999 for the grill rights and he made more from it than from boxing.

Pure licensing. But Foreman showed up grinning and flipped the burgers anyway. Messi runs the Foreman playbook while performing like he’s been waterboarded for 8 hours.

Now look at Messi. Stained by tax fraud. Shilling for a regime with a body count. Suspended by his own club for moonlighting. Not one major sponsor blinked.

Why? Nobody ever bought Messi’s character. There’s no image to crack. You can’t tarnish an empty billboard. Being an vanilla vessel turns out to be the ultimate brand safety.

And Ronaldo is the mirror. Equally shameless — the CR7 empire, the Binance ambassadorship that landed him in a class action, a museum about himself. But Ronaldo performs. He preens, he winks, he siuus.

He once moved two Coke bottles at a press conference and the internet credited him with vaporizing billions in market value. Probably coincidence. But Ronaldo generates moments. Messi generates presence. One of them is earning the check.

SUNDAY WAS THE STRESS TEST

Messi lost everything. Spain took the trophy. Mbappé took the Golden Boot, 10 goals to 8 — the second straight World Cup he’s snatched it at the death. Rodri took the Golden Ball.

Messi even briefly held the all-time World Cup scoring record mid-tournament, then lost that too when Mbappé passed him in the third-place game. A consolation match. Messi wasn’t on the field. He lost a record from his couch.

Eighty brands wrote a coronation and the tournament handed them a funeral.

So do we have to watch Messi ads for the rest of our lives? Yes. And that’s the point. The brands never bought the winning — nobody’s creative had a trophy clause. When you license a name, an image, a signature and a likeness, results are somebody else’s department. The monument doesn’t have to win. It has to stand there.

Meanwhile the actual best player of the tournament is Rodri — Ballon d’Or, World Cup, Golden Ball — and he fronts approximately nothing. The most valuable footballer on Earth is commercially invisible, and a 39-year-old who lost everything on Sunday is 22 percent of the ad break. One awards ceremony, and the case is closed: celebrity marketing divorced performance years ago.

Messi will do farewell-tour campaigns. Then legacy campaigns. Then anniversary campaigns. Then probably some sort of AI hologram double jubilee tour for the next 40 years.

This is how it ended.

The licensing entity doesn’t retire. It will just be remixed for all eternity.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: SAVOY HOTEL SPECIAL COCKTAIL NO. 1

In 1920, Prohibition made America the one country on Earth where a great bartender couldn’t work. So Harry Craddock got on a boat.

He landed at the Savoy in London, took over the American Bar in 1926, and in 1930 the hotel asked him to write down what he knew. The Savoy Cocktail Book — 750 recipes, a shocking amount of apricot brandy, art deco borders, still in print a century later. Not a bad read.

But check your copy of the book. If it says Pernod instead of absinthe, you own the remix. Absinthe was banned or extinct for most of the 20th century, so later editions quietly rewrote Craddock’s book — absinthe swapped for Pernod, some drinks cut entirely.

The most important cocktail book ever written has been running silent product substitutions for 90 years. Perfect pour for an issue about a man whose entire career is a name licensed onto other people’s products. At least the Savoy put its name on something Craddock actually made.

Savoy Hotel Special Cocktail No. 1

• 2 oz dry gin

• 1 oz dry vermouth

• 2 dashes grenadine

• 1 dash absinthe

Shake with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Express a lemon twist over the top and drop it in. I’m told that the grenadine should barely tint it — think rust-pink, not a kid’s Shirley Temple. Real grenadine, not that neon crap stuff. If your bar is still living in 1955, a rinse of Pernod does the job, and now you know why that substitution exists.

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’ve had Smokey the Bear on my advertising mascot radar for months. Since there are Ontario seems to be fully engulfed in flames this week and the smoke has settled over Toronto giving us that sweet campfire air quality, it felt like the week to run the story of the bear.

He outlived the man who voiced him, the artist who drew him and the deer he replaced. And the slogan that made him famous turned out to be ecologically wrong.

Here’s what I didn’t know. Smokey was born in wartime. After Pearl Harbor a Japanese submarine actually shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, right beside Los Padres National Forest. The fear took hold that enemy fire could ignite all of the Pacific forests, you know those same forests America needed for wartime lumber, with the able-bodied firefighters all overseas.

This wasn’t just paranoia. A Japanese pilot named Nobuo Fujita actually bombed the forest outside Brookings, Oregon in September 1942. Later in the war Japan launched some 9,000 incendiary balloons into the jet stream, hoping they’d drift across the Pacific and set the American West on fire. Hundreds made it. The enemy wasn’t hypothetically trying to burn the forests. They were trying 9,000 times. Oregon just happened to be to wet.

So the first fire-prevention slogans weren’t cuddly at all.

They were Forest Fires Aid the Enemy and Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon.

As Marty would say to Doc Brown, “Whoa. This is heavy.”

DISNEY LOANED THEM BAMBI. THEN THEY NEEDED THEIR OWN BEAR

For one year, Disney let the campaign use Bambi. It worked. But the loan expired, and the Forest Service needed a mascot it owned. On August 9, 1944, now considered his birthday, they authorized a bear.

Artist Albert Staehle delivered the first poster that October. In 1947 came the line that ran for the next 54 years. Remember — Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires.

A Forest Service artist named Rudy Wendelin became the campaign’s full-time artist in the late 40s and drew Smokey for nearly three decades, softening him, making him more human, putting his name on the hat and the belt buckle.

Smokey worked so well that Congress literally pulled him out of the public domain in 1952 and protected him by federal law. Yep. there is a statute about this bear.

THEN A REAL BURNED CUB MADE HIM FLESH

In May 1950 the Capitan Gap fire tore through the mountains of New Mexico. Crews found a black bear cub clinging to a charred tree, paws burned.

They called him Hotfoot Teddy, then renamed him Smokey after the cartoon that already existed. Flown to the National Zoo in Washington, he drew 13,000 letters a week. That was enough that the Postal Service gave him his own ZIP code, 20252, and the zoo needed three staffers just to answer his mail.

The government gave him a wife (Goldie, 1962, no cubs, sadly), a successor (an orphan from the same New Mexico forest, anointed Smokey Bear II (original) at an actual retirement ceremony in 1975) and, when he died in 1976, a front-page obituary in the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post listed Goldie among his survivors. The bear had a widow in print.

And one more thing he never asked for — the “the”. His name is Smokey Bear, full stop. A 1952 hit song by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins — the same duo who wrote Frosty the Snowman and Peter Cottontail — added the the to fix the rhythm of a lyric, and we’ve been mangling his name ever since.

HE’S ALSO WHY TRUCKERS CALL COPS BEARS

Let’s be real. This whole newsletter was just carefully crafted long play to post something about Smokey and the Bandit.

The flat-brimmed campaign hat became so associated with Smokey that when state troopers adopted the same style, the hat took his name. Truckers on CB radio ran with it — highway patrol became Smokeys, became bears. Bear in the air meant a police helicopter. Full-grown bear meant a state trooper.

Which means Smokey and the Bandit — second only to Star Wars at the 1977 box office — is technically named after a fire-prevention PSA.

Alfred Hitchcock called it one of his all-time favorite movies. It was the last film he ever screened in his office before he died. He’s not wrong. No mascot has ever traveled further from the brief.

THE SPOTS GOT WEIRD. AND THE CASTING GOT WEIRDER

Eighty years of pro bono work produces a strange archive. Smokey started in 1950s radio, voiced by Washington broadcaster Jackson Weaver, and for the last decade-plus he’s been Sam Elliott — the only casting decision in history nobody has ever questioned.

In between, the campaign pulled in Bing Crosby, Roy Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, B.B. King, Dolly Parton, Leonard Nimoy, Betty White and Ted Nugent. The Beach Boys quote Smokey in Drive-In. All of it running in donated time and space — over $1.63 billion worth of free media since 1944.

The best spot in the vault is a 60-second Ray Charles piece from the 70s called A Personal Viewpoint, where Charles describes the sounds he loves in the forest and closes with “when we lose a forest we lose a lot more than meets the eye.” A blind man selling the forest through sound. Somebody at FCB earned their keep that day.

The strangest is 1973. Actress Joanna Cassidy talks to camera about the quiet of the forest, the shot creeping closer and closer — then she peels off her face like a mask and it’s Smokey underneath. Plot twist.

“If you knew it was me, would you have listened?” It terrified a generation and got remade in 1980 with softer edges. And nine years after peeling off her own face on national TV, Cassidy was cast as a replicant in Blade Runner. Some auditions happen in public.

THE LONGEST CLIENT RELATIONSHIP IN ADVERTISING IS A BEAR

Here’s the part for the agency people.

Foote Cone & Belding picked up Smokey through the Wartime Advertising Council in 1944 and never let go. Eighty-plus years. Pro bono. Through every rebrand, every reshuffle, every procurement cycle that killed lesser relationships, somebody at FCB was the keeper of the bear. It’s routinely cited as the longest-running agency partnership in American advertising.

Then Omnicom swallowed IPG, and the longest agency-client relationship in the business quietly became a BBDO account.

