Before Chester Cheetah, Cheetos had a mascot.

Nobody remembers him.

His name was the Cheetos Mouse.

He debuted in 1971.

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

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

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

None of this helped.

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Kane wrote the scripts.

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

The voice was Joel Murray.

Bill Murray’s little brother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every commercial. For decades.

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

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

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

That honesty was the whole strategy.

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

THE CHEETLE

In 2008, Chester got a second act nobody expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cheetle.”

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

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

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

THE FLAMIN’ HOT MYTH

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

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

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

Then the LA Times investigated in 2021.

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

Nobody’s directing Lynne’s biopic.

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

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

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

Chester taught them that.

THE AD LESSON

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

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

Chester is that behavior with sunglasses on.

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

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE GARIBALDI

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

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

Try getting that out of a Bud Light.

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

The same color as a Cheeto.

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

• 1 1/2 oz Campari

• 4 oz fresh orange juice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE 1975 TORONTO FLEX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIP SAILOR’S PUB

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

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

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

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

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

THE HIDE A CASE STORY

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

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

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

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

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

The stories are better than any ad copy.

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

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

The Manhattan skyscraper case took hunters thirteen weeks to locate.

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

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

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

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

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

AND THEN THE CAMPAIGN ACCIDENTALLY INVENTED JAMES BOND

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

Michael G. Wilson — Cubby Broccoli’s stepson, the guy who’d eventually run the Bond franchise — was flipping through a Playboy in the mid-70s. He saw a Canadian Club ad featuring a skier named Rick Sylvester launching off what the ad claimed was Mount Asgard on Baffin Island. Sylvester skis off a cliff, pulls a parachute, floats down.

Wilson showed it to Broccoli. They decided to make this the pre-title sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me.

They hired Sylvester — who wasn’t a pro stuntman, just an adventure skier who’d done a version of this jump for fun off El Capitan in 1972 — to do the stunt for real on Baffin Island. It cost five hundred thousand dollars.

Most expensive single movie stunt in history at the time. Christopher Wood added the Union Jack parachute. Only one of three cameras actually caught the jump. One take. Uncut.

When that parachute opens over the Baffin Island mountainside and the Bond theme kicks in, you’re watching a moment that exists because a whisky ad ran in Playboy.

A Canadian whisky campaign inspired the most iconic opening in British spy cinema.

The ad was also, incidentally, faked — the El Capitan footage from one of Sylvester's early-70s jumps was the real jump, the Mount Asgard claim in the Canadian Club ad was staged. The Bond version shot in Baffin was the real version.

Bond unfaked it for history during the most faked Bond era.

Ads are pretty incredible aren’t they?

THE COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: COLA OLD FASHIONED

It had to be Canadian Club inspired. It had to be something that pairs with fifty plus years of men almost dying on Jet Ski and then sitting down to a stiff drink.

It had to be in a shirt this hideous. The fever dream of whatever Ozempic AI thinks I need.

So: a Canadian Club Cola Old Fashioned.

Coca-Cola bitters on a Canadian whisky is my move. CC has a slightly softer, sweeter profile than American bourbon, and Coca-Cola bitters play off the caramel and vanilla notes without overloading it with sweetness.

You get an Old Fashioned that reads like a memory of every road trip where you bought a Coke at a gas station and a Canadian Club at a duty-free. Which is, on balance, a fine place to land.

Cola Old Fashioned

• 2 oz Canadian Club

• 1 tsp demerara or rich simple syrup

• 3-4 dashes Coca-Cola bitters (I made them myself - it was a three month wait to try them just for this)

• Orange peel

Stir over ice in a mixing glass until properly chilled. Strain into a rocks glass over one big cube. Express the orange peel over the top and drop it in.

Drink it somewhere with a view. A patio counts. A kitchen window counts. On a Jet ski does not count. After a Jet Ski, yes. We’ve been over this. The jean shorts are just a suggestion at this point.

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

In 1965, a Leo Burnett copywriter named Rudy Perz sat at his kitchen table trying to figure out how to sell something.

In 2026, a Pound & Grain copywriter named Jackson Murphy sat at his desk and AI’d himself into a Pillsbury commercial and achieved a lifelong dream.

But, enough about me.

Perz was briefed on refrigerated dough.

Tubes of raw biscuit batter.

Not the most inspiring creative challenge in the world in 2026. Probably insane in 1965.

Here’s the business context that gets left out.

Pillsbury was getting absolutely lapped.

Betty Crocker and General Mills had figured out convenience food. Cake mixes. Ready-to-bake everything.

Pillsbury was still selling flour while everyone else was selling time back to housewives.

Leo Burnett had just won the refrigerated dough account that March. Perz had to come up with something fast.

He popped a can. Imagined a little figure climbing out. A dough boy. Poppin’ Fresh.

The pitch practically wrote itself.

The first sketches came from Martin Nodell — yes, the same Martin Nodell who created the original Green Lantern for DC Comics in 1940.

He left comics in 1950, drifted into advertising and eventually landed at Leo Burnett as an art director.

One of the most important superheroes in American comics and one of the most recognized brand icons in American advertising. Same guy.

It wasn’t all magic. His early Doughboy sketches looked too much like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

A former Disney animator named Milt Schaffer came in and fixed it. Gave him the chef’s hat. The neckerchief. The blue eyes. Enough personality to stop being a ghost.

Perz originally wanted him animated as a 2D cartoon.

Then he saw the stop-motion titling sequence on The Dinah Shore Show and changed his mind.

Cascade Studios in LA built a puppet. Plaster. Foam. Ball and socket armature inside. Five bodies. Fifteen interchangeable heads with different expressions.

Total cost: $16,000. Which is about $160,000 today.

For one puppet.

For the record he’s 8¾ inches tall. He weighs 14 ounces.

These details have been officially maintained by General Mills for 60 years. Nobody asked. They keep them on file anyway.

They hired voice-over actor Paul Frees. More than 50 actors auditioned. One of them was Paul Winchell — the original voice of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Tigger almost became the Doughboy.

He was the Doughboy for 21 years. Until his death in 1986.

The first commercial aired November 7, 1965.

It was called “Dancing Fingers.” 30 seconds. Pillsbury Crescent Rolls.

His first words: “Hi! I’m Poppin’ Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy!”

Pillsbury approved 13 more out of the gate.

Within three years he had an 87% recognition rate among American consumers.

Pillsbury was getting 200 fan letters a week.

At his peak, 1,500 requests for autographed photos. And again, this was for a puppet selling refrigerated dough.

He shot ads with a young Maureen McCormick making cookies pre-Brady Bunch.

A few years in, Leo Burnett hired a copywriter named Carol H. Williams. She took over the account and wrote the campaign that made him a household name — “Say Hello to Poppin’ Fresh Dough.”

On her watch they added Poppie Fresh, the Doughgirl, because the Doughboy was showing up on too many products and there was real concern he was getting diluted.

And Poppie never got poked in the belly. Too much of an optics problem — a giant masculine hand jabbing a small female character without her consent.

In 2017 she became the first Black woman creative inducted into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame. Poppie was just one of the reasons why.

The Doughboy family rolled out through the early 70s. Poppie in 1973. The rest in 1974. Son Popper. Daughter Bun-Bun. Grandparents Granpopper and Granmommer. Uncle Rollie. A dog named Flapjack. A cat named Biscuit.

I do not remember Flapjack or Biscuit.

By 1999, Ad Age ranked him sixth among the top 10 advertising icons of the 20th century.

He’s appeared in over 600 commercials for more than 50 products. He’s been an opera singer, a rapper, a rock star, a ballet dancer, a skydiver and a professional skateboarder.

He’s fluent in French, German and Hebrew. He’s played harmonica, bugle, accordion, electric guitar and violin — at a level General Mills describes as “virtuoso.”

In Germany he’s Teigmännchen — The Little Dough Man.

In Israel he’s Efi — a nickname meaning “cute little baker.”

In Latin America, El Masin — The Little Dough.

In 2005, he showed up for the Super Bowl in a MasterCard “Icons” spot alongside the Jolly Green Giant, Mr. Peanut, Chef Boyardee, the Morton Salt Girl, Count Chocula and Charlie the Tuna — ten mascots having dinner together. He was the one who got poked.

From 2009 to 2017 he moonlighted in GEICO commercials. He kept the giggle.

In Super Bowl LIX (2025) he showed up again for Instacart alongside Mr. Clean, the Kool-Aid Man, the Old Spice Guy and the PuppyMonkeyBaby. Sixty years in and still booking Super Bowl work.

Somewhere in the early 2000s, an anonymous writer sent a fake obituary out into the early internet.

“Veteran Pillsbury spokesman, The Pillsbury Doughboy, died yesterday of a severe yeast infection and complications from repeated pokes in the belly.”

The eulogy was wall-to-wall bread puns.

He “never knew how much he was kneaded.”

His later life “was filled with turnovers.”

He was “not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes.”

The California Raisins were at the funeral. So was Captain Crunch. Mrs. Butterworth. Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy.

It went viral — pre-social viral, the chain email kind — and has been circulating for 20+ years. Nobody knows who wrote it.

The Doughboy has outlived his own fake death by longer than most careers last.

Even Gary Larson made a comic with him once.

In 2001, General Mills acquired Pillsbury from Diageo in a $10.4 billion deal. Which meant the Doughboy now worked for Pillsbury’s biggest historical competitor.

He turned 60 last November.

The belly poke has never stopped.

THE AD LESSON

Rudy Perz had to make people care about a tube of biscuit dough.

His answer was to make the product into a character that people felt genuine affection for.

Not just awareness. Affection.

Strong enough that they wrote letters. Strong enough that they bought dolls. Strong enough that a stranger wrote a fake obituary full of bread puns and the internet shared it for 20 years.

Sometimes you don’t sell what the product is.

You sell what it feels like to have it in your house.

FRIDAY DRINK CART COCKTAIL: THE CLOVER CLUB

Pink. Foamy. Soft enough to give when you poke it.

Born in Philadelphia in the 1880s at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. The Clover Club was actually a men’s club where lawyers, journalists and businessmen met in the hotel bar and eventually got a drink named after them.

It was one of the most popular cocktails in America before Prohibition. Then Prohibition killed it. Then the cocktail renaissance of the 2000s dug it out of the grave.

It tastes better than anything this pink has a right to.

The Clover Club

• 2 oz gin

• 0.75 oz fresh lemon juice

• 0.5 oz raspberry syrup (or 4-5 fresh raspberries muddled with 0.5 oz simple)

• 1 egg white

• Raspberry for garnish

Dry shake everything without ice for 15 seconds to build the foam. Add ice. Shake again hard until cold. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Drop a raspberry on top.

The whole drink is about what it feels like to poke it. The foam holds its shape for a moment, then gives. Soft. Pillowy. Giggling optional.

The Clover Club is older than the Doughboy by about eighty years. Which feels right.

Some things just survive.

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

Yes, I’ve AI’d myself into a fictional movie scene with Jon Hamm in 18th-century frocks to talk about a dried mango company called Mangones.

It’s the first thing that has given me true joy in the past 72 hours. And this is what they call int he newsletting business, a long walk. So get comfy.

So a mango company with all of 1,625 followers with a bio reading, “taking down Big Snack” declared the end of the advertising industry.

“Claude Design is actually insane. It’s so over for agencies. Pack it up, apply to trade school.”

The evidence attached was a pretty generic sales email.

In the replies, someone asked how he’d done it. Was it just a text prompt or did he feed the AI some inspiration?

“Yeah, uploaded our brand book, fonts, logos, product shots, colors and gave context on the sale we are running.”

Oh the cruel irony. He declared agencies dead using work an agency made for him.

The classic coal shipped to Newcastle, repackaged as coal he’d invented. (again, the coal reference will come)

A designer replied that the email looked like “a $49 WordPress theme from 2014.”

Another noted it was basically what every e-commerce agency produces for email. Mangones, wounded, fired back: “Did you just shit on the design?”

Which is the whole thing, really.

A guy declares an entire industry over, then gets personally hurt when someone points out his revolutionary output looks like the industry at its most average. The same industry he just told to apply to trade school.

If I had a dollar for every time an agency was declared over because of something somebody said on the internet, I’d be Timothy Dexter.

WHO THE HELL IS LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER?

And there we are. Who is Timothy Dexter?

Dexter was an 18th-century American merchant from Newburyport, Massachusetts who in 1802 self-published a 32-page book about how great he was. This is a man who would have cooked with X and Substack.