The bear survived a wildfire, outlived two zoos worth of caretakers and made it 80 years with one agency — and in the end, not even Smokey could prevent the agency mega merger.

THE AD LESSON: THE CAMPAIGN WAS SO GOOD IT BROKE THE FORESTS

Smokey the Bear worked too well. Decades of all fire is bad trained Americans and policymakers to suppress every flame on sight. But fire is part of how healthy forests live.

Not something we are hearing this week at all. To be fair most of the feed is speculation on just how many cigarettes you’re consuming being out in that air quality. Is it .125 an hour, 10, one pack, 10 packs. Lets call that unhelpful.

Stamp out every small natural burn and the dead fuel just accumulates — year over year, decade over decade — until it feeds the catastrophic megafires we get now.

That’s why in 2001 the slogan officially changed from forest fires to wildfires. The fix was to carve out a distinction Smokey had spent 50 years erasing — that some fire, the controlled and prescribed kind, is exactly what the forest needs. The most effective public-service campaign in American history had, in part, taught the country the wrong lesson about its own woods.

Smokey is the cautionary tale. A great campaign reduces a complicated thing to one unforgettable idea — and that compression is the entire point, because nuance doesn’t travel and slogans do.

Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires is a perfect line.

Personal, direct, impossible to misread. The better your message lands, the longer you’re responsible for it.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE DIVISION BELL

Don’t write this cocktail off as just another mezcal sour. Think of this week’s cocktail as the Last Word after the fire went through.

In 2009 a bartender named Phil Ward tore down the Last Word and rebuilt it in smoke: mezcal in for the gin, Aperol in for the Chartreuse. He was opening Mayahuel, his East Village shrine to agave, and the construction nearly broke him. The thing that got him through was Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell on endless repeat. So the drink took the album’s name.

Remember what mezcal was in 2009 — a worm in a bottle, a dare, a punchline. Ward’s menu helped change that. The Division Bell was smoke used deliberately, in proportion, in service of something beautiful. Sound familiar? It took the Forest Service 57 years to figure out what a bartender knew on opening night.

The Division Bell

• 1 oz mezcal

• 3/4 oz Aperol

• 3/4 oz fresh lime juice

• 1/2 oz maraschino liqueur

• Lime wheel

Shake everything with ice. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lime wheel.

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.

Picture it. You saved up for two years. You flew to Miami. You paid $2,000 (minimum) for a quarterfinal seat at the World Cup. England v Norway. Bellingham. Haaland. History.

And directly behind you, a millionaire in a costume is screaming into a phone.

Not at the game. At 40,000 people who aren’t even in the stadium. You’re an extra in someone else’s show now. Unpaid. Uncredited. Unhinged.

THE STREAMERS HAVE ENTERED THE CHAT AND THE CHAT IS YOUR ROW

Plaqueboymax got removed from the England-Norway quarterfinal in Miami after a confrontation with England fans escalated and security stepped in.

He’d been livestreaming from the stands in a Norway shirt. He showed up in an Erling Haaland cosplay wig. Before the game he was out in public as fake Haaland, forging Haaland’s signature on Haaland’s own book for fans. Haaland has a book?

Then he spent the match taunting the England supporters in front of him until one alleged Max spit on him. Max denied it, and after a back-and-forth that nearly turned into a fistfight, security tossed him.

The internet was not divided on this one. One viral post called monetized idiocy one of the key problems with society today. Fair.

The World Cup has the audience and he needs it, badly.

Then there’s the 5K Guy. Fitness influencer Jacob Abrams Cohen “ran a 5K” in his seat at the Morocco-Haiti match in Atlanta — day 214 of running a random 5K every day until he hits a million followers. Jogging in place. Bumping the paying humans around him for an Instagram video.

His defense: he was invited to the game with a brand and everyone in the video wanted to be in it.

You can see their faces. Nobody in that video wanted to be in it.

Invited by a brand, though. Remember that part.

IT’S ALL SANCTIONED

These guys didn’t sneak in. IShowSpeed streams World Cup matches under a deal with FIFA, Fox Sports and YouTube that lets him simulcast official match feeds. His sideline livestreams — camera pointed at him, not the field — pull tens of millions of views each.

Creator-led streams have helped FIFA reach younger audiences, opened up new ad inventory for brands that don’t hold official World Cup rights, and handed Twitch a template it wants to apply to other leagues.

New ad inventory for brands that don’t hold official rights. The guy annoying you in row 14 is a media buy. You paid $2,000 to attend the game. Brands paid less to annoy you.

Fans are begging FIFA to throw the streamers out. FIFA is drafting the invitations for 2030.

THE SAME TOURNAMENT IS DOING IT RIGHT BY ACCIDENT

Cape Verde’s goalkeeper Vozinha gained over 15 million followers after a heroic performance.

New Zealand defender Tim Payne had 4,715 Instagram followers when a creator crowned him the least known player at the World Cup and told 2 million people to follow him. Payne hit millions within a week and leaves the cup with 5.8 million — and a transfer to Paraguayan giants Olimpia, who used his new fame to announce the signing.

A duck named Merlin in a tiny Mexico shirt became an unofficial mascot and ended up at a press conference with the Mexican president.

Quick sidebar while we’re here. The semis are the top four teams in the world for the first time ever. They’re also a sneaker war. France (Nike) v Spain (Adidas). England (Nike) v Argentina (Adidas). Both semifinals are Nike versus Adidas. Somewhere in Beaverton and Herzogenaurach, two war rooms are watching the same games and rooting for opposite jerseys.

And right on cue, here comes MLS. The league just launched the biggest coordinated marketing campaign in its 33-year history, timed to the World Cup’s final days: “Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here” — Messi, Beckham, Son Heung-Min, Magic Johnson, McConaughey and Kevin Durant, produced by Ogilvy, debuting during Fox’s semifinal and final coverage. Cocky tagline. Smartish timing — MLS launched off the back of the 1994 World Cup, so this is the sequel to their own origin story.

MLS is trying to convert World Cup attention into soccer fans. The streamers are converting soccer into streamer fans. One grows the thing. One eats it.

THE SAME WEEK, THE INTERNET ATE GEORGE COSTANZA

In early July, an X user used AI to give George Costanza a fully bald head and a beard. Since then, and it’s only been two weeks, we have George as everything from Jabba the Hutt to the three-time champion of the Bulls in the 90s.

Some are funny. The part that is most important here: they don’t look like slop anymore. The uncanny AI tell is disappearing.

A streamer in a Haaland costume forging Haaland’s autograph. An AI user in a George costume forging Larry David’s jokes. Same move. Wear something you didn’t make, borrow an audience you didn’t build, bet the original is famous enough to carry you. Plaqueboymax is a George Costanza edit that happened live, in a stadium, to people who paid $2,000 to be there. Wow, really tied this up in a neat bow, didn’t I.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE MARGUERITE

The Marguerite is the gin-based forerunner of the Dry Martini. The earliest known recipe appears in an 1898 cocktail book, where it sits right before the Martini recipes. It was the original. Gin, dry vermouth, a whisper of orange.

Then the edits started. Harry Johnson’s 1900 bar manual added anisette. Tim Daly’s 1903 encyclopedia swapped it for orange curaçao. By 1904 it had dried out to two parts gin, one part French vermouth — essentially the Martini as we know it today.

These weren’t randos. Johnson and Daly were two of the most famous bartenders in America, all editing each other’s work like a group project. One of the edits got so famous it took the name, the glass and the legacy.

This week’s spec is adapted from Alice Lascelles’ The Martini — the FT drinks columnist’s deep dive into the king of cocktails. Buried in a book about the most famous drink on Earth: the drink it erased. We made our own edit too. At least we’re crediting the original.

The Marguerite

• 2 oz gin

• 1 oz dry vermouth

• 1/2 oz orange curaçao

• 4 dashes orange bitters

• Orange twist

Stir with ice, strain into a chilled coupe, express the orange twist over the top and drop it in. If you don’t have curaçao, any decent triple sec gets you there.

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.

A six-foot jug of cherry sugar-water whose entire job was bursting through drywall to the delight of thirsty children.

Somehow he ended up permanently welded to the worst mass murder-suicide in modern history. Awkward.

He didn’t even do it. A competitor did. The bastards.

The country never cared, and it never let go.

THE DRINK CAME FROM A MAIL-ORDER HUSTLER, NOT A BOARDROOM

Before there was a man there was a powder, and before the powder there was Edwin Perkins — a small-town Nebraska kid who’d been mixing and mail-ordering product out of catalogs since he was a teenager. Perfumes. Patent remedies. A cure for the tobacco habit. Somewhere in that pile was a liquid fruit concentrate he called Fruit Smack. Not quite as catchy as the now famous Kool-Aid.

The problem with Fruit Smack was logistics. Liquid is heavy, glass bottles shatter in the mail, and shipping ate whatever margin the stuff had. So around 1927, watching what Jell-O had pulled off by powdering dessert, Perkins boiled his syrup down to a dry powder you could fold into an envelope.

He renamed it Kool-Aid.

Then the Depression hit.

So Perkins slashed the price to a nickel a packet while the rest of the grocery aisle was raising prices or folding.

He turned Kool-Aid into the one small pleasure a broke family could still put on the table. It didn’t survive the Depression in spite of being cheap sugar-water. It won because of it.

Volume went vertical. He sold to General Foods in 1953, rich and quiet, and a year later the new owners went looking for a mascot face.

A FACE A KID DREW ON A FROSTED WINDOW

In 1954 an art director named Marvin Potts at Foote, Cone & Belding got the assignment.

The story goes that he watched his young son draw smiley faces in the condensation on a cold window, and that was the whole idea. A glass pitcher with a fat grin on its side, brimming with red.

They called him “Pitcher Man.” He was one of several designs Potts put up. He was the only one that stuck, which is how it usually goes. You sweat over ten options and the client points at the one you sketched in thirty seconds.

In the 1960s Kool-Aid got cute and briefly benched their own pitcher for borrowed celebrity clout chasing. Turns out, when you rent a bigger star than your product, kids remember the star and forget the juice. A cardinal sin of mascot advertising.

The pitcher came back, because the pitcher was the only one who couldn’t upstage the brand. He was the brand.

ARMS, LEGS AND A WALL HE COULD NOT STOP DESTROYING

The transformation came in 1974 out of Grey Advertising, credited to Alan Kupchick and Harold Karp. They bolted arms and legs onto Pitcher Man, handed him a personality and a running start, and the modern Kool-Aid Man was born — no longer a logo, now a linebacker.

The voice, that booming OH YEAH, came from a Grey composer named Richard Berg, who also wrote the jingle. Three people in three rooms perfecting three variables: Potts the face, Grey the entrance, Berg the sound.

The formula never changed and never needed to. Thirsty kids cup their hands and yell Hey Kool-Aid. The big red jug detonates through a solid wall it was never invited through, roars OH YEAH, and pours.

By the eighties he was a full-blown icon. Kool-Aid Man had brand recognition among kids that occasionally beat Ronald McDonald, his own 1983 Atari and Intellivision games, a comic book, a museum display back home in Hastings, where Nebraska would eventually name Kool-Aid its official state soft drink and throw an annual festival for it.

And those video games weren’t even for sale, at least not at first. You clipped Kool-Aid Points off the packets and mailed them in — 125 points for the cartridge, which works out to roughly 62.5 gallons of sugar water a family had to drink to earn one video game.

Or 30 points and ten bucks if your kidneys tapped out early. A brand so confident in its grip on American kids that it ran its own currency. Cash was for other companies. Kool-Aid dealt in points.

When Grey creative Steve Skollar got swept up in the New York trend of throwing elaborate birthday parties for kids, he asked Richard Berg — the voice, the man who recorded the OH YEAH — to actually wear the costume at his son’s sixth birthday.

First time the voice was ever inside the suit. Half the kids were terrified. Time later filed the Kool-Aid Man on its 2011 list of the creepiest mascots ever built, asking the only fair question anybody’s ever had — why does a guy this friendly have to destroy the house every single time he shows up.

THEN A PHRASE TRIED TO STEAL HIS LIFE

On November 18, 1978, more than nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple died at Jonestown in Guyana after drinking a powdered fruit punch laced with cyanide. The phrase drinking the Kool-Aid slid into the language to mean blind, fatal, cultish loyalty, and it has never once loosened its grip.

Except the drink was Fla-Vor-Aid. Yes, a cheaper knockoff, the store brand of the tragedy. That’s the version everyone reaches for now to sound clever, and it’s mostly true.

Reporters at the scene documented crates of Fla-Vor-Aid packets. But the honest, uglier footnote is that some accounts and photos put both brands in the pavilion, and nobody at the time was auditing labels. The language didn’t run a fact-check. It grabbed the name it already knew. Kool-Aid took the blame for one reason and one reason only: it was famous, and Fla-Vor-Aid wasn’t.

So the most exuberant, kid-safe, wall-smashing mascot in American advertising, a smiling jug whose whole reason to exist is bursting in to rescue thirsty children, spent the rest of his life shadowed by a mass death his brand almost certainly sat out.

He crashed through a thousand walls. He could not crash through that one.

THE RUMOR MILL KEPT A CLIENT ROSTER

Kool-Aid wasn’t even the rumor mill’s only account. The same era was murdering brands with stories they had nothing to do with, and the body count is worth a minute.

Start with Mikey. The picky kid from the Life cereal commercials — the one who hates everything, tries it anyway, and “Mikey likes it” enters the language. Somewhere in the late seventies a rumor started that Mikey was dead. Killed, the story went, by mixing Pop Rocks and soda until his stomach exploded.

People swore they’d seen the news report. There was no news report. The actor, John Gilchrist, was alive the entire time — is alive right now — and spent decades politely explaining that his stomach remained intact. A beloved kid mascot buried alive by a rumor his brand had nothing to do with. Same disease as Kool-Aid, different symptom.

And the murder weapon in that fake death? Also a General Foods product. Pop Rocks — same parent company as Kool-Aid, which means one corporation spent the late seventies fighting phantom deaths on two fronts.

The exploding-stomach panic got so bad that General Foods took out full-page newspaper ads and mailed letters to school principals across the country, begging America to believe its candy was not killing children.

A Fortune 500 company spending real media dollars to disprove a death that never happened. The rumor won anyway. It always does.

THE AD LESSON

Kool-Aid Man is a lesson in the part of brand reputation you don’t own. You can perfect every variable in the building — Potts perfects the face, Grey perfects the entrance, Berg perfects the OH YEAH, the whole machine engineered down to the last decibel — and then the culture takes your name out into the parking lot and does whatever it wants with it.

Drinking the Kool-Aid is now a permanent fixture in American English, deployed in boardrooms and on cable news by people who have no idea it should say Fla-Vor-Aid and would not change a syllable if you told them. Fame is a magnet. When something culturally enormous needs a name to stick to — even something monstrous — it reaches for the most recognizable one in the category and accuracy be damned.

That’s the cruel math of it: the exact ubiquity that made Kool-Aid a triumph is what nominated it as the default label for a horror it had no part in. Being the biggest name in your category means you answer for the whole category, including the things you didn’t do and the things that happened while you weren’t in the room. The brand was too famous for its own good.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE KOOL-AID

Before you push the cart away from all this, one more pour — because there is, sitting on the bottom shelf of bar history, an actual cocktail called the Kool-Aid, and it would be journalistic malpractice not to serve it in this issue.

It’s exactly what you’d hope. Sweet, red, artificial in the best possible way — a drink that exists for one reason, which is to taste like the powder. No contested origin story, no Prohibition lore, no bartender in a vest claiming it. Just a bar shot that grew up into a glass and never grew up in any other sense. It fits this issue like a costume: cherry-red on the outside, more going on than advertised.

THE KOOL-AID
1 oz vodka
1 oz amaretto
1 oz Midori
2 oz cranberry juice

Shake everything with ice and strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice. That’s it. Specs vary bar to bar because this thing was born as a shot and nobody was writing anything down . Morre cranberry stretches it into a highball, and if you’re missing the Midori (no one should have Midori) add a little more amaretto and cranberry and it still lands in the right cherry-adjacent neighborhood. Trust me no one will know.

ONE MORE NOSTALGIA STORY

In 1988 or 89-ish Kool-Aid launched a flavor called Sharkleberry Fin. It was pinktastic.

Strawberry, orange and banana. Fronted by a bright pink shark wearing sunglasses. Kool-Aid man got swim trunks and rode said shark.

Sit with that for a second. A sharkleberry is not a fruit. It has never been a fruit. A room full of adults at one of the biggest food companies on earth invented a fruit, named it after an apex predator, dressed the predator like he summers in Miami and shipped it to every grocery store in America.

And it worked. Kids lost their minds. And the shark got a whole entourage — a purple dinosaur, a crocodile with a saxophone, an octopus in a top hat. Decades later grown adults still hunt eBay for the packets, and when the flavor finally came back in 2014 the news broke on live TV during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, announced by a host who had no idea what he was holding.

Those were good times.

Which brings us to what is even happening here? There was so much roller skating in the 70s and 80s. Absolutely bonkers.

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.

Anthony Gordon took an arrow for a stranger at Agincourt.

Somebody posted that on X about a 600-year-old debt of gratitude paid out in real time. Thousands of people went yeah, felt that.

That’s the power of the World Cup. And characters like Anthony Gordon. They do look like they would take an arrow for you at Agincourt.

There is no agency on earth that pitches “past-life medieval war guilt, but make it Newcastle’s left winger.” It only exists because one weird person felt one weird feeling and hit send. That’s a beautiful game.

Hold that thought. Because while the internet was busy reincarnating Anthony Gordon, every brand in America climbed the Empire State Building to fight about what you are allowed to post.

THE FLAGS DIDN’T KILL ANYONE. THE DISCOURSE DID.

If you skipped social media for the holidays, people in black masks scaled the Empire State Building as a stunt. Then the brands started to run with it.