The book had no punctuation. It had dozens of misspellings. It had rants about his wife, who he’d started calling “the ghost of my wife” because the feeling was mutual.

It was called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, and Dexter was, by almost every available metric, an idiot.

One of my favourite reads, Messy Nessy covered him in Volume 770 of her weekly internet dig and said someone should make a movie about him. She’s right.

And I think the movie’s already been made. We’re all living in it. Jon Hamm was made to play this role.

Because the thing is — Dexter was rich. Absurdly stinking rich. A few years before publishing the book, he’d shipped coal to Newcastle, the English mining town, during what turned out to be a miners’ strike. This kind of things happened to him over and over again until he was so rich he wrote a book.

When readers complained the book had no punctuation, Dexter published a second edition with a full page of nothing but commas, periods, semicolons, question marks and exclamation points. Along with a note telling readers to “peper and solt it as they plese.”

THIS IS WHAT THE LAST 30 DAYS FEELS LIKE

Stuart Heritage wrote a piece in The Guardian about how ChatGPT has a tell: a linguistic tic it can't stop using, “it’s not X, it’s Y.” Self-improvement isn’t a trend, it’s a lifestyle shift. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

It’s in Facebook posts, Peloton scripts, TV dialogue, your coworker’s Slack message. Even Don Draper used it, “It’s not a timepiece,” he says. “It’s a conversation piece.” Every LLM sentence that passes as thought has that same rhythm. It’s the punctuation page of 2026. The em dash of the moment. A pile of confident commas pretending to be an argument.

Meanwhile somebody asked Chipotle’s customer support chatbot, a cheerful little thing named Pepper, to help them reverse a linked list in Python before placing their order. Pepper complied. Wrote the function. Noted the O(n) time complexity. Then politely asked what they’d like for lunch.

Chipotle is paying the LLM bill. Some coder got a free computer science tutor. The screenshot went so viral that within a week, fake versions started circulating of McDonald’s’ Grimace bot doing the same bit, a French SEO guy tweeting “stop paying for Claude AI, McDonald’s AI is free and answers all questions, even if they’re not about the BIG MAC.”

On TikTok, an AI-generated show called Fruit Love Island — exactly what it sounds like, anthropomorphic strawberries and bananas doing a Love Island parody became the fastest-growing account in TikTok history.

3 million followers in nine days. Ten million views per episode. The creator claims each two-minute episode took three hours to make. A creator named Joy Ofodu had been making a real version of this with actual performance and got 5 million views on her series. The AI knockoff cleared 300 million. Figure that one out.

A New York Times investigation earlier this year found that 40% of videos YouTube recommends to children after they watch the terrifying in its own right, CoComelon are now AI slop: horses hatching from eggs, misspelled alphabets, warped faces. All of it was making money.

The cultural high point (and I use “high” loosely) came on April 12, when the sitting US president posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus healing a dying man.

He later told the press he’d thought the meme depicted him as a doctor. Not Jesus. A doctor. This is a man looking at a page of punctuation marks and sincerely telling us he sees a comma.

BUT THAT’S WHEN I HAVE TO STOP MYSELF

Richard Shotton posted a photo of a San Miguel ad, “SPANISH SUMMER NO MATTER WHEN,” a woman in a red dress sitting on the roof of a small house (or she’s a giant), a fan, a seagull with nowhere to go, a disembodied hand clutching the bottle, a typeset that looks like three different agencies couldn’t agree on what day it was.

His caption: “While AI is creating ads like this the dangers of the convergence still seem a long way away.”

Which is the reminder. We didn’t need AI to make slop. We’ve been making it all along.

The New York Times ran a piece about a TikTok genre called “day in my life” videos — 25-year-olds filming themselves doing office tasks and narrating them like they’re performing surgery. Typing. Packing a “snacky” lunch. Taking “night showers.” Retiring to the “man attic” to game.

A creator named Hubs became so popular for glorifying his 9-to-5 that he quit his 9-to-5 to post about it full-time, and the comment sections are split between people calling it “modern enlightenment” and people calling him an “NPC.” No AI involved. Humans filming other humans performing confident nothingness for other humans to watch.

Then yesterday and I can’t make this one up — Prego (yes the jarred pasta sauce brand) announced the Connection Keeper.

A $20 bundle, landing in time for Mother’s Day, containing a jar of pasta sauce, a conversation prompt card deck, a USB-C charging cable and a “screen-free recording device” so your family can preserve their dinner table conversations forever.

A pasta sauce brand has decided to solve the connection crisis by mailing you a microphone. No AI in sight. Just humans selling other humans a microphone and a jar of red sauce.

We’ve been told for three years that AI would make everyone smarter. What it actually did was hand everyone Timothy Dexter’s pen. Polished. Confident. Grammatically fine.

But we have nothing important to saying. Dexter had his pen in 1802. San Miguel’s agency has one. Hubs has one. Prego has one. Even the Mangones guy has one.

AI didn't invent the confidence-without-substance business model. It just made it 10,000 times more efficient.

The smart brands in 2026 aren’t the ones using AI best. They’re the ones who figured out that being legibly, confidently, obviously dumb is now a viable strategy.

The reward system is broken in the exact same way it was broken for Dexter. Reality was doing his marketing for him.

The difference is Dexter didn’t know he was winning. These brands do. And that’s the part I can’t stop chewing on.

Is calculated idiocy still idiocy?

Somewhere out there, a dried mango company is telling an entire industry to pack it up, using the industry’s own brand book to do the telling.

We’re not entering a new age of idiots. We’re in the second edition. The page of punctuation got added. Everyone’s shaking commas onto the page just like the em dash.

Only some of them know what they’re doing. It’s all fine.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: THE VANDERPUMP NO. 5

Vanderpump Villa Season 3 dropped recently and Lisa’s left the Italian sun behind and set up shop at an English country estate called Rosecroft Park, with Stassi Schroeder as “resident chaperone” and a full rotating cast of reality TV refugees from Love Island, The Challenge, Made in Chelsea and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

It’s ten episodes of hospitality staff trying to serve five-star dinners to people who built their careers refusing to behave at dinners.

Which brings us, naturally, to Lisa’s signature cocktail. And maybe why AI gave Jon Hamm a wig and not me. Completely unfair.

The No. 5 is served at Vanderpump à Paris in Vegas in a full-size Chanel-style perfume bottle. You pour it into a coupe yourself. The name is a wink, the presentation is a wink, the whole menu is a wink.

Which makes it perfect for this week. Because after everything above about brands winning with confident nonsense, here’s a cocktail that figured out the trick legitimately.

Lisa Vanderpump has been selling rum and cognac with a spritz of Chanel energy since the first day she opened a bar. The drink underneath is good. The drink on top of the drink is theatre. Some people call that slop. Others call it an empire.

The No. 5

• 1 oz Cognac (Pierre Ferrand 1840 or any decent VS)

• ½ oz Diplomático Mantuano rum (or any sippable dark rum)

• ½ oz Malibu or another coconut rum

• ½ oz St-Germain elderflower liqueur

• 1 oz fresh pineapple juice

• ½ oz fresh lemon juice

• ¼ oz pear liqueur (Belle de Brillet is the move — or sub pear nectar if you don’t keep it)

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake hard with ice. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a thin pear slice or a lemon peel, twisted over the glass and dropped in.

Perfume bottle optional, but if you’ve got an empty Chanel on the vanity and a steady pour, live your life.

The drink should land floral and tropical up front with the cognac and Angostura doing structural work underneath. If yours tastes like a pina colada that went to finishing school, you nailed it.

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

In 1928, the Jolly Green Giant wasn’t jolly.

He wasn’t even green.

He was an orange caveman in a bearskin, hunched over a giant pea pod.

And before you even ask, I’m not AI-ing myself as the Green Giant. Even I have limits.

So back to Green Giant.

Angry, maybe. Threatening, kind of. Described at the time, charitably, as terrifying.

1928 seemed maybe a bit too generous to advertisers.

They already had a solid canned vegetable mascot, right?

He existed because a small canning company in Le Sueur, Minnesota had discovered a new variety of jumbo pea.

So big and tender that none of the established brands wanted to sell it. What a time to be alive.

So the Minnesota Valley Canning Company made up a name, Green Giant. Then they bolted a cave monster to the label for maximum effect.

In 1935, you know what comes next. It’s always the copywriter.

The account landed on the desk of a copywriter at Erwin, Wasey & Company in Chicago.

His name was Leo Burnett.

He looked at the angry orange cave dweller. He decided the problem was simple.

The giant wasn’t jolly.

He added the word. Changed the bearskin to leaves. Straightened the posture. Gave him a smile.

Minnesota Valley liked the revision so much they eventually renamed the entire company after it.

When Burnett left to start his own agency that same year, the Green Giant account came with him. One of the founding clients of what became Leo Burnett, Chicago.

Imagine being on such a generational run creating Tony the Tiger, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Toucan Sam and the Jolly Green Giant?

He made everything that way. Found the one true word and the whole thing changed.

There’s a reason his company was billing over $100 million a year by 1959.

The Giant’s first TV appearance we’re a disaster. He sort of moved. He apparently frightened children.

The “Ho, Ho, Ho” wasn’t added until 1961.

A Chicago session singer named Elmer Dresslar Jr. walked into an audition. Was told nothing except to stand at a mic and do a low laugh.

He did.

That was it. That sound ran for decades.

They introduced frozen vegetables and gave JGG red scarf to keep him warm in the freezing temperatures.

They added Little Green Sprout in early 70s because the Giant had one problem. He was too big and too iconic to really give a voice to. He couldn’t sell products directly. He could only loom and Ho, Ho, Ho.

Sprout was the talking proxy. He’d ask questions. The Giant would just watch over the valley.

A genuinely odd two-mascot structure. The authority figure communicates exclusively through size and laughter. The little guy does all the actual explaining.

It worked.

The Giant got so embedded in culture that in 1964, The Kingsmen (yep the “Louie Louie” guys) had a top 10 hit with a novelty song about him.

Green Giant initially objected. When it hit #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, the brand took the win.

A 55-foot fiberglass statue was erected in Blue Earth, Minnesota in 1979. A local radio host commissioned it because travellers kept telling him they wanted to see the Giant.

No landowner near the new I-90 would donate frontage for it. So at the freeway’s dedication ceremony, he hoisted the Giant from a crane by the armpits as a publicity stunt. The Giant got a permanent base the next year.

Still draws 10,000 visitors.

In 1999, Ad Age ranked the Green Giant third among the top 10 advertising icons of the 20th century. Behind only the Marlboro Man and Ronald McDonald. Ahead of Betty Crocker, the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger.

Third.

For a guy who sells canned corn.

Then you know what happened? Oh you know.

Green Giant merged with Pillsbury in 1979.

Pillsbury then sold to General Mills in 2001.

General Mills decided $585 million in annual vegetable sales was only 4% of their business and not worth the focus.

So they sold to B&G Foods in 2015 for $765 million.

B&G sold the canned line to Seneca Foods in 2023. Then the frozen line a few years later

The complete brand is now at Seneca Foods in Fairport, New York.

Four ownership changes.

But he’s still here.

THE AD LESSON

Leo Burnett looked at a frightening orange cave monster.

And applied his phrase: 'There is an inherent drama in every product. Our No. 1 job is to dig for it and capitalize on it.'

For Green Giant, the inherent drama was one word. Jolly.

That’s the whole intervention. The product didn’t change. The peas didn’t change. Just the one word.

Suddenly the monster had a personality. The personality had a brand. The brand had a company name, a pop song and a 55-foot statue in Minnesota.

The lesson isn’t about softening a brand. It’s about finding the word that transforms how everything else gets read.

Sometimes the brief is just: find that one word.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: GREEN CHARTREUSE SOUR

Ho, Ho, Ho. Yes, we’re making a green drink.

Made with a French liqueur that gets its green from actual chlorophyll. The recipe has 130 herbs in it and two Carthusian monks are the only people who know what they all are.

• 2 oz Green Chartreuse

• 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

• 1/2 oz simple syrup

• 1 egg white

Dry shake to whip the egg white. Add ice, shake hard, double-strain into a coupe. Foam on top is the look.

Herbal, bracing, actually green. Made by monks who capped production in 2019 because they’d rather pray than scale.

The Giant would respect it. So sip that sour and watch the Jolly Green Giant in action.

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

Just a few weeks after shaming their CEO to step down for daring to not share a plane accident in French, Air Canada announced something this week with breathless excitement.

The press release called it a “comprehensive redesign showcases a distinctly Canadian experience rooted in comfort, care, and connection.”

They named the whole thing “Glowing Hearted.”

I’ve always hated Air Canada. This story just adds fuel to that.

Yeah, lie-flat seats, 4K OLED screens, bigger overhead bins, Bluetooth audio. Honestly, all fine upgrades. The kind of thing you’d actually want on a transatlantic flight if you were suckered enough to have to fly on this airline.

But you see, “Glowing Hearted” is not about that kind of stuff. It’s about the design in the air. The thing a 27-year-old will be asked to present at a stakeholder meeting with a straight face.

Air Canada’s EVP Mark Nasr said — and I am quoting directly — “We’re setting a new standard for how Canadians and the world connect with our brand.”

Mark. Buddy. You put bigger screens in economy seats. Simmer down a bit.

The press release tells us, “The new cabin design is inspired by Canada, creating a thoroughly modern space that evokes a sense of calm.”

I can hear you asking, “what does Canadian mean to Air Canada”

The answer, apparently, is glowing. And hearted. And if I’m being honest kind of bland and grey. That must be the luxury part? But I am forgetting that the “signature red stitching and bespoke fabrics provide a subtle Canadian touch paired with a palette of greys and stone.”

Sure those in the fancy areas are also, “greeted by a wave-like entrance monument, inspired by Canada’s waterways and anchored by the Air Canada rondelle cast in bronze.”

What are they even talking about? I do not need a welcome monument on my plane.

There was a time when airlines just had good names and used words like Fantabulous. Bonanza Air Lines launched in Las Vegas in 1945 with one Cessna and a dream of connecting the Southwest. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot.

By 1960 they were the first all-turbine airline in America. Here’s the best part. They called their DC-9s “Funjets.”

Not Joyful Skied Jets. Not Warmly Elevated Travel or even Glowing hearted.

Funjets.

They flew Las Vegas to Reno, Phoenix, LA, Salt Lake City, eventually Mexico. Then Howard Hughes bought them, Delta eventually absorbed the whole lineage and that was that.

Funjets. Two syllables. The opposite of whatever Air Canada is trying to call innovation.

That energy. The earnest, effortful, slightly over-explaining itself, runs through everything Air Canada does. And I say that as someone who has been apologized to by Air Canada while being delayed dozens of times.

The seats will be fine. No one is every going to say, “oh, have your flown in the new Glowing Hearted cabins?” Never. The name will haunt the brand manager for the rest of their career.

BEAVER LUMBER: A CANADIAN LOGO EULOGY

The logo says everything.

A beaver. A Green apron. A tool box. Yellow background. Absolutely unmistakable. The kind of identity that takes forty years to build and eighteen months to throw away.

Beaver Lumber started in 1906 in Winnipeg, after the Banbury brothers came down from Saskatchewan and bought up a bunch of other lumber stores. They needed a name connected to wood. Someone said “Beaver.” That was that. 94 years as a Canadian institution.

At its peak, 138 stores. Hardware. Lumber. Building supplies. The place your dad went on a Saturday morning and didn’t come back until 2pm.

Then Molson bought it.

The beer company. In 1972, for $40 million.

Why on earth did a beer company buy this and at the same time also own Aikenhead’s Hardware. Their plan was to merge the two chains and build a national hardware empire.

This is a real thing that happened. Canada’s most beloved brewery spent the better part of two decades in the lumber and hardware business.

Then Home Depot crossed the border.

Molson saw what was coming and made the only sensible call: sold Aikenhead’s to Home Depot in 1994 for $200 million. Then sat on Beaver for five more years, watching it retreat from cities to smaller towns, closing its big urban stores one by one. In 1999, they sold the rest to Home Hardware for $68 million.

By the end of 2000, the name was gone. Stores became the very on the nose, Home Building Centres. The green and yellow beaver gone.

The real tragedy isn’t the brand death. It’s the ownership sequence. A beloved Canadian hardware chain, built over 90 years, ending up as a line item in a brewery’s failed diversification strategy.

Molson didn’t kill Beaver Lumber exactly. But they were just holding the keys when Home Depot showed up.

RIP to a fine logo. And we didn’t even get Beaver Lumber lager? So dumb.

MARV THRONEBERRY: THE ORIGINAL SELF-AWARE SPOKESMAN

In 1975, a phone rang at midnight in Fisherville, Tennessee.

Marvin Eugene Throneberry picked it up. An ad executive on the other end offered him a job. A Miller Beer ad. They wanted athletes. They also, apparently, wanted Marv.

This was a strange call to receive.

Throneberry had been out of baseball for over a decade. His defining moment — and he had several — came in 1962, when he was the first baseman for the New York Mets. The expansion Mets. The ones who lost 120 games, a modern record that stood for over 40 years.

In one game, Marv hit what should have been a bases-clearing triple. Called out for missing first base. His manager, Casey Stengel came out to argue. An umpire walked over and said, “Casey, I hate to tell you this, but he also missed second.” Stengel, reportedly: “Well, I know he touched third because he’s standing on it.”

That’s Marv. His initials were MET. His fan club had 5,000 members who wore shirts that said VRAM, Marv spelled backwards and they chanted “Cranberry, Strawberry, we still want Throneberry.”

McCann-Erickson’s “Tastes Great / Less Filling” campaign was ranked by Ad Age as the eighth best advertising campaign in history. They filled it with legends. Mickey Mantle. Whitey Ford. Bob Uecker. Rodney Dangerfield. And then, at the end, they put in Marv.

His line: “If I do for Lite what I did for baseball, I’m afraid their sales will go down.”

That’s it. That’s the whole pitch. The results are impeccable.

In another spot, sportswriter Frank Deford sits at a bar waxing poetic about a beloved baseball icon. Billy Martin sits next to him, assuming Deford means him. Deford slides the beer to Marv. Marv looks at Martin: “Cheer up, Billy. One day you’ll be famous just like me.”

When he died of cancer in 1994 at 60, the New York Times ran a full column.

The lesson? Self-deprecation, delivered straight, is more charming than almost anything else. They didn’t ask Marv to pretend to be great. They paid Marv to be exactly himself.

ON THE DRINK CART: THE MILE HIGH RUM PUNCH

Since Air Canada just named their new cabin design the impossibly smug “Glowing Hearted” we have to be inspired by flight.

Flight attendants have been mixing rum, orange juice and cranberry in plastic cups at 35,000 feet for decades and calling it Crew Juice or simply a really great Friday.

This is the real Air Canada cabin experience. You have to drink to get through it.

It’s deadly simple:

• 2 oz rum

• 2 oz orange juice

• 2 oz cranberry juice

• Ice

Pour over ice. Stir. Done. If by some miracle you have an orange slice handy and you want to feel fancy, you do you. You’re not getting that fancy in the air.

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

The original voice of Toucan Sam was Mel Blanc.

Bugs Bunny. Daffy Duck. Porky Pig. Tweety. Yosemite Sam. Speedy Gonzalez. Foghorn Leghorn.

This is the man who built the Warner Bros. cartoon universe.

He side hustled part of his career selling Froot Loops to children.

In Pig Latin.

The original Sam spoke exclusively in Pig Latin — “OOT-fray OOPS-lay” — which is insane, and also probably hilarious in 1963 if you were six years old eating cereal before school.

Leo Burnett eventually decided Sam needed a more sophisticated persona.

They wanted him to sound exotic, to match his tropical bird character. The reference they gave to the next voice actor was Ronald Colman, a 1930s and 40s film actor described as dashing, debonair. A gentleman adventurer.

They wanted the bird who eats cereal every morning to sound like he’d just returned from somewhere interesting.

The job went to Paul Frees — who was already voicing the Pillsbury Doughboy and the farmer who educated Little Green Sprout in the Green Giant commercials.

And don’t worry more on these in the next few weeks. Paul Frees is in this entire series and nobody has ever said his name.

Sam launched in 1963. The campaign structure was air-tight from day one: Sam smelled Froot Loops. Sam followed his nose. Sam found said Froot Loops.

That’s it. Same plot. Every single commercial. For sixty years.

“Follow your nose — it always knows.”

That epic tagline does three things simultaneously: it describes the character’s superpower, it makes smelling sugar into an adventure and it quietly invites the kid watching to do the same thing.

The nose is the product benefit. Froot Loops smell like fruit. Sam is just honest about it.

The stripes on Sam’s beak originally represented the three flavors in the original Froot Loops lineup: orange, lemon, cherry.

When new colors were added in the 90s, the beak gained stripes accordingly. His nose is a product changelog. Now, remember that there are not actually different flavors, the brand confirmed long ago that all of them are the same vaguely fruit taste. Any difference you taste is pure fiction.

In 2020, Kellogg’s decided to update him.

They gave him a flat 2D design. Neon tie-dye beak. Turquoise tones. And then — and this is the part that broke something in people — they gave him human teeth. The beak had a visible mouth inside it. With teeth.

The Facebook reveal post got more angry-face reactions than likes. #NotMyToucan trended. One tweet read “NOOOO WHAT THE FUCK DID THEY DO TO TOUCAN SAM????? THOSE CALART FUCKS GOT TO HIM IM NEVER BUYING CHEERIOS AGAIN” which is the wrong cereal brand, wrong on emotion and completely correct on vibes.

Kellogg’s response: this isn’t the first time Sam has changed, he evolves to stay relevant. The internet’s response: what have you done to my boy.

By 2021 they put him back. Slightly brighter. More solid. No teeth. Sam survived.

He’s still there. Still following his nose. Still British for no reason that actually kind of makes complete sense and somehow works entirely.

THE AD LESSON

Toucan Sam is proof that a single clean creative mechanism like follow your nose can run for six decades without modification.

The character barely evolved. The beak changed as the product changed.

The accent shifted once. Otherwise Sam is exactly what he was in 1963.

The 2020 redesign is the negative lesson: even a brief departure from a simple truth causes a measurable crisis. The teeth weren’t a creative decision. They were a symptom of not trusting the original idea enough.

They put the original idea back and everything was fine. It was always fine. It was always the nose.

COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: STRAWBERRY WHITE NEGRONI

The Masters was this week. Augusta National, where the pimento cheese sandwiches cost $1.50 and the azaleas are always in bloom and the whole thing feels like a country club that decided to cosplay as a national treasure. Beautiful. Timeless. Slightly unreal.

I had this drink at Gary’s on Twelfth in Vancouver — a nice place, as they describe themselves, and they’re not wrong. I was going to rant about having to eat at back-to-back small plates restaurants, but i enjoyed it. It has a sneaky simple vibe. And everything tastes like someone made very specific decisions and never eviated from the path. It gave the opposite to The Bear energy.

Strawberry gin, chiaro amaro, dry vermouth. Stirred. Big ice. Lemon peel.

The white negroni already swaps Campari for something softer — usually a gentian-based amaro or a blanc vermouth — which gives you all the bitter-aromatic structure without the red. This version goes one step further: strawberry wallflower gin from Odd Society (local, Vancouver), Woods Spirit chiaro amaro (also local), Esquimalt dry vermouth.

It’s pink-gold in the light. It tastes like fruit that earned it.

The Masters has its egg salad sandwich for $1.50. This is decidedly way better.

• 1.5 oz strawberry gin (Odd Society Wallflower if you can find it, or any floral gin works)

• 1 oz blanc or dry vermouth

• .75 oz amaro bianco or chiaro amaro

Stir with ice until very cold. Strain over a large rock. Express a lemon peel over the top and drop it in and start watching the 7 decades of Froot Loops ads.

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

Augusta National posted six grass measurements on social media this week.

No hashtags. No creator strategy. No trending audio.

1.1 million impressions.

The fairways are cut to 3/8 of an inch. Greens at 1/8. Tees at 5/16. Collars at 1/4. They posted the full spec sheet and called it “The Details.”

Because that is the brand. Every single detail counts.

In case you’re wondering, yes, this newsletter inspired by a Linkedin post I did last year where I became obsessed with The Masters.

Cut to me putting the old green jacket on, again. This time looking kind of like Chris Farley in Tommy Boy.

People have been talking about this for 2 decades. But Augusta’s digital team really does operate like a newsroom. Over 150 pieces of content in two weeks during tournament time. 48 videos a day. Every post crafted with the same obsessive precision applied to the grass.