Now there are dozens of them. Loverboy put its logo on a flag. Spritz asked “when are you restocking skinny spritz.” Caraway: “your cookware shouldn’t have PFAS in it.” Fashion Nova went absolutely elementary school dork: “made you look. shop Fashion Nova.” Petco. Bulletproof. A soda brand. A marketing services company, which is the point at which the bit ate itself and started digesting. Or as Anonymous Crab tells it, “contemporary capitalism has become exceptionally good at absorbing the language of resistance and flattening it into a meme template”

Matthew Kobach posted the grid. “Brands move fast these days. And there’s hundreds more.” And the timeline lost its mind.

Jack Appleby: “This is so, so embarrassing.” Adam Faze: “a beautiful example of why chasing trends is the worst imaginable way of building a long lasting brand.” Cory Dobbin: “I want to throw up.” Somebody named sandra: “low signal af.” Somebody named Joana: “extremely tacky.”

And here’s where I get off the bus.

EVERYONE DUNKING ON THE FLAGS IS DOING THE FLAGS.

The flag trend lasted about four days if we’re being kind. The trend of being disgusted by the flag trend is going to last three weeks and get ten times the engagement.

I don’t disagree with the hypothesis put forward by Silence, Brand!, “Increasingly, brands are joining moments because visibility has become a race against the algorithm, not because the moment aligns with their values. Viral moments are treated like a rapidly depreciating asset needing to be harvested before attention expires.”

They are going to say that consumers recognize all this. I’m just not so sure that the vast majority of people care as much as we think they do.

I’ve watched this cycle for over twenty years and it never changes. A thing happens. Brands pile on. Then a second, more sophisticated crowd piles on the pile-on, and they get to feel like the smart ones when their marketing outrage does numbers.

The dirty little secret is that the algorithm pays everybody the same either way. Chasing the trend and chasing the backlash to the trend or even the backlash to the backlash are the exact same move.

Nobody’s being poisoned here. A flag is not a crisis. A brand is not going to fold because it hung a bedsheet with AI with a stupid little headline. In a month you will not remember a single one of these posts, including the ones that made you type “I want to throw up,” which, respectfully, is a lot of feeling for a Loverboy logo banner. I mean how could they do that to my boy Kyle Cooke.

The problem was never that brands did a trend. Brands have always done the trend. The problem is that most of them have nothing to say at the best of times, so they said their tagline, loudly, up high, where you couldn’t ignore it. That’s not trend-chasing. That’s just moving quickly and trying post something.

Should you do one? Sure, why not. But it’s always better if you are going to be the Anthony Gordon at Agincourt. Weird, specific, a little unhinged, clearly made by a human who felt something. Anything. You can’t fake that with a flag. You definitely can’t fake it with a flag that says “logo.”

Which brings us to the one brand this week that actually understood the assignment.

DOMINO’S SOLD PEOPLE AN IMAGINARY PIZZA AND IT WAS THE FUNNIEST THING ONLINE.

This week Sony told PlayStation customers in the UK that 551 movies they’d paid for were about to vanish. StudioCanal titles like Paddington, Terminator 2 and Pan’s Labyrinth were all pulled from people’s libraries as of September 1, “due to our content licensing agreements.”

Guess what? You bought Paddington. You did not own Paddington. You owned permission to watch Paddington and your permission got revoked.

The reminder nobody wanted: digital purchases aren’t purchases. They’re kind of long-term rentals.

Domino’s UK understood the assignment before Sony even handed it out. An “OFFICIAL STATEMENT,” corporate blue, deadpan as a hostage note: as of April 1 2027 it will cease production of physical pizzas and go digital only. Download the codes. Enjoy them “using the power of the imagination, in an entirely virtual sense.”

16.5 million views. On a joke about owning nothing — which is the exact thing Sony just did to 551 movies, except Domino’s did it on purpose and it was funny.

That’s the whole lesson sitting right next to the flags, and it’s free: commit to the bit and aim it at something real. Domino’s didn’t write its tagline on a bedsheet and haul it up a pole.

It built a joke, kept a straight face, pointed it at the emptiest promise in tech — you bought this, you own this — and let you do the rest of the work. Reactive, sure. Trend-chasing, technically. But it had a point of view and it landed, which is the only test that’s ever mattered.

The flag brands chased a moment. Domino’s made one out of thin air. Sounds like what Sony’s been selling.

MEANWHILE FIVE BRANDS SHARED A COAT SIX WEEKS TOO LATE.

While American brands were dogpiling on flag trends, five Canadian ones stitched themselves onto one jacket. Molson Canadian, Canadian Tire, RBC, Sleep Country and Manchu Wok put their logos on a single faux-fur coat, dropped in a music video back in May, have now created The Great Canadian Giveaway for real.

Enter to win the coat, plus a Molson mini fridge, a Blackstone griddle and a Manchu Wok fortune cookie plush. Over $5,000 in prizes.

It’s ridiculous. No more so than the flag stuff and endless “buy Canadian” moment for clout. But the coat dropped in mid-May. The giveaway landed July 1. By the time it arrived, the moment it was chasing had already moved on at least twice.

Also: who needs a fur coat in July.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE ORANGE CRUSH

This week, we’re drinking an Orange Crush.

Here’s the thing I love about it, and why it belongs in an issue about manufactured trends: nobody marketed this drink to you. It’s credited to The Starboard, a beach bar in Dewey Beach, Delaware, back in 1995. It spread the slow way — one sunburned Marylander at a time.

It got big because it’s good. Took thirty years. That’s the opposite of a trend. That’s a classic. No wonder it’s the official State Cocktail of Delaware.

I saw a great version this week from @spooonfullofsyd that runs it with orange Poppi instead of the usual lemon-lime soda — very 2026, and honestly it works. So that’s how we’re building it.

Orange Crush

• 2 oz vodka

• 1 oz Cointreau (or any orange liqueur)

• 3 oz fresh squeezed orange juice — about two oranges, and it has to be fresh, this is the whole drink

• Splash of orange Poppi (or any bubbly orange soda)

• Orange wheel

Build over crushed ice in a pint glass and stir. Top with the Poppi. Orange wheel on the rim. No Cointreau? Triple sec’s fine.

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.

Marlboro was a woman’s cigarette. Not in some loose, forgotten way. Nope, it was deliberately, head to toe, selling to women for thirty years.

Philip Morris launched it in 1924 as “America’s luxury cigarette.” Sold it in fine hotels and resorts. Called it “The Cigarette of Distinction” and charged twenty cents a pack back when twenty cents meant something.

By 1927 the company was reportedly the first to advertise a cigarette directly to women, running spreads in fashion magazines with lines like “Favorites on Fifth Avenue, famous wherever Fashion gathers.”

The whole pitch was beauty counter. And because a lit cigarette left lipstick on the paper, Philip Morris dyed the tip red and sold the flaw as a feature: “Red Tips to Match Your Pretty Lips.” Later they switched to an ivory tip and ran “Ivory Tips Protect the Lips.” The entire brand was organized around not smudging your makeup.

It flopped. By the late 1930s Marlboro was stuck under 1% of US cigarette sales, and Philip Morris pulled it off the market for a stretch.

So the most aggressively masculine brand in the history of advertising started life as a fashion-magazine cigarette for women who didn’t want to ruin their lipstick. A brand that failed so badly it briefly stopped existing.

Then it got handed to a short bald man in Chicago.

THE GUY THEY SAID WOULD BE SELLING APPLES

Leo Burnett opened his agency on August 5, 1935, in the deepest part of the Great Depression. He was 44. He’d borrowed against his life insurance and mortgaged his house to do it.

A Chicago columnist took one look and predicted Burnett would be broke and selling apples on a street corner inside a year.

So Burnett put a bowl of apples at the front desk. The message being: I’m not selling them, I’m giving them away. Ninety years later there are still bowls of apples in Leo Burnett lobbies around the world. The man held a grudge with style.

He believed every product had what he called its “inherent drama” — some true, human thing buried inside it — and the job was to dig that out and put it on display. He kept a folder in his desk labeled “Corny Language” where he wrote down honest, plainspoken phrases he overheard, the kind that sounded like a real person talking.

In 1999 Ad Age ranked the most important advertising people of the century and put Burnett third. Then it named the ten greatest advertising icons of the century. Four of them came out of his shop — the Marlboro Man, the Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger. No other agency had more than one. Toucan Sam, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, the Keebler Elves, the Maytag Repairman — also his. The man basically invented the entire genre this series has been picking through.

In 1954 Philip Morris brought him the failing brand. Like Michael Jordan, Burnett took the account personally.

THE COWBOY WAS A CASTING CALL THE PUBLIC WON

He didn’t bet the brand on a cowboy. Here’s the part that gets flattened in every retelling. Burnett pitched a whole lineup of manly men. Sea captains, drill sergeants, war correspondents, construction workers, weightlifters. The cowboy was just the first one out of the gate. Early ads even ran a “Tattooed Man,” a clean-cut guy with a tattoo on his wrist hinting at some rugged past he wasn’t going to tell you about.