Leave Money on the Table

The TV rights cost CBS, ESPN and — for the first time this year — Amazon, exactly zero dollars. Augusta grants broadcast rights for free. In exchange for total production control. Four minutes of commercials per hour. Their cameras. Their call.

Amazon just got two hours of Thursday and Friday coverage. They described getting the deal as an honour. They should.

The merch is only on site. No drop. No Shopify. The merch case of you had to be there. They’ll do about $70 million during tournament week. A collectible gnome has become one of the most coveted items in sports. 125 styles of baseball caps. Gone in hours.

The Cheapest Food in Sports. On Purpose.

The egg salad and pimento cheese sandwiches continue to be $1.50. Have been since 2002. Pork barbecue $1.50. Masters Club, chicken salad, ham and cheese on rye, classic chicken all $3. Beer and wine max out at $6. Coffee is $2.

This year Augusta introduced a new candy bar. Dark-milk chocolate blend with caramel, rice crisps and hazelnut crunch, made in partnership with Bitzel’s, an artisan chocolate factory near Atlanta. $2.25.

The Georgia Peach Ice Cream Sandwich — peach ice cream between two soft sugar cookies — is $3 and apparently a staff favourite at every outlet that covers this tournament.

The concession menu isn’t cheap because Augusta can’t charge more.

It’s cheap because the experience is the product.

The experience is the brand. That’s the lesson.

The Rules Are the Brand

The other thing about The Masters and Augusta is the rules.

Magnolia Lane is 330 yards. 61 magnolia trees on each side.

You are a patron, not a spectator.

You cannot run.

Your chair cannot have arms.

You cannot wear your hat backwards.

You cannot take sand home without being arrested.

The logo hasn’t meaningfully changed since 1934.

The tournament wasn’t even called The Masters yet.

The brand was already figured out.

Meanwhile, Everyone Else Is Sprinting Too

Sports Business Journal ran a piece about MLB teams building in-house content studios this week too. It’s worth the read.

The Dodgers generated $101 million in social media value last season. Not revenue. Not ticket sales. Social media value. The number defined as the equivalent cost of reaching that same audience through paid advertising. 2.51 billion impressions. 122 million engagements. From their own accounts.

The Mariners used to rely on an outside agency for their commercials. Not anymore. Everything in-house now. This spring they produced a series of digital shorts, they won’t call them commercials.

One features their All-Star catcher Cal Raleigh playing a fictional alter ego called “Hal Baleigh.” Another is called “Babyproof” — built around the influx of new dads on the roster. Both went viral.

“One advantage to going in-house is we have the ability to build relationships with these players,” Mariners Creative Director Keri Zierler told SBJ. “We get to know them on a more human level, so we have insights into their personalities more so than an external agency just coming in cold would have.”

The Brewers went further. Their senior manager of content Ezra Siegel calls their internal philosophy “Arthouse Baseball.”

This spring they filmed a stunt making it look like pitcher Jacob Misiorowski who touches 104 mph, threw a fastball that knocked an apple off a prospect’s head. People genuinely couldn’t tell if it was real.

The Mets went long-form. Full two-part documentary on Juan Soto. A series called “Inside the Diamond.” Behind-the-scenes travel content.

“Content has gone from kind of a support function to now being the main driver of the business,” said Mets VP of creative content Bobby Clemens.

The NBA Built a Second Brain

The NBA took a different approach entirely. They built a second account. @nbaresdev is the “NBA Research & Development.” This account bills itself as the official unofficial testing lab for the league. And if testing means pop culture and fun.

Content like “Does starting a podcast make you worse at basketball?” and “Why Summer House is like the Brooklyn Nets.” And most importantly, players responding to being called hot. Or Dwyane Wade’s legacy analyzed like a true crime conspiracy board.

None of it reflects the NBA brand per se. All of it extends it to new audiences.

The Gap

Every sports team and property is sprinting in a different direction trying to find new people. Building studios, launching alter egos, making GTA parodies, testing things in R&D accounts nobody expects to work.

Augusta posts grass measurements and gets 1.1 million impressions from the audience it already owns.

The Brewers are doing genuinely interesting work. The Dodgers’ numbers are staggering even if their feed isn’t all that compelling. The NBA R&D account is legitimately clever especially if you are a cross over Bravo fan.

You can build a content studio.

It’s harder to manufacture 90 years of earned obsession.

Cocktail of the Week: The 13th Hole

The official Masters Azalea is vodka, lemonade and grenadine. Elegant. Appropriate. Very on brand.

This is not that.

The 13th Hole is what you make at home on the couch when you can’t get a ticket and you’ve decided to commit to watching 40 hours of golf anyway.

• 2 oz bourbon

• 1 oz fresh lemon juice

• ½ oz grenadine

• Top with cream soda

Build over ice in a rocks glass. Add bourbon, lemon and grenadine, stir once. Top with the trashiest cream soda you can find. Don’t shake it. Garnish with a cherry and a lemon wheel.

It’s pink. It’s loud. It tastes like the 13th hole looks.

Pair it with a $3 Georgia Peach Ice Cream Sandwich if you can find one.

Augusta would never serve this drink. Make two and enjoy with Carl.

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

Advertising used to be so simple.

Imagine this happening so easily today.

Jay Ward, the creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle, gets contacted by Bruce Baker from Compton Advertising about a new cereal.

The brief? Just use the word crunch.

Ward was just about to let his whole studio go on vacation.

So his request was yes as long as there was no creative interference. (The dream)

A writer in the studio, Allan Burns, was inspired by Captain Horatio Hornblower.

But instead of Royal Navy officers as his crew. it was kids.

An early voice session had the girl playing Brunhilde call him Cap’n instead of Captain.

It stuck.

Cap’n Crunch’s origin story was, how shall we say, complicated and elaborate.

“Crunch’s father, Sven, was a navigator of a Viking vessel but was marooned in New England where he married a lovely Indian girl, Gidget Running Star.

They had a child, Horatio Magellan Crunch. Since American schools were limited in their curriculum at the time, Horatio was sent to England for schooling but on his voyage he was kidnapped by a band of pirates who taught him how to be a sailor.”

That seemed to be a bit much for breakfast cereal captain.

So it came down to basically, “he was born on Crunch Island located in a sea of milk.”

Much better.

Despite wild speculation that the captain’s, full name was Horatio Magellan Crunch, and he’s often been described as seafaring Napoleonic-ish egomaniac and that maybe he was French too.

There is also mounting evidence that the Capn’ didn’t seem to be a very good at his job of being the captain of a sailing ship.

Mon Dieu.

THE WHISTLE

One fun story is that some of those early 60’s boxes included a free toy whistle.

Legend says that the whistle emitted a tone at exactly 2600 Hz.

Why does that mean anything?

Apparently that is also the precise frequency AT&T used to signal a free long-distance trunk line.

A hacker named John Draper (You can’t make that up) figured out you could blow the whistle into a phone, seize a free trunk line and make calls anywhere in the world for nothing.

He called himself Captain Crunch.

Then got arrested.

But first he told Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs about it. They built their own blue boxes and sold them to UC Berkeley students.

Apparently Wozniak prank-called the Pope. Got through, impersonated Henry Kissinger and said "I must confess my crimes."

A very confused Vatican clergyman answered.

Jobs later said there would never have been an Apple Computer without blue-boxing.

A cereal box toy accidentally helped invent Apple.

GO BIG OR GO HOME

When the cereal launched in 1963, Quaker spent 80% of its entire marketing budget ($5 million).

The big gamble paid off. The Crunch empire was rolling.

They added Crunch Berries in 1967. Peanut Butter Crunch 1969.

Then in 1985 he disappeared.

Don’t worry. The Old Cap’n was just in the Milky Way.

They liked it enough to run it again in 2000, this time with a CD-ROM game and six months of promotional waves, and a limited-time cereal called Mystery Crunch with magical popping sprinkles that nobody remembers.

PepsiCo acquired Quaker Oats in 2001 and Cap’n Crunch came along for the ride.

By 2011 the cereal was no longer being actively marketed to children. That old crunchberry.

In 2013, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the Cap'n wears three stripes on his uniform, which makes him a Commander, not even a Captain.

The internet briefly lost its mind.

Last year Elliott Investment Management, the activist firm that took a $4 billion stake in PepsiCo, published a 75-page deck recommending the company shed underperforming brands.

They named names.

Cap'n Crunch and Life cereal were recommended to be divested.

The Soggies were the original villains and soggy cereal was the existential threat in the Crunch world.

It's a little on the nose that the thing that finally beat him wasn't a cartoon villain. It was a bunch of corporate villains during a portfolio review.

This is what they took from us.

THE AD LESSON

The Cap'n Crunch origin is a brief for what happens when you just let creative people make ads and don't interfere.

Jay Ward and hist studio’s only condition was zero creative meddling. They got it.

The result was a character with a full biography (maybe even too much of a backstory), a villain, a sidekick, serialized storytelling and genuine wit in every commercial.

When the creative team left, what remained wasn’t just a mascot. They had built him an entire Navy and nobody at Quaker ever said no.

Remember, a mascot without creative ambition is just a logo with eyebrows.

A mascot with his own navy and the ability to invade the dreams of every seven-year-old in America is a brand that echos into eternity.

THE CAPN’ CRUNCH NAVY GROG

This cocktail starts in 1740 on a British warship.

We are so on theme in this newsletter.

Vice Admiral Edward Vernon had a problem.

His sailors were being issued a daily pint of rum — straight, barrel strength, roughly 75% ABV — twice a day.

They were drunk constantly.

So Vernon ordered it diluted with water. He also suggested adding lime juice and sugar to make it more palatable, which accidentally became one of the first documented treatments for scurvy and the rough blueprint for every rum drink that followed.

Vernon was nicknamed Old Grog — after the grogram cloak he wore everywhere. Thus his watered-down rum became grog. The name has stuck for over three hundred years.

The daily rum ration continued in the Royal Navy until July 31, 1970. The day it ended is still observed as Black Tot Day. For the couple of hundred years the rum tot was being handed out, the Royal Navy was the most powerful fleet in the world. Make of that what you will.

Donn Beach, the dude who invented tiki culture, built the modern Navy Grog around 1941 at Don the Beachcomber in California.

His male customers wouldn’t order anything that looked tropical or fancy. The Navy Grog solved that.

Listed on the menu as “a robust rum punch dedicated to the gallant men of the American navy.” Three rums, citrus, honey. Limited to two per customer.

It was Frank Sinatra’s drink at the Palm Springs Don the Beachcomber.

Richard Nixon drank Trader Vic’s version. The former Navy lieutenant, who served in the South Pacific would have his staff call ahead to Trader Vic’s inside the Capitol Hilton to clear the bar of everyone except one trusted bartender.

Then he’d spend hours drinking Navy Grogs and talking. The bartender never said what Nixon told him.

While the Cap’n wasn’t actually a captain, he still would have been drinking this and maybe that explains the various crashes.

NAVY GROG

• 1 oz light Puerto Rican rum

• 1 oz dark Jamaican rum

• 1 oz Demerara rum

• ¾ oz fresh lime juice

• ¾ oz white grapefruit juice

• 1 oz honey syrup (equal parts honey and hot water)

• ¾ oz club soda

Shake everything except the soda hard with ice. Strain into a double old fashioned glass over crushed ice. Top with the soda. Mint sprig and lime wheel to garnish.

The three-rum blend is the whole point, each one doing something different. Light rum brings clean sweetness, Jamaican adds funk, Demerara brings weight. Good bottles: Planteray 3 Stars, Appleton Signature and El Dorado 8.

White grapefruit is correct. Ruby red works but the bitterness is softer and the drink loses backbone. White grapefruit season runs December through February.

Honey syrup keeps two weeks in the fridge. Make a batch. Make two. Celebrate Captains and the Capn’.

Happy breakfasting kids.

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

No this is not an April Fools’ newsletter. But if that is something you want to do before you jump into the hellscape of brand posts today (even the Canadian government is doing them in the only way a government knows how with the hashtag?), I suggest reading the 1985 Sports Illustrated baseball tale of Sidd Finch.

Now, the real story today is that a server at Black Rock Bar & Grill had one rule. One. You do not put the casino butter directly on the hot stone.

The video was originally posted by @verystupidfood on Instagram in December 2024.

It resurfaced on X this week and broke the internet in a way that’s hard to explain until you watch it.

The rule is delivered with all the energy of someone who has seen things. Then, immediately after the warning, she touches the butter to the stone and in the process ruins the steak.

Within 48 hours: The meme showed up anytime something was seemingly put on the stone. Moneyball characters were putting it on the stone. The angry Peloton instructor meme. A Blue Jays fan account posted an AI image with two dogs captioned “the jays put the casino butter directly on the stone tonight.”

Dear God, what the hell is Casino butter? Casino butter, if you’re really asking: softened butter, bacon, garlic and herbs. The compound used in Clams Casino. A real thing. A restaurant thing.

“Billy, this is Casino Butter. It’s next to our Rock Sauce, which is like a Zip Sauce. Its only defect is that this butter does not go directly on the stone.” (Moneyball Memes)

Mostly the reaction is a lot of posts like this, “This is great if you want your steak to be the same color of gray as ET when he’s dying.”

This is just how the internet works now. A server said a funny thing in 15 months ago and then in March the Internet decided it was the whole personality of the week.

Someone also stole 12 tonnes of KitKats.

That is roughly two elephants worth of chocolate bars, stolen somewhere in transit between a Nestlé factory in Central Italy and Poland. KitKat issued an official statement. Confirmed the theft. And reconfirmed this has nothing to do with April 1st shennanigans.

Noted supply was unaffected and consumer safety was fine. 129.6 million views. They now have a tracker so you can see if you are sold stolen KitKats.

Other brands, like vultures, descended immediately.

Domino’s UK: “On a completely unrelated note, we’re pleased to announce we’ll now be selling a new Kit Kat pizza.” 10 million views.

Then Airports got into it? Tampa International Airport and Dulles both posted the “our hearts go out to KitKat / in unrelated news” format within hours of each other. Dulles even generated an AI-rendered chocolate version of its own terminal.

DoorDash claimed a “completely random packaging error” had landed them 12 tonnes of KitKats they couldn’t sell — and included a CTA asking people to add 500-600 bars to their cart to resolve it. “For legal reasons, this is a joke.”

And if you think you should jump on to this trend, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute just commented. So please do not.

Meanwhile, Polymarket opened a market on whether any stolen KitKats would be recovered by April 5. Current odds: 13% yes. Someone put real money on this. This is where we are.

Which brings us, neatly, to Kalshi — the federally regulated U.S. prediction market that spent this same week plastering Washington, D.C. with big green OOH ads listing their rules. Rule #1: We Ban Insider Trading. Rule #2: We Don’t Do Death Markets. Rule #4: We Operate Under U.S. Law.

Someone standing at a bus stop replied “if I was here I’d be like Jesus, how serious was rule number 1?”

The campaign is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do — positioning Kalshi against Polymarket without saying Polymarket’s name, in a week when Polymarket was literally taking bets on international candy theft.

The “we don’t do death markets” placement at a D.C. bus stop, a block from the Capitol, is genuinely inspired.

Two prediction markets. One week. One of them is betting on stolen KitKats. The other is explaining what death markets are and why they banned them.

If You Thought Casino Butter was Dumb, This is Real Stupid Food News

It was also a big week for food stunts, some of which are April Fools’ pre-launches and some of which are completely real and somehow harder to explain.

The New York Yankees are selling a Mini Dessert “Chicken” Bucket at home games this year. Drumstick-shaped ice cream, white chocolate coating, candied corn flakes, a cookie bone, served in a souvenir mini bucket that looks exactly like a fried chicken bucket.

The best detail: they put the word “chicken” in quotes in their own announcement. They know.

KFC Spain turned its restaurant signs into 12-metre-tall rotating kebab spits to promote a fried chicken döner kebab. They spin continuously. They resemble oversized rotisseries. Someone replied “because making something bigger always makes it do well.”

Top Ramen x Butterfinger is a real product with peanut buttery glaze and actual Butterfinger pieces in noodle soup. Buncha Crunch is launching a popcorn dispenser at movie concession stands that lets you select your “Crunch Level” — Low, Medium or Buncha.

Moosehead made a freeze-dried, zero-ABV version of their Canadian Lager called Space Beer to celebrate a Canadian astronaut mission. It’s available through their Instagram, which is a sentence I’m choosing to accept as normal. What are we even doing here?

One of these things is a prank. All of them feel like pranks. None of them are the prank.

In separate news: Ryan Reynolds has a Signature Maple Butter Glaze Donut at Tim Hortons. It launched this week. Someone immediately photographed a hair covering most of the display donuts at their local location. That’s all you need to know.

The Masters Website From 1996

My genuinely favourite thing this week was a screenshot of the 1996 Masters website. Player bios. Leaderboards. “Internet Technology” credited to IBM in the bottom footer. It looks exactly like a site that was built by people who had been told, firmly, that the internet was going to be important.

The Masters — an institution that to this day will not let you wear shorts inside the ropes — went online for the first time in 1996. The same year as the Macarena. You can feel the energy of every board meeting that led to that hunter green GeoCities page and the feedback to webmaster@masters.org.

The cocktail: The Casino

This is the drink Jack Tripper would have ordered at the Regal Beagle if Jack Tripper had any taste. Larry (in this case, a poorly AI'd version of me with Jack) would have made fun of him for it. Then Larry would have ordered one too.

The Casino is pre-Prohibition gin — maraschino, lemon, orange bitters — the kind of drink that existed before anyone decided cocktails needed to be complicated or ironic. It’s the drink your parents’ generation forgot about while they were busy drinking Tab and white wine spritzers. It deserved better.

It also deserves to be the drink of this particular week, because casino butter is named after Clams Casino, and there is a cocktail called the Casino, and sometimes The Drink Cart just hands you these things.

The Casino Recipe

• 2 oz London dry gin

• 1/4 oz maraschino liqueur

• 1/4 oz fresh lemon juice

• 2 dashes orange bitters

• Lemon twist

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled coupe. Express the lemon twist and drop it in.

Bright, tart, slightly floral. Drier than an Aviation, more bitter, older. The kind of drink that would have felt right on a Friday night in Santa Monica, 1979, at a bar with good lighting and a bartender who didn’t need to explain anything.

Do remember, do not put the casino butter directly on the stone. Ever.

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

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.

It’s 1952. Post-war America.

Kellogg's needs a new sweetened cereal to compete in the market.

They turned to Leo Burnett.

The agency was behind the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man and later the Pillsbury Doughboy.

They knew mascots.

Art Director Eugene Kolkey designed Tony to feel like another ad man at the agency.

This wasn’t a slam dunk. Tony the Tiger would be up against Katy the Kangaroo, Elmo the Elephant and Newt the Gnu.

Katy actually made it to shelves along with Tony.

She did not last.

But Tony was destined to be a star. (Also listen very carefully to that ad where they say you need milk or cream. Let me get this straight, people where just out there eating cereal with cream?).

There is this funny bit where Newt talks about what could have been.

Elmo would be DFA’d and picked up by the brand’s Cocoa Krispies.

The team that made the design of Tony was Quartet Films.

These were veteran Disney animators who also designed Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Jolly Green Giant and the Baltimore Orioles mascot.

Tony’s voice would become iconic thanks to Thurl Ravenscroft.

That deep bass that would embody Tony for five decades. It’s not settled canon whether it was Ravenscroft or copywriter John E. Matthews who came up with the signature, "They're grrreat!" line.

But does it matter? It happened.

Ravenscroft would also sing,"You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch." That’s talent.

PEAK TONY

After Tony wrestled control of the sole mascot gig, he was everywhere.

By the 1970s Tony had a full family. Mama Tony, Mrs. Tony, Tony Jr. and daughter Antoinette.

They gave him a full on Italian-American background.

In the 1980s, there is no way to frost or sugar coat this.

Tony got absolutely jacked. Started riding horses.

Then he would be the coach and sports tie in that brands wanted.

And that you could show ‘em you’re a tiger. Another 10/10 line.

Tony did make some questionable corporate judgement calls.

Transporting the secret of Frosted Flakes in a hot air balloon seemed risky, even if you were a tiger.

One time he was almost duped by a female tiger robot too. (and um, I feel completely ripped off that i was never able to try Banana Frosted Flakes)

Tony even went on some side quests of other taglines like “The taste that adults have grown to love.”

THEN THE FROSTING GETS WET

But all was not great on the Frosted Flakes mascot front.

Exxon started using a Tiger in its advertising. Like the Cold War, Kellogg’s and Exxon maintained peace for nearly 30 years. The two giants were spending billions on ads and ads with Tigers.

Then Exxon called their stores, Tiger Marts. And Tony’s legal team pounced. They would settle this after a brief battle in court.

There was also a battle with the 1988 Summer Olympics and mascot Hodori. The similarity is uncanny.

But it was health that had Tony on the run.

Chile banned cereal mascots from sugary food packaging in 2016.

Mexico followed in 2018 by stripping Tony off the boxes.

The UK tightened HFSS restrictions, and Kellogg's removed the cereal from their UK Variety Packs because the sugar content was too high. A real Brexit for sugar - or Sweetxit if you will.

Kellog’s fought back.

In Mexico after 380,000 boxes of Kellogg's cereal was seized, they went science on them. They reformulated Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops, replacing sugar with a zero-calorie sweetener called allulose.

Apparently you can find two versions of Frosted Flakes side by side in stores: a plain box with warning labels and no Tony, and a reformulated box with Tony on it.

Tony is still on the boxes here. But the walls are closing in around him.

THE AD LESSON

What’s the lesson?

Saturday morning cartoons.

A bowl that was mostly sugar.

A tiger telling you it was great.

Nobody ever questioned it.

Tony wasn’t selling cereal. He was making friends.

And forty years later we are still reaching for the box with the tiger on it.

That’s why governments came after him.

Not because he failed. Because he worked too well.

The ban is, in a twisted way, the ultimate proof of concept.

Kellogg’s response is a masterclass.

They hired lobbyists, found a loophole in sweetener classification, reformulated just enough to keep Tony on the box.

They didn’t save the cereal. They saved their billion dollar mascot.

That tells you everything about what Tony the Tiger is worth.

I GIVE YOU THE PINK SQUIRREL

Bryant’s Cocktail Lounge has been open in Milwaukee since 1936. Started as a beer hall.

Two years in, owner Bryant Sharp ripped out the jukebox, put in a record player playing only classical music, carpeted the floors, blocked the windows and turned down the lights.

Possibly the first cocktail bar in Milwaukee was born.

Nobody knows much about Bryant Sharp. His obituary in the Milwaukee Sentinel described him simply as “owner of a cocktail lounge.” That is a great last line.

In 1941 Sharp invented the Pink Squirrel, possibly for a cocktail competition. Crème de noyaux, white crème de cacao, heavy cream. Or, in Bryant’s original version, vanilla ice cream instead of cream.

Crème de noyaux is made from apricot kernels or peach and cherry pits.

It tastes like almond and turns pink when mixed with anything white.

Historically it contained trace amounts of hydrogen cyanide — not usually dangerous, but old bottles left in a cellar long enough could apparently float all the cyanide to the top. Dorothy Sayers used this in a murder mystery called Bitter Almonds. Cocktail ingredients used to be way more interesting.

The Pink Squirrel became a supper club staple across Wisconsin. Ordered by women at mid-century dinner clubs while their husbands drank Scotch and felt serious about it. Sweet, pink, creamy, about 10% ABV. An adult milkshake with a name that sounds like a cartoon character.

Tony the Tiger launched in 1952. The Pink Squirrel was already there, holding down the Midwest bar, waiting for him. Wonder if anyone has had Frosted Flakes in their Pink Squirrel?

Both are sweet in a way that feels aggressively innocent by current standards. Bryant’s still serves it. They have over 450 drinks on a list they don’t show you — the bartender just asks what you’re in the mood for. A fire gutted the place in 1971 and the then-owner rebuilt it from scratch rather than take the insurance money.

That’s a bar worth drinking a Pink Squirrel in.

THE RECIPE

• 3/4 oz crème de noyaux

• 3/4 oz white crème de cacao

• 1 oz heavy cream

Shake hard with ice. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Grate fresh nutmeg over the top. The OG version used vanilla ice cream.

Don’t have any crème de noyaux? I mean what kind of a weirdo does? Shhhh. Just try 3/4 oz amaretto plus a splash of cherry syrup gets you close enough. Then AI yourself into an old ad. Everything will be just fine.