Then they watched what landed. The cowboy won.

His inspiration was a single photograph. A 1949 issue of Life, a Texas cowboy named Clarence Hailey Long, foreman of the JA Ranch. Sun-creased face, cigarette already in hand like it had always been there. Burnett saw it and never let it go.

He told Philip Morris to skip the filter conversation entirely. No health claims. No technical language about what the filter did or didn’t do. Every competitor was busy reassuring smokers that filters made cigarettes safer. Burnett figured that talking about safety just reminded everyone cigarettes weren’t. So he said nothing. Just a man in a landscape.

Philip Morris thought it might kill the brand.

IT WORKED FASTER THAN ANYTHING SHOULD

Within four weeks of launch, Marlboro was the number one cigarette in the greater New York area. Within a year, the fourth best-selling brand in America — up from less than 1% of the market. Sales jumped roughly 300% in two years.

The cowboy the client thought was too regional, too masculine, too narrow turned out to appeal to everyone. Men bought the cigarette. The image pulled in everyone else.

The Marlboro Man was never one man. Over 45 years the role went to actors, models, agency employees and a handful of actual ranchers. The first ones were fakes. Paid models pretending to rope cattle, plus Burnett’s own art supervisor posing in a uniform. You could tell they’d never sat a horse.

So he started casting real cowboys at rodeos.

The definitive one was Darrell Winfield. A ranch hand on the Quarter Circle 5 in Wyoming, discovered by the agency in 1968. He wore his own clothes to the shoots.

At his peak he was in eight of every ten Marlboro ads on earth, and he held the role for two decades. He once said Burnett didn’t do “phoney baloney stuff” and that Marlboro Country was about as close to authentic as they could make it.

WHAT THE COWBOYS FOUND OUT

Marlboro Reds picked up a street name Philip Morris never printed.

Cowboy Killers.

The men who played the part are why it stuck.

The ones who never smoked walked away. Bob Norris was the real thing — a Colorado rancher the agency found because he knew John Wayne. Twelve years as the Marlboro Man, never touched a cigarette, quit because he didn’t like what it might teach his kids. Died in 2019 at 90.

The ones who believed the ad didn’t. Wayne McLaren modeled in the mid-70s, got lung cancer at 49, and spent his last years testifying for anti-smoking laws and pushing Philip Morris at shareholder meetings to pull back. The company answered by denying he’d ever been a Marlboro Man — then walked it back to say the real one was Darrell Winfield. The authentic cowboy they’d built became the thing they used to disown a dying one. McLaren died in 1992. His last words, per his mother — tobacco will kill you, and I’m living proof.

The rest went the same way. David McLean, sued Philip Morris claiming he was handed five packs a take to get the shot, lung cancer, 1995. Eric Lawson, COPD, 2014. Dick Hammer and Tobin Jackson, both lung cancer.

The product kept its promise. Just not the one on the billboard.

The Master Settlement Agreement didn’t ban the Marlboro Man. An earlier failed deal would have wiped human figures out of cigarette ads forever — the settlement that actually passed in 1998 let him live.

It just took away every place he could appear.

Cigarettes had been off TV and radio since 1971. The 1998 settlement — $206 billion, 46 states — banned the billboards. And the billboard was the Marlboro Man’s whole world.

The lone rider, fifty feet tall, against a desert sky. In 1999 they came down across the country and the most recognizable cowboy in America had nowhere left to ride.

THE AD LESSON

Burnett preached “inherent drama” — every product hides something true and human, and your job is to dig it out. Marlboro broke his own rule. There was nothing true or human buried in a filtered cigarette that used to ship with lipstick-matching tips. So Burnett didn’t uncover the drama. He imported it — bolted a cowboy who had nothing to do with the product onto the front of the brand and let it ride.

His second move mattered just as much. He refused to argue. Every competitor was explaining their filter, the science, the safety, the technology. Burnett understood the explanation was the problem. Defend the product and you remind people the product needs defending. So he said nothing about cigarettes at all and let the cowboy carry the whole thing. Nobody buying Marlboros in 1960 was thinking about filtration. They were thinking about the man.

Here’s the darker half. The most “authentic” campaign in advertising history was almost entirely manufactured. The cowboys were mostly models and actors. The most famous real one was a Wyoming ranch hand the agency used to prove their fantasy was true — and later used to disown a dying one.

Authenticity wasn’t the truth of the campaign. Authenticity was the product. That’s exactly how dark this gets — emotional identity beats factual information almost every time, and the people selling the identity always know it before the people buying it do.

Burnett knew. Philip Morris knew. The cowboys found out last.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE GIN RICKEY

Gin, fresh lime, soda, no sugar. Bone dry and all fizz with nothing sweet to get in the way.

Born in 1880s Washington DC at a lobbyist hangout called Shoomaker’s, named for Colonel Joe Rickey, who took his drinks dry and his politics Democratic. It started as a whiskey drink. Gin showed up a decade later and stole the name.

Fitzgerald put it in The Great Gatsby — the gin rickeys land on the hottest afternoon of the book, right before everything comes apart. Same chapter where Daisy looks at Gatsby and tells him he resembles “the advertisement of the man.” A drink, a heat wave and an ad reference, all in one scene. We didn’t plan that.

The cowboy got retired by a Washington courtroom. So this week we drink like a Washington lobbyist.

Gin Rickey

• 2 oz gin

• 1/2 oz fresh lime juice

• Soda water

Build over ice in a highball, top with soda. Lime shell dropped in. You’re welcome.

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

Every Fourth of July, somewhere around 150 million hot dogs get eaten across America. The dirty secret is that almost everything you believe about them is a lie an ad man told you.

The annual hot dog eating contest isn’t a century-old tradition. The jingles you’ll catch yourself humming over the grill were written by amateurs and marketing executives who’d have been thrilled to know we still can’t get them out of our heads.

Even the name is a fib. The story that a sports cartoonist named Tad Dorgan (no one is named like this anymore) coined "hot dog" at a 1901 ballgame because he couldn't spell "dachshund" is completely bunk. The phrase was already kicking around college slang in the 1890s, and Dorgan didn't even start at the paper until 1903.

It’s time to fact-check the hot dog.

THE MOST PATRIOTIC TRADITION YOU KNOW WAS INVENTED BY TWO PR GUYS IN THE 1970s

Here’s the Nathan’s Famous origin story you’ve heard. July 4, 1916. Four immigrants on the Coney Island boardwalk argue about who’s the most American.

They settle it the only sensible way, by eating hot dogs.

But it never happened. Not one bit of it.

The contest actually started in the early 1970s, and the whole 1916 backstory was fabricated by two press agents, Mortimer Matz and Max Rosey, who backdated it to make a brand-new stunt look like a sacred American institution. Matz later confessed in the most beautiful possible way: “In Coney Island pitchman style, we made it up.”

They invented the immigrants. They invented the patriotic argument. They even invented fake years the contest was supposedly canceled to make the fake history feel lived-in. Matz was a legendary New York flack who also dreamed up the idea of running the marathon through all five boroughs. Inventing traditions was the job.

The vivid detail everyone repeats — the four squabbling immigrants — wasn’t even in the original lie. That got added later by George and Richard Shea, the publicists who trained under Rosey and took the contest over in the ‘90s, building it into the ESPN spectacle it is now. A fake backstory, polished by a second generation of storytellers who knew a good fake backstory needs characters.

And it worked so completely that ESPN, the New York Times and the Washington Post all repeated 1916 as fact for decades. Nathan’s still runs the contest as a tradition “since 1916.” A lie told well enough became true through sheer repetition. Manufactured heritage is the oldest trick in advertising and it never stops working.

The founder was a hustler from the jump, too. When Nathan Handwerker opened in 1916 selling nickel dogs to undercut the fancier Feltman’s next door, customers worried cheap meat meant filthy meat.

So Handwerker hired college kids to dress as doctors and eat his hot dogs out front — figuring if physicians ate there on their lunch break, the dogs must be clean. Guerrilla marketing, 1916. The whole brand was built on a costume.

THE BEST JINGLE EVER WRITTEN CAME FROM A GUY WITH A BANJO-UKULELE AND ONE NIGHT TO DO IT

The Oscar Mayer Wiener song is the one everybody can sing, and it almost didn’t happen.

Richard Trentlage wasn’t some hobbyist. He was a working Chicago ad man who’d done time at McCann Erickson and spent his career writing jingles. But he heard about the Oscar Mayer contest the day before the deadline. He wrote the whole thing in about an hour at his typewriter.

He recorded the demo in his living room. His children sang it. His wife played the stand-up bass. He played a banjo-ukulele. Then he dropped the tape at the agency and didn’t hear anything for over a year.

Oscar G. Mayer himself had picked it and wanted those same kids on the real recording.

It ran for 47 years. Twenty-one countries. The company figures it sold enough hot dogs to get to the moon and back six times. Trentlage went on to write “Buckle up for safety,” V8’s “Wow, it sure doesn’t taste like tomato juice” and “McDonald’s is your kind of place.”