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

In 1975, an ad copywriter named Gary Dahl was drinking with friends at a bar in Los Gatos, California.

They were complaining about their pets.

Dahl said he had a better idea.

A rock.

No feeding. No walking. No vet bills. No grief when it dies.

Just a smooth grey pebble from a Mexican beach, a cardboard box with air holes, and a 32-page training manual.

The manual was the whole joke.

He sold 1.5 million of them in six months. Became a millionaire. Opened a bar.

The last time a rock captured America like this, it cost $3.95 and came in a box.

Project Hail Mary is the pet rock of movies

Okay this headline is paying the biggest movie in the “universe” a huge disservice.

But this is what happens when you’ve watched way too much college basketball and you don’t know what is up or down anymore.

This pet rock cost $200 million.

And it opened to $80.5 million — the biggest debut for an original, non-franchise film since Oppenheimer.

There’s a reason this playbook worked so well in 1975.

In the wake of Vietnam, Watergate and a general sense that nothing was good made the absurdity of the pet rock just what we needed just like following 48 basketball games over 4 days. It’s exhausting.

It’s also what happens when you read too many headlines like, “An AI-powered TikTok account behind Fruit Love Island series is already the fastest-growing ever, gaining 3M+ followers in 9 days since launching on March 13th.”

Or even this, “The Story Behind All Those Fruit and Veggie AI Slop Videos. The trend didn’t start with baby carrots begging for their lives. It also won’t end there.”

Or that we have to do an investigative report to understand that the Chloe in Chloe vs. History with millions of followers is in fact someone that looks like Moby.

Or the kind of content that is absolutely cooking people of a certain age. As one commentator said, “running through the Boomers like nothing I’ve ever seen.” But how can you not help this charming young lady who makes shell purses?

People are screaming for safe content. In the efforts to diversify my metaphors. I’m dropping one of my favourite The American President lines about the average voter - similar to the slop watching boomer.

It’s like this post I saw this week talking about the aesthetic known as Global Village Coffee House. Take a look at. If you were there in the 1990s, you’ve soaked in those vibes. Global Village Coffee House was a reaction to 80s luxury and excess. It’s cozy nostalgia.

The same reason why everyone and their least favourite brands are doing the “What was it like in the 90’s” montages to the Goo Goo Dolls.

Warm amber everywhere, folk art from three continents, hand-painted signs that somehow made you feel like you’d traveled without ever leaving the suburban strip mall.

Every surface had something to say. None of it matched. All of it seemed to work.

They could never open this today. Too much going on. Too many fonts. A brand consultant would walk in and have a breakdown before they hit the cash.

Back to the movie. Ryan Gosling plays a science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there.

His only company? A faceless, voiceless, crab-like alien made of rock.

Somehow the most lovable character in a movie since Groot?

They could’ve done the rock creature (Rocky) with CGI. Every studio note on every movie like this points toward CGI.

Cheaper. Easier. No craft services for the damn puppet masters.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller said no.

They brought in Neal Scanlan, the creature designer behind the best practical work in modern Star Wars. He built Rocky. Then they found James Ortiz, a New York theatre puppeteer who’d spent years bringing dinosaurs to life on Broadway.

Scanlan sat down with Ortiz and said: “I’m going to treat this like you’re Frank Oz, and my job is to build Yoda for you.”

Ortiz was on set in London for six months. Every single scene.

Sets were built four or five feet off the soundstage floor so the crew could cut holes beneath them. Five puppeteers moving as one creature. Gosling acting against something he could actually see and react to.

“It would’ve been much easier to put a tennis ball there and figure it out later in CGI,” Gosling said.

Narrator voice: They didn’t put a tennis ball there.

And you can feel it. You can feel it even if you can’t name it. Rocky feels alive because Rocky was alive, inches from Gosling’s face, operated by a guy who’d made mammoths walk on Broadway.

Audiences, and me in a March Madness haze, felt it. I had a big stupid smile on my face for two and a half hours. $80.5 million opening weekend. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

There’s an ad industry argument buried in this newsletter somewhere.

There it is. We’re in an exhausting moment. So exhausting i’ve AI’d my own face into a Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.

That’s how serious it is. I think it makes my head look gigantic.

Where was I? Everything is dark and morally complicated. War. AI. Tariffs. The cancellation of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and The Bachelorette crossover. The Rock with hair in the new live action Moana movie.

Every brand wants to subvert your expectations. Every campaign wants to be ironic or provocative or self-aware. They want to put little sweaters on mayonnaise jars. No, wait, really they did that.

Project Hail Mary is none of those things.Although Ryan Gosling is getting rave review for wearing an iconic Cowichan-style Curling Sweater with birds on it.

A man and a rock figure out how to trust each other across a language barrier, an atmospheric barrier and the basic incompatibility of their two species. Then they save the universe.

And yet Canada and America can’t make a trade deal, and the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked.

Nobody dies for shock value. The ending earns every tear because the movie took the long road to get there.

The audience didn’t just like it. They needed it. Badly

That’s the brief most brands are ignoring now. Not how do we surprise people. Or even delight people. Not how we get our CEO to eat our “product.” Not how do we challenge the category. Not how do we put a little sweater on my condiment stunts.

Just: how do we give people something to really feel good about.

The brands getting this right aren’t the ones being clever. There are not many of those anyway.

Drink Cart Approved Agency Discussion Topics™:

It’s back. Here’s your links too good not share over a cocktail.

• The power of Chuck Norris branding is real. And it will punch you in the face.

• They are giving away awards to AI “personalities” is probably the saddest thing I’ve read all week.

• OpenAI might be the worst run company. News last night that they are shutting down Sora despite a massive $1 billion Disney deal. Which is also dead. That was a wild six months. This just 24 hours after Claude dropped more features.

• Fashion cracks me up. They are picking now to ditch quiet luxury?

• If Scottie Pippen is telling you “AGI isn’t scary” at the same time as he’s talking to a sentient can of Mr. Pibb in an ad, I think someone’s cheese has slipped off their cracker.

Drink Cart Cocktail: The Gypsy Queen

This story goes back nearly a hundred years to 1938. The Russian Tea Room, still standing on 57th Street, still serving Beef Stroganoff, still one of the more ridiculous dining experiences money can buy in Manhattan.

Back then it was a gathering place for the Russian Imperial Ballet who had fled to New York after the Revolution and opened the place in 1927. They were trying to introduce America to vodka. They printed a cocktail pamphlet. In it was the Gypsy Queen.

Drinks historian David Wondrich later dug it up and confirmed it as one of the first American vodka cocktails on record. The timing was real bad. WWII started the following year and the whole experiment more or less got shelved. The Gypsy Queen quietly disappeared for decades.

Which is a damn shame. Because it’s actually a pretty great drink.

Vodka, Bénédictine and orange bitters. Stirred. Served up. Lemon twist.

Bénédictine is a French herbal liqueur made from 27 plants and spices. Recipe unchanged since 1510. It tastes like honey and Christmas and something your grandfather kept in a locked cabinet.

The vodka doesn’t do much here except step back and let Bénédictine run the show. Which, as a philosophy, feels right for this issue.

Get out of the way of the thing that’s actually good.

The Gypsy Queen

• 2 oz vodka

• ½ oz Bénédictine

• 2 dashes orange bitters

• Lemon twist

Stir with ice until cold. Strain into a chilled coupe. Express the lemon peel and drop it in. It’s like having a herbal martini in the best way possible.

Her real name was Honey Tree Evil Eye. That’s the whole newsletter.

Technically her friends called her Evie.

She was a female show dog from Woodstock, Illinois.

She spent two years playing a male party animal named Spuds MacKenzie.

Evie made Anheuser-Busch 20% more money and got a United States Senator to yell about her in Congress, while holding a stuffed animal of her likeness as a prop.

This e is story of marketing legends.

Evie retired to North Riverside, Illinois and died of kidney failure in 1993.

She was ten years old.

Geez, this newsletter took us on quite the arc. Don’t worry. That was the saddest part.

In 1983, Bud Light started putting a bull terrier on bar posters. Frat sweatshirts. Goblets of beer.

The most incredible tagline you’ve ever seen: “The Original Party Animal.”

Not a campaign yet. Just a vibe. A tour de force of four little words.

The aura built slowly on college campuses and in dive bars until 1987, when a 23-year-old art director named Jon Moore at Needham, Harper & Steers in Chicago put Spuds in a Super Bowl ad in 1987.

The rest was history.

THE RISE OF THE PARTY ANIMAL

Within months, Spuds MacKenzie was the most popular thing in America. More popular than ALF, and let me tell you 1987 was peak ALF.

The LA Times called him “a canine cross between Bruce Willis and John Belushi” and “the nation’s most unlikely sex symbol.” Weird, but I’ll allow it. He was deemed, the “AYATOLLAH OF PARTYOLLAH. ”

Macy’s started selling Spuds merchandise.

Over 200 officially licensed products. T-shirts. Beach towels. Beer steins. Stuffed animals. This is the 80s mascot marketing playbook.

That last one matters. We’ll get there.

Bud Light sales jumped 20% in one year. He competed (in an ad) in the pole vault at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

He appeared on Late Night with David Letterman.

He starred in a Christmas ad dressed as Santa — which got pulled in Ohio, because Ohio law prohibits alcohol advertising featuring Santa Claus. Ohio is fascinating place.

“The Spudettes” were available for public appearances. In case you missed it, they were Spud’s entourage of models who rarely left his side.

That’s where it started to turn. Before the partying and laughter stopped.

THEN IT GOT POLITICAL

Slowly schools started banning students from wearing Spuds T-shirts.

Then in November, Republican Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina walked onto the Senate floor with a Spuds MacKenzie stuffed animal.

He held it up over his frail little 84 year old body.

He gave a 15-minute speech about how Anheuser-Busch was using an adorable dog to sell alcohol to children.

The FTC investigated. Found no evidence.

Didn’t matter.

MADD piled on. The Center for Science in the Public Interest filed allegations. Schools kept banning the merch.

In 1989, the party was over.

Anheuser-Busch retired Spuds MacKenzie.

Official reason: the character had started to overshadow the product.

Evie went home to North Riverside.

She lived four more years. She was ten when she died. The campaign was eighteen months old when it ended.

Narrator from The Simpsons’ Behind the Laughter: The dream was over. Coming up: Was the dream really over? Yes, it was. Or was it?

ONE LAST PARTY

In 2017 — 28 years later — Wieden+Kennedy brought Spuds back for Super Bowl LI.

Ghost Spuds. A Christmas Carol structure. Voiced by Carl Weathers. Yes they got Apollo Creed himself to be a glowing, floating bull terrier who appears to a homebody named Brian to remind him that beer is really about friendship.

There was one problem.

A firm called Spuds Ventures LLC had quietly acquired the Spuds MacKenzie name and trademark — twelve days before the commercial aired. They’d been building a pet supply business on the IP since 2013.

They sued.

Bud Light settled.

Spuds has not appeared since.

THE AD LESSON

Spuds MacKenzie didn’t fail. He got cancelled before cancellation was a word.

The FTC cleared the campaign. Sales were still climbing. The character was working exactly as designed — transferring equity from a lovable mascot to the product he represented. That’s not a problem. That’s the whole job.

What killed him was the merchandise.

The stuffed animals and the kids’ T-shirts gave the fun police visual evidence. Even after the FTC said there was nothing there, the images of children’s-sized Spuds gear made the story easy to tell. It looked true.

The creative team built a great campaign. The licensing team sank it.

Control your merchandise. The branded stuffed animal is always where mascot campaigns go sideways, fast.

There’s still vintage Spuds stuffies littering eBay if you need to get your fix in. This one is just $89.23. And has a party hat.

Also: know that there a vampire lawyers out there ready to make you pay if you retire a mascot and leave the IP unguarded for 28 years, at least check who owns the domain name before you book the Super Bowl spot.

THE DRINK: A COLD BUD LIGHT AND A SALTY DOG.

I know. I know.

But sometimes the obvious answer is the right call. Like a beer in the shower. It just makes sense. Spuds MacKenzie spent his entire career trying to make you feel like a Bud Light was the only possible thing in your hand at a party. He was damn good at his job.

If that feels like a cop-out, make it a Salty Dog instead.

Grapefruit juice, gin or vodka, salted rim. It’s the house party drink of 1987. A little trashy in just the right way. The salt makes it feel like effort even though it isn’t.

Spuds would approve.