The man who dashed off the most durable jingle in American history was a craftsman who could do it again on command.

A FOUR-YEAR-OLD AND A MARKETING VP MADE SOMETHING THAT OUTLIVED EVERY SERIOUS AD OF ITS DECADE

“My bologna has a first name” wasn’t written by a songwriter either. It was written by Jerry Ringlien, Oscar Mayer’s own VP of marketing. A “meat executive” if you will. That would be a hell of a Linkedin profile. Ringlien would write one of the most permanent pieces of music in the country.

He fought for the iconic homemade kid-driven wiener demo tape with his fellow execs to test it instead of tossing it. Yep, the rare marketing guy with the ear to know when the homemade version was the magic.

Tthe version you know exists by accident. The commercial was supposed to feature a group of kids. With time left at the shoot, the director asked if any one of them could sing it solo, start to finish. A four-year-old named Andy Lambros stepped up, nailed it in one take holding a fishing rod and a sandwich, and that take became the ad.

There’s even a name for why it won’t leave your head. A marketing professor told NPR the bologna song sits in a register between speaking and singing, and its tiny musical wrongness is exactly what jams it into your memory. The imperfection is the hook. Oscar Mayer brought it back in 2024 and gave people free groceries for singing it.

While we’re here, we should mention the Wienermobile. Oscar Mayer has had a 27-foot hot dog on wheels rolling around America since 1936, when Carl Mayer built the first one to haul a costumed “Little Oscar” between grocery stores.

It still tours today, driven by recent college grads with the official job title “Hotdoggers.” A company built a fleet of giant drivable sausages and made getting the keys a coveted entry-level gig. Total commitment to the dumbest possible vehicle, for almost ninety years.

BALL PARK BUILT AN ICON OUT OF THE WORST THING YOU CAN SAY ABOUT A HOT DOG

Here’s my favorite one. Ball Park’s “they plump when you cook ‘em” wasn’t strategy. It came out of a room.

An ad guy was grinding on the account, pushing Gus Hauff — the sausage maker who actually developed the franks — on what made them special, and Hauff just blurted out that they plump when you cook them.

The line everyone remembers wasn’t pitched in a deck. It got extracted from a frustrated maker who didn’t know he’d just written the campaign.

A hot dog that visibly swells in the heat. That’s water and filler expanding. It is, on paper, the least appetizing fact you could volunteer about a cheap wiener.

The agency put it to music, animated the dogs getting longer and higher and turned the single most unappetizing property of their product into one of the most beloved taglines in America.

Never forget to commit hard enough to the dumb thing and the dumb thing becomes the only asset that matters. (Dumb Ad Things should be a book)

THE PUREST IDEA IN THE HOT DOG STORY GOT A MAN ARRESTED

And then there are the Racing Sausages, where this whole theory stops being a metaphor and becomes a crime scene.

It started as a crude cartoon on the Milwaukee County Stadium scoreboard — a between-innings animation to sell concession-stand brats. Then a local designer named Michael Dillon built the costumes for real, put one on himself, and won the first live race in 1993 as the Bratwurst.

A scoreboard cartoon became five people in seven-foot foam meat suits sprinting across a Major League outfield. Fifteen other teams eventually copied it. They were trying to move brats.

Then July 9, 2003. Pirates first baseman Randall Simon leaned over the dugout rail and swung his bat at the Italian Sausage as she ran past. The costume — a 19-year-old named Mandy Block — went down, and took the Hot Dog down with her. Simon was handcuffed and hauled to the Milwaukee County Jail. He was fined $432 for disorderly conduct, fined another $2,000 by the league and suspended three games. He later mailed Block the bat, autographed.

A man was arrested for assaulting a sausage. There is a police report. The press called it Sausagegate. And the only person in the whole affair who kept her head was the woman who got clubbed in a meat costume — Block thought it was hilarious, said the whole thing was ridiculous, and walked away with scraped knees and a few marriage proposals in the mail.

Nobody set out to make any of it matter. It all does anyway.

AD LESSON

Sixty years of meat advertising all teach the same thing, and it’s the opposite of what wins awards.

Go look at the prestige work from any of these decades — the big swings, the ads the industry actually voted for.

Meanwhile a wiener song written in an hour, a bologna jingle by a marketing VP, a contest backdated by two pitchmen and a guy in a bratwurst suit are still in heavy rotation inside your skull. This was creative built by people who were close to the product, weren’t embarrassed by it and committed all the way to something small, specific and maybe a little bit dumb. Or in a few cases, completely made up.

Get specific and invent the legend and commit to it without blinking. They plump when you cook ‘em. Four immigrants in 1916 who never existed. This is what fuses to the culture and won’t scrape off.

If an idea feels a little too dumb, or a little too fake, to put in your case study, that’s usually the one that’ll outlive everything else you do. The embarrassment you feel is just taste trying to talk you out of the thing that works. Taste is overrated. Commitment isn’t.

So this Canada Day or Fourth of July, while you’re standing over the grill humming a fifty-year-old hot dog jingle you never agreed to learn, remember this. If it wasn’t dumb enough, you weren’t brave enough.

CANADA DAY COCKTAIL: THE 7 & 7, A DRINK THAT IS LITERALLY TWO BRAND NAMES STAPLED TOGETHER

Happy Canada Day newsletter readers. Today we’re drinking a 7 & 7 — Seagram’s 7 and 7UP, tall over ice, lemon-lime fizz. About as summery and un-fussy as a glass gets.

Seagram’s distillery started in Waterloo, Ontario in 1857. Then a refugee’s son named Sam Bronfman bought it in 1928, stockpiled the largest private cache of aged whiskey in North America while waiting out Prohibition, and the day it ended built it into the biggest liquor company on earth out of Montreal. Seven Crown launched in 1934 and a massive marketing push made it one of the best-selling whiskeys in North America almost immediately.

The drink itself is lore. The story goes that a distributor’s sales rep thought it’d be clever to link the 7 in 7UP with Seagram’s 7, and the 7 & 7 was born. A cocktail named after a pun between two products. It only exists because somebody in sales liked how the names lined up. A drink that’s pure marketing, with no craft underneath, that outlived basically every “serious” cocktail of its era and got an entire generation to order by brand name without thinking.

7 & 7

• 2 oz Seagram’s 7 (any blended whiskey works)

• 4–5 oz 7UP or Sprite

Build over ice in a highball. Lemon wedge. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.

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.

Try explaining to a kid today what it meant to run out of batteries in 1983.

Not your phone. You charge that overnight, full by morning, the whole transaction invisible. Batteries didn’t work like that. Batteries were a finite resource you hoarded in a kitchen drawer.

A crisis when the remote died. You went through drawers like a hungry raccoon cracking open the back of every other device in the house to see who had a fresher pair worth stealing.

The Walkman ate them. Game Boys ate them even faster. The smoke detector that started chirping at 3am for reasons known only to God. The flashlight you needed exactly once every five years during a blackout, when you discovered the batteries in it had died during the last blackout.

Your entire life ran on AAs and you never had enough of 'em.

And here’s the part that sounds genuinely insane now. You couldn’t tell how much was left.

No percentage. No little icon. You used the thing until it slowed down or quit, and then you guessed. Dead battery or broken toy? Nobody knew. So you’d toss a maybe-battery back in the drawer and find it six months later with no way on earth to know if it had anything in it.

Then in 1996 they put the tester right on the battery. Press two dots, watch a strip change color, mystery solved. It felt like the future.

It was also a tiny lie. The strip ran current through heat-sensitive ink, which means every time you checked how much life the battery had, you spent a little of it. Checking the charge cost you charge. Duracell’s strip gave you a percentage. Energizer’s just said “good” and went blank when it wasn’t.

Both companies announced the technology on the same day in December 1995, then spent years in court over who owned it.

These two had been at war for a decade. And the whole thing started with a rabbit nobody was supposed to keep.

THE BUNNY WAS A ONE-OFF PARODY

In 1973, Duracell launched a campaign in Europe. A set of pink toy rabbits, all drumming at once. Batteries dying one by one. Only the Duracell rabbit keeping going. Simple. Memorable. They ran it for fifteen years, made their point and stopped. They also let the US trademark lapse in 1988.

DDB Needham noticed.

They made a commercial that opened exactly like a Duracell ad. Multiple pink bunnies drumming, batteries fading out one by one. And then a different pink bunny marched onto the screen. Sunglasses. A massive bass drum with the Energizer logo on the head. He kept going while every other bunny stopped cold. They filed the trademark immediately.

The first commercial aired October 30, 1988.

And it didn’t really work. The first spot was fine. Competent. Forgettable. The Bunny everyone actually remembers showed up only after Energizer handed the campaign to Chiat/Day, who found the thing that made it click.

The Bunny isn’t selling at you. He’s rescuing you. He interrupts bad commercials, which puts him on the viewer’s side. Jay Chiat went for the throat, and a competent competitive battery ad became one of the great sustained campaign structures in advertising history.