• 2 oz gin or vodka

• 3 oz fresh grapefruit juice

• Salt rim

Run a lemon wedge around the rim of a rocks glass, dip in salt, fill with ice, build the drink. That’s it. Or just drink the damned Bud Light.

Evie would have wanted it that way.

She’d want you to watch all her life’s work. (Which you can here)

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

I know it’s March because Leonardo DiCaprio has released a new meme that is clogging my feeds post Oscars.

This week’s Leo “Shrugs with a Mustache” works for everything. Lawyers keeping their hourly rates despite AI. Bosses asking where the slide data came from. It works for anything. The hallmark of a DiCaprio Meme.

Leo in that photo looks like a man who knows exactly what he’s getting away with. Very on brand for March.

BRACKETS

The second reason I know it’s March is college basketball. It doesn’t hurt that I’m currently neck deep in March Madness for clients, but i’m also swimming in Kalshi ads and posts about giving away a billion dollars for a perfect bracket.

That’s the kind of math that C-3PO would tell Han about and regret instantly. The odds are 9.2 quintillion to one. Even knowing basketball well, you're at roughly 1 in 120 billion. One grain of rice in 80 semi-trucks.

And yet millions of people are losing their minds to get their picks in. Funny thing is, Warren Buffet did this exact same gag in 2014. March Madness is so linked to the idea of the bracket and betting that U2 once appeared with a giant bracket behind them for the tournament. I’m not kidding.

ESPN's "Bracketbrain" campaign is the best work of the season — a full pharma spoof where bracket obsession is a medical condition, Joe Lunardi plays head of the Department of Bracketology and the prescription is ESPN Tournament Challenge.

Side effects include "elation, heartbreak and/or emotional whiplash." Knows its audience cold. Which brings us to the Atlantic piece.

SUCKERS

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic who doesn’t gamble. Last year The Atlantic gave him $10,000 to spend an entire NFL season betting. The cover story — “Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler” — is the longest and best magazine piece I’ve read this year.

He lost almost everything. More importantly, he became someone his family didn’t even recognize. Up past midnight on games he had no reason to care about. Sneaking bets at church. His 10-year-old finding him hiding in the pantry. “You’re addicted,” his wife whispered from a pew.

The piece isn’t about addiction. It’s about infrastructure. Since 2018, Americans have wagered over half a trillion dollars on sports. Roughly half of men 18 to 49 have an active sportsbook account. Majorities of Americans now believe athletes occasionally change their performance to help gamblers. There used to be signs in ballparks that stated No Betting. Right there next to all the other cool stuff. Beer. Cigarettes. Deli meat.

As a brief side note on stadiums. This week, the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team with more money than god, sold the naming rights to the field at Dodger Stadium to Uniqlo.

As @luke_metro noted: “Uniqlo Field sounds like the place where you go to fight the menswear guy.” The historic ballpark will now be called “Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium.”

I’m not one to be on a high horse. My entire creative career has been defined and continues to be heavily favoured in work for gambling brands. So I’m not advocating we can’t do that. Just that it’s just interesting to see how the gambling is now so woven into the fabric of sports.

The gambling ads are worth paying attention to if you’re in this business. The “no sweat bets” language. The same game parlays. The reality check pop-ups Coppins says he impatiently swiped away. This is precision-engineered persuasion running at full speed during every game you watch backed by AI. Kalshi is handing you a free bracket to sign up for the same ecosystem.

Watch the first round and think about that as your bracket busts out. True story, I’m already out 1 team. It’s only been 2 games.

THE COCKTAIL: THE WARD EIGHT

This story lives almost entirely in bar lore, cocktail history books, squeezed out of wet bar rags and a 1951 Holiday magazine article that nobody can fully verify. And historians have been poking fun at this for decades.

Martin “The Mahatma” Lomasney, the Democratic boss of Boston’s Eighth Ward, a man who held the city’s political machine in his pocket for nearly 50 years — was so confident about the next day’s election in 1898 that his supporters gathered at Locke-Ober, the power dining room of the Boston political class, and ordered the bartender to make a drink in his honour.

Before a single vote had been cast.

The bartender — name disputed, depending on who’s telling it, Tom Hussion or Charlie Carter or maybe Billy Kane — made several options. The party tasted and voted. The Ward Eight won. Democracy at its finest.

Lomasney won the next day too. He always did.

Now here’s where it gets good. Lomasney was actually a teetotaler. He didn’t drink. And if the historians are right that grenadine didn’t become widely available until the early 1900s, the drink that supposedly celebrated his 1898 victory couldn’t have contained its signature ingredient. The origin story of Boston’s only classic cocktail is almost certainly wrong on multiple counts. The man it honored didn’t drink it. The key ingredient may not have existed yet. The bartender’s name nobody can agree on.

One more thing. Lomasney was famous for a single piece of advice: “Never write if you can speak, never speak if you can nod, never nod if you can wink.” The ward boss whose drink lives on in Boston bars was a man who left no paper trail on purpose.

Locke-Ober closed in 2012 after 130 years. The Ward Eight is still being ordered. A drink invented to celebrate a victory before the game was played, named after a man who never touched it, built on an ingredient that may not have been available, with three possible inventors and a story nobody can verify. That’s beautiful.

It’s a bracket pick in liquid form.

• 2 oz rye whiskey

• ½ oz fresh lemon juice

• ½ oz fresh orange juice

• ½ oz grenadine (real grenadine, not the corn syrup stuff)

Shake hard with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Cherry and orange slice if you want to go full 1898 about it.

This week if you’ve made the drink, pair it up with this bit of 1990s nostalgia to the vocal stylings of Bob Seger in and Shooter McGavin says, “Kids today will never get to hear Bob Seger belt “Like a Rock” for a 90s Chevy truck commercial. Peak America culture.”

And I 100% agree with Michael Miraflor, “They don’t do it like this anymore.” They sure don’t.

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

J. Walter Thompson art director and cartoonist Sue Rose was at a bar in 1985.

She was bored.

So she doodled on a cocktail napkin.

Fifteen lines. A stick figure. Triangle face, squiggly hair, two dots for eyes.

Her friend Joanna Ferrone named him the next morning on her commute to work.

They printed him on T-shirts. A fashion designer named Patricia Field, who later dressed Carrie Bradshaw for six seasons of Sex and the City, put them in her boutique.

They sold out.

The character’s name was Fido Dido. His ahead of his time philosophy: “Fido is for Fido. Fido is against no one. Fido sees everything. Fido judges nothing.”

In 1988, PepsiCo called.

While Pepsi had bought 7UP’s international business from Philip Morris for $246 million in 1986, they couldn’t use the brand in the United States.

They needed a face for international markets, one that worked in any culture or language.

Those fifteen lines on a napkin just became a multinational marketing asset.

Fido Dido was never the American 7UP mascot. Americans got Cool Spot — the red circle in sunglasses (for another story I guess).

Fido would shill for Pepsi’s other beverage Slice. Ouch that’s like playing for the minor league club.

The rest of the world got Fido.

Australia. Philippines. Netherlands. India. Brazil. Turkey. Yep, even Canada.

Ecuador painted a mural of him on the side of a building large enough to be a city landmark. It’s still there.

By 1990, Fido had CBS Saturday morning bumper spots, his own magazine in the UK, a YM comic strip, merchandise at Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s and a family of sixteen spin-off characters with names like Howdy Dido, Fido Gato and for some strange reason, Fido Jerk.

In 1993, Kaneko finished a Fido Dido video game for Super NES and Sega Genesis. Box art done.

It previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show, but was never released.

That was it. Fido Dido came and went. Mostly.

He came back in the 2000s as a CGI character.

He got a 3D animated series in India.

In 2018, BBDO India put him on limited-edition vintage 7UP bottles representing the ‘90s.

Then on April 20, 2025, a TikToker posted an old Fido Dido ad from 2006 with the caption: “This is a meme from 2026. You will not understand.”

52.3 million views in nine months.

On January 3rd, 2026, someone finally made the actual meme. Tagged it #fidomaxxing. 337,000 views in three days.

Fido Dido was the first viral moment of this year.

PepsiCo didn’t do anything about it.

The character that “judged nothing” became the internet’s first obsession of 2026 because the original idea was so random that somebody found it interesting 40 years later and that was enough.

THE AD LESSON

The most powerful characters are philosophies with a face, not pitchmen with a personality.

Fido worked because he actually stood for something specific — radical non-judgment, being exactly who you are — and then never violated it.

The original Fido was timeless because he was barely anything. Fifteen lines. You can’t redesign a philosophy.

And great IP doesn’t expire. It hibernates.

That napkin sketch is now 40 years old. It’s already outlasted the brand that licensed it, the agency that deployed it and every trend it was ever used to sell.

Now it’s gotten a new life in nonsensical memes.

That TikToker who posted it in 2025 didn’t know anything about PepsiCo’s global distribution rights or the Kaneko video game or the licensing split.

They just thought it was cool.

THE DRINK: THE FIDO DIDO GIMLET.

But it’s got to be made in a vintage Fido Dido cup. Gin, fresh lime juice, splash of 7UP instead of simple syrup. Three ingredients and some technique. Nothing extra. No garnish required. Would taste real good in some vintage Fido Dido glasses.

Like the character, The Gimlet is minimal, it’s precise and it has never not been cool.

The classic version appeared in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye in 1953. It was the drink of someone who knew exactly what they wanted and didn’t need to explain it. That one also was basically half gin, half rose lime cordial. And that was it.

Fido Dido would probably order a Gimlet if he couldn’t have a 7UP. He wouldn’t even look up from his phone. Now we make a Gimlet with 7UP. Take that innovation people.

• 2 oz gin

• 3/4 oz fresh lime juice

• 3/4 oz 7UP.

Shake with ice. Strain into a coupe. Squeeze of lime if you’re feeling generous. Think about Fido Dido as you gulp down the Gimlet, and enjoy all these compilation of all his ads.

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

Food is doing something right now.

Not the food. The theatre of it. The pure spectacle of it.

Don’t tell Timothée Chalamet about the theatre of food. He might lump it in with ballet.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive,’ even though no one cares about this anymore,” the ping pong movie star said.
”All respect to the ballet and opera people out there … I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I’m taking shots for no reason.”

I’m inspired this week by recent listens to The Ringer’s podcast, Food News. This is where Juliet Litman and David Jacoby “sample various snacks, share personal tales about food, and round up the latest in food news from around the world.”

I’ve been listening to them for years, for over a decade now. And I hold them personally responsible for my entry into the Bravo realityverse.

They got me on to Stassi and Jax and the gateway drug of Vanderpump Rules. I blame them for all of it.

So that’s why I’m starting with $15 honey in an aluminum tube. That’s Honey Department. That’s the whole company. Their tagline? “honey but thicker.”

It’s absurd. This makes squeezable olive oil seem strategic. I get it. Your average bottle of honey drips everywhere, gets crusty or worse solid.

Don’t get me started on the bear-shaped honey bottles. This solves the problem and looks cool doing it. And making this an actual trademark? The Official Honey of Honey™. Someone had a good week there.

Okay. Now that we’re warmed up and covered in thick honey. Let’s cook.

The World Baseball Classic is serving cannoli in mini batting helmets. I have nothing to add to that. Everything is better in mini helmets.

It’s not new, but the WBC has unearthed, the Tokyo Dome ice cream sandwich. Now this has been going viral every six months for years. Same product. Same photos. But this is guaranteed to get at least 50k likes every time.

There is a product design lesson in there about getting something so right it never stops spreading. Someone should write a case study.

Not to be outdone, the Seattle Mariners are serving crab nachos out of a iconic souvenir Washington State ferry boat. Wonton chips, crab salad, Thai chili sauce. Basically you can get whatever you want in it. The souvenir is the vessel. And you could do a whole newsletter about that ferry’s design system that appears to have not changed in 50 years.

Also on the “get it in a ferry boat” menu: Sidewinder Fries. I said I didn’t want to look up what those are. The mystery would be better. But I couldn’t help myself. They are maxed-up curly fries.

Ranch is having another moment. Stassi must be going crazy with this.

First, the Tulsa Drillers are rebranding as the Ranch Dippers for four games this season. It’s been a while since I snuck a baseball hat into the newsletter, so this is great news. And a great hat.

Meanwhile Hidden Valley is hiring four people to travel Europe for eight weeks as “Ranch-bassadors”.