The actual Bunny was built by Eric Allard’s company, All Effects. Allard was the robotics guy who built Johnny 5 for Short Circuit. Same shop did the creature for the 1988 Blob remake and worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. He went from movie monsters to a corporate rabbit on a drum, and he’s on record saying the Bunny is probably his most recognized work. Sit with that.

Here’s how the campaign ran. The Bunny would interrupt fake commercials for fake products, marching through mid-pitch, still drumming. And the fake products had real names. Sitagin Hemorrhoid Remedy. Nasotine Sinus Relief. TresCafe Coffee. Somebody wrote those. Somebody got paid to name a fictional hemorrhoid cream so a rabbit could ruin its commercial. That’s the job.

AND THEN THEY INVENTED A VILLAIN

This is the part that gets left out. The famous crossovers — Darth Vader, King Kong, the Wicked Witch of the West, Wile E. Coyote, Boris and Natasha — weren’t random celebrity cameos. Energizer built an entire fictional rival battery company to hire them. It was called Supervolt. It had its own mascot. It was a deliberate Duracell lookalike. And its CEO was played by Rip Torn.

The bit was always the same. Supervolt hires a famous villain to destroy the Bunny. The villain corners him. And then the villain’s weapon dies, because it was running on Supervolt batteries. Vader’s lightsaber goes dark. Coyote’s gadget quits. King Kong gets tricked off the Empire State Building. The product demo was the plot. Even the Grim Reaper showed up and got out-waited.

Now the good part. Duracell built the exact same thing in reverse.

Their counterpunch was the Puttermans, a family of plastic robots powered by Duracell who ran from 1994 to 1996. Their enemy was a generic Brand X drawn to look like Energizer.

So at the same moment, both companies were producing elaborate expensive commercials starring a cartoon-villain version of the other guy. Two brands. Each one the bad guy in the other’s universe. The whole battery aisle was a cinematic universe nobody asked for.

THE CAMPAIGN WORKED. THE SALES DIDN’T

During the peak Bunny years when Energizer was most culturally embedded, the brand stayed stuck behind Duracell.

Duracell claimed 40% of customers thought the Energizer campaign was actually for Duracell. The pink bunny was so completely associated with battery advertising that consumers couldn’t reliably remember which company owned him. The campaign designed to destroy Duracell’s brand was accidentally reinforcing it.

Energizer kept running it for 35 years anyway.

Even the tagline ended up in a courtroom. Nothing outlasts the Energizer had to be softened after Duracell sued over the claim. With these two, everything was a battlefield. The mascot. The trademark. The tester strip. A single adverb.

In 1992, Duracell filed for a new US trademark on their own bunny citing prior use. Energizer filed suit. The settlement split the world in two. Energizer keeps the trademark in the US and Canada. Duracell keeps it everywhere else. This is why if you grew up in Europe or Australia you remember the Duracell Bunny, and if you grew up in North America you remember Energizer. One world. Two pink drumming rabbits. Divided by trademark law.

Energizer Bunny entered the language as a synonym for unstoppable endurance. George H.W. Bush compared himself to the Bunny during the 1992 campaign. Howard Dean did the same in 2004. Two presidential candidates, twelve years apart, reaching for the same mascot to describe their own resilience. When politicians use your character as a metaphor for staying in a fight, the character has done something beyond advertising.

THE AD LESSON

The Energizer Bunny is proof that cultural penetration and sales effectiveness are not the same thing, and sometimes one matters more.

The numbers didn’t support the campaign. Brand confusion was documented. Duracell still was #1. And yet the Bunny became a phrase people use in sentences that have nothing to do with batteries. That kind of embedding is almost impossible to engineer directly.

Energizer kept going because going was the whole point. The product benefit and the campaign mechanism were the same thing, and once you’ve found that, you don’t stop even when the quarterly numbers are telling you to. The lesson is also in the accident.

They built the whole campaign on a competitor’s lapsed trademark. And the two of them spent so many years obsessed with each other that they each wrote the other into their own commercials as the villain.

Sometimes the best idea in the room is the one nobody protected. Sometimes the whole category is just two companies who can’t stop thinking about each other.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE NORDIC NEGRONI

Here’s a confession. I did a bar cart clear-out a few weeks ago and found a mini bottle of aquavit I got for Christmas - I’m not even sure when. It had just been sitting there behind the good gin, doing nothing. The bar cart equivalent of that battery in the junk drawer you can’t bring yourself to toss.

So I did what a responsible adult does now. I fed the contents of my bar cart into a robot and asked what I could make.

It came back with a Negroni. Aquavit swapped in for the gin. And it’s a nice taste. Genuinely good. The caraway leans into the Campari instead of fighting it. Earthier than a regular Negroni. A little bread-y. Like a Negroni that spent a winter in Oslo at $47 a cocktail.

Then I went looking into the thing I’d been ignoring all this time, and it turned out the aquavit had a better travel history than I do.

Aquavit is the Scandinavian water of life. Aqua vitae, same root as whisky’s uisce beatha. Distilled from potato or grain, flavored with caraway and sometimes dill, kicking around since the 1500s. But the best story in the whole category belongs to one bottle in particular.

In 1805 a Norwegian shipowner named Catharina Lysholm loaded five casks of potato aquavit onto her brig and sent them to the East Indies, betting she could crack a new market. Nobody out there wanted Norwegian caraway hooch. The casks came home unsold two years later. But when the Lysholms cracked them open, the spirit was transformed. Rounder. Smoother. Better. Months at sea, the constant rolling, the swing from tropical heat to North Atlantic cold, had aged it in a way no cellar ever could.

So they made the voyage the entire point. The brand became Linie, Norwegian for the line. As in the equator. Every cask still sails the world for four months in old Oloroso sherry barrels lashed up as deck cargo, crossing the equator twice and stopping in dozens of ports before it ever gets bottled. Every back label tells you the ship’s name and the dates it sailed. It’s the only thing on the boat that gets picked up and dropped off at the same harbor.

The casks ride up top, out in the weather, on purpose. Temperatures swing from the high 40s to below freezing. And in the old days sailors used to drill holes in the barrels, drink the aquavit on the sly and plug the holes back up with wooden pegs — so a few casks came home, in one blender’s words, like porcupines on the inside.

A spirit that crosses the equator twice and keeps going. For an issue about a rabbit that won’t quit, I couldn’t have planned that better. That little mini bottle hiding on my bar cart had probably seen more of the world last year than I did.

It just kept going. Same as the Bunny. Same as the drink.

The Nordic Negroni

• 1 oz aquavit

• 1 oz Campari

• 1 oz sweet vermouth

Stir with ice until cold. Strain into a rocks glass over a big cube. Express an orange peel over the top and drop it in.

If you’ve got a bottle of Linie, use that and read the back label first. It earned it more than the rabbit ever did.

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.

This month the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got repainted “American flag blue,” for over fourteen million dollars and within a week it bloomed green with algae and the fresh paint started peeling off in strips. Oops.

Now people are spending hours fighting about it in the comments like this is the only thing worth talking about.

Do they not know that Cannes is on? Have they not heard about the World Cup? Are we not drinking Whispering Angel while writing this newsletter? Sacre blue.

EVERYONE HAS A HOT TAKE, NOBODY HAS A POINT

So let’s settle the only matchup that matters. Which take is worse?

The Cannes take, from a dude in linen who expensed a flight to France to photograph a glass of rosé and announce that AI is the worst?

Or the World Cup take, from someone who’s never sat through a full ninety minutes, explaining what the sponsors fundamentally misunderstand about the beautiful game, FIFA’s wonderfully oppressive rules or talking about how Vancouver really nailed it to people from Toronto.

Coin flip. Both unbearable. Both about to get commented on Linkedin by someone adding “this 👏 exactly.”

And we may as well admit it. The take is the one thing both industries are genuinely elite at. Not the ads. Not the 0-0 draws. The takes about the ads. The takes about the VAR. We are world-class at explaining, after the fact, what the work should have been or how the play should have been executed.

This newsletter is also takes. I’m very aware.

THE CLEAN STADIUM RULE

FIFA has a rule called “clean stadium.” Host a World Cup match in a building named after a brand that isn’t an official sponsor and the brand has to vanish. Tarps, tape, the works. For a month AT&T Stadium is just “Dallas Stadium.” Gillette Stadium is anonymous. Levi’s Stadium is a stranger to itself. They even cover up the condiment labels. Heinz is not a sponsor.

In some very small navel gazing circles it turned the whole tournament into a fight over whose logo gets seen, and the brands sorted themselves into two piles. The ones who can read a room, and the ones who can’t.

Start with the ones who can.

FIFA bagged the Levi’s batwing on top of the stadium under a plain white tarp. The shape is so lodged in people’s heads that a blank tarp in that silhouette reads as Levi’s louder than the logo would.

So Levi’s changed its Instagram profile photo to the covered-up logo. Said nothing. Then it took the bit global and draped the awning of its Paris store too, because when a stunt is working on Linkedin you don’t explain it, you just keep doing it in more cities.

Then came the part that always comes. The copycats. Within days every brand was throwing a white sheet over its own logo and calling it a campaign. A biscuit brand. A smoothie shop. Bananas.

And they all missed the one thing that made it work. It only works if your logo reads with the lights off. Levi’s survives a tarp because it’s burned into our culture. A logo nobody’s memorized under a sheet is just a lumpy white blob. The trend instantly sorted brands into iconic and wish-they-were, in public, for free.

Did the normies notice or actually care? That’s the real hot take.

THE MISTAKE WAS THE WHOLE CAMPAIGN

The other pile is DoorDash, and it might be the lamest thing I’ve watched a brand try all year.

The setup. New Zealand has a defender named Tim Payne. Two weeks ago an Argentine influencer told his followers to boost “the least-known player at the World Cup,” and Payne’s Instagram jumped from a few thousand to over five million overnight.

So during New Zealand against Egypt, DoorDash starts tweeting about the match and tagging @TPAIN. The rapper. Yes the Auto-Tuning, two Grammy-winning, does-not-play-soccer T-Pain. Nine times.

So T-Pain finally posts “Are you all okay??? @DoorDash stop tagging me. I literally don’t play soccer.”

DoorDash signs off with “Oh not @tpain... Tim... goodnight.”

You’re meant to read it as a careless intern. It wasn’t. It was clearly a whole paid gag the whole time. You don’t tag a Grammy winner nine straight times by accident. Somebody built this in a deck, presented it, got it approved, pitched it to T-PAIN. Paid the man.

Who watches a brand pretend to fumble a name nine times and thinks, comedy gold? The fake-oops is the most tired move in the social playbook, act dumb on purpose, pray the screenshot travels, file it under engagement. A brand doing an impression of a funny person and blowing the timing on purpose, because somebody told it imperfection plays as relatable.

DoorDash typed nine times and got a courtesy chuckle from its own senior VP. That’s the difference between a joke and a brand that wants credit for telling one.

CANNES YOU BELIEVE THIS

Last week I made the case that Cannes is the one award show with no dark horse. No public to surprise, a few hundred judges in a room who already know the ending. We traded the festival a whole country used to stay up and watch for a ticketed yacht party.

Update from the Croisette. The yacht’s being repossessed. By AI.

Monday’s first Grand Prix winners were human. A soccer pitch reimagined as a giant working barcode took Outdoor. Heinz doing something clever about the fry box, The Ordinary, a Novartis health campaign, a Hyundai spot out of Puerto Rico.

But nobody flew to France to talk about the winners. They came for OpenAI, working the beach and walking advertisers through how ads are going to live inside ChatGPT.

Adobe announcing “agentic AI at scale” with WPP, Omnicom and the rest, software that segments and writes and ships the campaign while a human “reviews the outcome.”

Here’s the dirty little secret: the festival hands trophies to humans on a stage at night and rents the beach to the companies building the thing that does their jobs by day. Paul Feig spent the same week planting a flag for the other side, his “we are HI, we are human intelligence, keep telling your stories.”

No wonder Matt Belloni laid this take out, “Cannes is the Festival de Cannes, a prestigious global film event where talented creative people display and sell their work (and look glamorous doing so). Cannes Lions is… not. It's a tacky business conference for selling advertising and announcing brand partnerships, populated mostly by paunchy middle managers and YouTubers. They call it an "international festival of creativity," but that's just to make the suits and the media people feel better about their soulless corporate boondoggle. Enjoy the rosé.”

A hundred creatives liked this because every one of them has sat in the meeting where that pitch was halfway serious. The robots are coming for an industry that was already running on a formula.

The yacht era isn’t over. The yacht just has a new owner, and it doesn’t drink rose or sleep.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: CANNES STRAWBERRY-ELDERFLOWER SPRITZ

Fitting, because the key ingredient is the most-copied bottle behind the bar. When the late Robert Cooper launched St-Germain in 2007 it was the first commercial elderflower liqueur anyone had seen, and bartenders fell so hard they nicknamed it “bartender’s ketchup,” the thing you grab to fix any drink.

Then every spirits company on earth rushed out its own elderflower knockoff. You can measure how well Cooper nailed it by how many people tried to be him. None of them stuck.

Same lesson Levi’s is teaching this week, just with a bedsheet instead of a bottle.

And it happens to be the official drink of every beach the industry is currently selling itself on. Late June, strawberries are in, drink what they’re drinking on the Croisette while you read about them handing it to the robots.

Strawberry-Elderflower Spritz

• 1 oz strawberry syrup

• 1 oz elderflower liqueur

• Soda water

• Fresh strawberry

Build over ice in a wine glass, top with soda, one gentle stir, garnish with a halved strawberry. Want it boozier, sub prosecco for the soda and make three times as big.

You know what I’m thinking about more than Levi’s logos or Cannes Lions? When Kentucky Fried Chicken also went into the Roast Beef business.

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.

Dr. Evil came back this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The roast is missing the actual story.

HE’S THE MOST INTERESTING AD GUY IN HOLLYWOOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the brand.

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

SO DID HE SELL HIS SOUL OR NOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CHALAMET AD RULE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE COCKTAIL: THE GALLIANO SOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a number that stopped me cold.

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

A whole conversation, gone. Every day.

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

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

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

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

THE AWARD SHOW WITH NO DARK HORSE

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

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

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

I’d seen five of them.

Five.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty minutes? I’d have remembered thirty minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE MARTINI BIANCO SPRITZ

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

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

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

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

THE MARTINI BIANCO SPRITZ

• 1.5 oz Martini Bianco

• 1.5 oz prosecco

• Splash of soda

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

• Build and serve over ice

AN ITALIAN CANNES WOULD ACTUALLY WORK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COORS LIGHT PRINTED FOURTEEN OS AND DIDN’T FLINCH

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then LinkedIn went to war about it.

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

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

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

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

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

JEEP IS BETTING THE FARM ON 350 GUYS NAMED GEORGE

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

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

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

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

BANK GOALS

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

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

Okay?

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

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

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

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

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

AD LESSONS

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

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

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

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

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: PITCH BIRD

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pitch Bird

• 1 oz gin

• 1 oz mezcal

• 1 oz Campari

• 1 oz sweet vermouth

• 1 oz pineapple juice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IF THIS IS HOW THEY BUILD, BE VERY AFRAID

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PATTERN

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

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

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

Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE OLDEST LAW IN THE AD GAME

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

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

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

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

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: WORLD CUP FASHIONED

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

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

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

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

The World Cup Fashioned:

• 2 oz rye

• 1 oz Fernet-Branca

• 3-4 dashes Coca-Cola bitters

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

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

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

“Loneliness influencers.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POOPSICLES ARE REAL. AND THEY’RE WINNING

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

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

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

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

143K people looked at flushable wipes because of it.

FIREBALL’S WEARABLE DAD GUT

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

Genuinely revolting.

I’m in love with it.

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

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

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

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

MILLER HIGH LIFE WELDED A BAR TO A JUKEBOX

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

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

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

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

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

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

AND THEN COKE SHOWED EVERYONE UP

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE AD LESSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: FIREBALL DR. PEPPER

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

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

• 1.5 oz Fireball

• Top with Dr Pepper over ice.

• That’s the whole recipe.

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

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

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

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

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

-

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

The rib flute.

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

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

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

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

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

I need you to sit with how stupid this is.

The stupidity is the entire argument.

It’s the whole theory. Stay with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ron Howard Voice: It did not vanish.

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

A man actively rooting against his own masterpiece.

There is no purer artist in America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ENTIRE THEORY: STUPIDITY TIMES CONVICTION

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

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

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

An embarrassed brand is a boring one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of lesson.

THE COCKTAIL: A MANHATTAN BUILT ON A BEAUTIFUL LIE

Today we’re drinking the Monte Carlo.

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

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

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

Except that is complete rib flute fantasy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the cocktail recipe:

• 2 oz rye

• 3/4 oz Bénédictine

• 2-4 dashes Angostura bitters

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kids said yes.

They always said yes.

It was never even close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Harris remembers.

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

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

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

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

Done.

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

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

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

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

And Underdog.

The campaign structure has never changed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customers chose the fake ones. Unanimously. Emphatically.

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

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

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

Carlton Banks understood.

Here’s the one that should be illegal.

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

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

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

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

THE AD LESSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

TGIF COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: TRIX RUM PUNCH

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

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

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

Everyone but you-know-who.

• 2 oz white rum

• 1 oz dark rum

• 1/2 oz orange curacao

• 1 oz lime juice

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

• 2 oz pineapple juice

• 2 oz orange juice

• Build over crushed ice. Stir.

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

• Umbrella, mandatory.

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

Not him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

Subway thinks you should feel more about a sandwich

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

About a sandwich.

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone got the memo that said “platform.”

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

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

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

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

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

And it’s not just beer.

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

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

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

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

Patriotism, now available in a six-pack form.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He meant it as a brag.

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

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

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

Michelin built a platform. It’s still standing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cocktail of the week: the El Presidente

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

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

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

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

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

• 1.5 oz white rum

• 1 oz dry vermouth

• 1 tsp orange curaçao

• 1 dash grenadine

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

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