Well played. That’s their actual job title. The role? Introducing ranch to countries that have been living without it. The wild thing is how they talked about it in the video. The video from the Chief Ranch Officer (classic marketing gag. Side bar, I once pitched the idea about a Chief Slots Officer for a casino with Seth Rogen as the CSO. Still bummed that didn’t happen).

Calling it the “flavour of America” as an eagle carries a bottle of Ranch across screen.

That feels like the most American marketing activation ever conceived. I mean that as a compliment.

Actually, the most American marketing thing ever might just be the owner of Keens Steakhouse in New York. They paid $525k for the flag that was supposedly draped over Abraham Lincoln’s casket.

So the flag is hanging in their Lincoln Room now. You can eat steak right beside it. They’ve been collecting memorabilia like this since 1885.

They didn’t run an ad. They spent half a million dollars and got a couple weeks of press. A cheaper-than-a-Super-Bowl-ad strategy that is a way better story.

Giving the ranch news a run for its money is Buffalo Wild Wings. They attempted a triple axel (or maybe unholy trinity) of food branding by launching the “wing-flavored Espresso Proteini.”

An espresso martini infused with buffalo dry rub seasoning and packed with 10 grams of protein.

The future of marketing is just going to be weird collabs and finding the scientific limit of how much protein you can include in a single piece of popcorn.

Then Taco Bell dropped its 2026 menu.

This is where things went even more sideways.

It’s a Milk Bar collab. So yes, there is a Birthday Cake Empanada. A Crème Brûlée Crunchwrap Slider. Strawberry & Cream Mex Pizza Bite. Mountain Dew Baja Midnight Pie, Obviously.

All of those are completely insane. But it’s the Edible Fire Queso sauce packet, that steals the whole show. The sauce packet is the food now. It’s environmentally friendly saucing.

We’ve fully crossed over into something.

So it makes sense that Pokémon and Heinz made Pikachu ketchup bottles. Of course they did. And in 40 years those will fetch a hefty price on eBay. It’s not even yellow ketchup. It’s just got Pikachu on the label.

No wonder another brand is stripping away their identity down to almost nothing in a brand version of the hunger games.

The pitch is always: if you know, you know. Works great when the product earns it. Doesn’t work at all when it doesn’t. KitKat is pretty iconic. And the logo is there, just not in any field tested or accessible way. It still seems like we are playing insider marketing to an extreme level.

But Jackson. I’m hungry. What is the point of all this?

Here’s what all of this actually is.

Nobody’s selling food anymore.

They’re selling the screenshot. The group chat share.

The cannoli helmet, the ferry boat nachos, the edible sauce packet, the crème brûlée crunchwrap, the wing-flavored Espresso Proteini. None of that is lunch.

It’s content with a side of lunch. The food is the media buy.

Guess what? It’s working.

In today’s algorithms weird travels farther than good.

A honey tube goes viral. A mini batting helmet stops the scroll. Taco Bell’s whole 2026 strategy is basically: what if we just keep going?

What if there was no ceiling to food mis-innovation?

We are living in the era of the edible press release.

What a time. What a weird, delicious, completely unhinged time to be alive.

This Week’s Cocktail: The Baja Dirty Ranch Water

Ranch is having a moment. Taco Bell is putting Mountain Dew in a pie. Someone is paying you to bring ranch dressing to Europe. The least we can do is make a drink that matches that same energy.

The Baja Dirty Ranch Water is not a craft cocktail. It is not even a vibe. It is what happens when a tailgate and a Tuesday night make a bad decision together. It is perfect for this week specifically.

The Baja Dirty Ranch Water

• 2 oz bourbon

• Juice of half a lime

• Top with Mountain Dew Zero Sugar

Rocks glass rimmed with a packet of Taco Bell sauce and Tajín spice. Big ice. Squeeze the lime in, pour the bourbon over it, top with Dew, sprinkle a little more of that Tajín like you’re a chef. Don’t stir it, let it be a little chaotic and messy. Garnish with a lime wheel if you’re feeling fancy, which you are not. This is a dare.

Notes: Use a low-shelf bourbon. Nothing too precious. This drink does not reward subtlety.

A 13 or 14-year-old named Antonio Gentile submitted a drawing of a jovial peanut to a Planters design contest.

He won $5. Not a bad haul for 1916.

An artist named Andrew Wallach or a Planters employee named Frank Krize Sr. would add the monocle, top hat and cane.

Mascot origin stories are as complicated as cocktail origins.

Mr. P. Nut would go on to be one of the most recognizable advertising mascots of all time.

His real name is Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe. Of course it is.

Today we just call him, Mr. Peanut.

LONG MAY HE REIGN

By the 1930s Mr. Peanut was everywhere.

Planters would open hundreds of stores.

A legendary store on Atlantic City’s Boardwalk had fans carrying 5-cent bags of nuts everywhere called "The Nickel Lunch." They were walking billboards.

There were print ads.

TV ads.

Incredible Times Square billboards.

Mr. Peanut showed up at political conventions. Thanksgiving parades. Wherever he was needed.

There was the Nutmobile in 1935.

He was inducted in the Advertising Walk of Fame in 2004.

In 2006 the public was asked if Mr. Peanut still needed a bow tie, cufflinks or pocketwatch?

The public voted for no changes. See, sometimes democracy works.

Robert Downey Jr. would become the first voice of Mr. Peanut in 2010.

In 2017, the Virginia General Assembly voted on a joint resolution commending him.

THEN AN AD AGENCY HAD HIM JUMP OFF A CLIFF.

In a pre-Super Bowl teaser in January 2020, Planters showed Mr. Peanut sacrificing himself to save Wesley Snipes and Matt Walsh during a Nutmobile crash to avoid hitting an armadillo - at least that’s what they want you to think.

Only an ad agency would set out to kill the brands own 104-year-old mascot.

The agency was VaynerMedia. I can only imagine what that presentation was like.

The creative team cited Iron Man, Marvel deaths and maybe even Jon Snow storylines as inspiration.

Then timing got ugly.

Planters suspended the campaign after a Calabasas helicopter crash killed Kobe Bryant.

The Super Bowl ad showed Mr. Peanut's funeral, attended by Mr. Clean and the Kool-Aid Man.

I kid you not, the Kool-Aid Man's tears then caused a sprout to grow from the grave.

And Baby Nut was born.

Within a year, Planters reverted back to classic Mr. Peanut.

Kraft sold Planters to Hormel in 2021.

THE AD LESSON

Mr. Peanut outlived every trend, every owner and every agency idea for over a century.

World wars. The Great Depression. Television. Digital. Social Media.

Only to be murdered by his own brand on national television. Et tu, VaynerMedia?

The lesson: don't kill what's working just because your agency is bored with it.

Planters spent $5 million on a Super Bowl spot only to destroy a 104-year-old asset.

Sometimes the most rebellious thing a brand can do is leave the mascot the hell alone.

THE COCKTAIL: THE AVIATION

This week’s cocktail originated the same year as Mr. Peanut. In 1916 Hugo Ensslin, the head bartender at New York’s Hotel Wallick made a drink for the booming field of aviation that captured everyone’s attention.

Airline travel was the AI of its time. Hugo used the very exotic sounding crème de violette to create that pale sky-blue colour. Here is the recipe in Hugo’s cocktail book. Think of it like a lavender gin sour.

Give this a try:

• 2 oz gin

• 0.5 oz lemon juice

• 2 tsp maraschino liqueur

• 2 tsp crème de violette

• Shake with ice, strain into a coupe. No garnish.

I’m going to be straight up with you. Buying a whole bottle of crème de violette for one teaspoon, to make a drink for a newsletter, is going to haunt my bar cabinet for the next decade. Maybe longer.

Was it worth it? I mean, the drink was pretty good. It’s a bit like those old soap candies. Do you like them? Do you not like them? It’s a bit like drinking a flower. On the plus side, finding another use for maraschino liqueur is a plus. The colour is incredible, and that makes it a fun one to serve up after a long week in the slop mines.

And it was doubly worth it, as the cocktail book - available online - had a treasure trove of old ads in it and a lot more things to try - even some with crème de violette. He must have had that same problem.

What do you do with all that crème de violette? I guess you start making these classics: The Blue Moon (no maraschino), The Water Lily (try swapping the violette with Cointreau), or The Moonlight (swap the maraschino for Cointreau). It’s worth noting that by 1930, the Savoy Cocktail Book skipped the crème de violette.

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

Here’s a bit of a take. Big brands are spending fortunes to seem real.

Some aren’t even spending big bucks, and yet they still seem not real.

Let me explain.

One guy with a terrible website and an open letter on Linkedin got more traction than most campaigns. That man is Brad Reese. Who’s sign off on the open letter was, “Protecting REESE’S Brand Integrity/ Grandson of H. B. Reese (Inventor of REESE’S)”

First, you know how much I hate open letters. They are the most useless item of communications invented of all time. This is the kind of thing AI would dream up if PR hadn’t invented it already.

Basically open letters are like me talking about feet (I also hate feet).

It take a lot of guts to launch a website that looks this terrible when you could make it look so good in about 2 hours with Claude. You’re the grandson of the guy who invented Reese’s for god’s sake. Instead it looks like it was built during the first Clinton administration.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying AI makes everything better. Take for instance this ad running while I was “monitoring the situation” and catching up on news this weekend was shocking. I almost wrote this whole newsletter simply about the creative process here.

I don’t want to get too off the track from old Brad Reese. But inside some sort of agency or in house creative department they definitely had this conversation.

CREATIVE: We use AI and the character becomes whatever his companion in the empty bar or pun says. It’s going to be awesome.

CEO: Great. I want our hero to go from clown, borderline racist, astronaut, priest, deadbeat, punk. Just make sure the bar is completely empty.

CREATIVE: You’re genius. Thank you for your leadership. I’ll start prompting.

Compare that to this 1981 real Reece’s ad. I still love how these ads lived in a world where people were always carrying around open jars of peanut butter.

It almost feels about as valuable the advice agencies are making like this latest round of McDonald’s ads in New Zealand. Nuggets! Cheeseburger! Fries! Sundae! And the tagline, “you know where.”

Famous Campaigns reads this like it’s an influencer on the brand’s payroll, “The idea hinges on a simple truth. When Kiwis see those menu names, there is one brand that comes to mind first.”

Sure. McCann New Zealand’s Chief Creative Officer Gary Steele tells you that, “an iconic global brand, and their products are so iconic they need no explanation, so we let the words do the talking.” This is self congratulatory iconic-brand maxxing is what the industry counts as brave in 2026.

Agency creatives wanting to remove your logo so badly from every ad it is beyond cliche at this point. It’s been done. Many times. This will still win some award. Pretty much everyone on Linkedin will talk about this as “brand goals”.

Here’s the rub. That only works when you drop $2 billion a year on advertising. Every year. For decades.

I feel like Captain Kirk explaining to Lt. Saavik about why things work on a starship.

(Editor: Another Wrath of Khan reference, Jackson? Really? Me: I will use your prefix code if you don’t shut up. Editor: You’re right, we should write a whole newsletter about the branding lessons from a 1982 Science Fiction film. Me: Is that a challenge?)

As someone else posting about this great movie scene said, “Children must be taught *why* things work the way they do, not just how.” Same with advertising people.

Only after investing in a decades-long cultural branding project do you get to put the word 'fries' on a billboard with no logo and call it brave.

The other brave thing you can do is make your pencil neck CFO the CEO and then videotape him trying to eat your burgers.

There’s not enough marketing budget to fix that. Special Drink Cart correspondent Garron Noone breaks down the tape.

Not sure if this is legal, but it should be in the McDonald’s brand guidelines that the CEO should have to look like any one of the following:

1. Guy Fieri

2. Original Roseanne era John Goodman

3. Chris Farley doing fat man in a little coat

4. William Howard Taft

5. Chris Christie

The worst part about this is that now people are looking at this whole series of events like they love it. Like Kirk here with a knowing look of awe. It has slipped into parody. Now the brand is calling burgers product. Other brands (even A&W) are doing the same bit and the trends are calling this Burgermogging now. The CEO is doubling down on even more content. Even as the memes keep piling up.

And if you’re wondering if in the middle of whatever is happening in the Middle East, we can still be actively leaving space for this topic in the world, you haven’t been paying attention.

But lets leave the product behind and talk about bravery. Brave is probably making a playlist urn for $450. And it selling out immediately.

“Finally death is a lot less boring. With the Eternal Playlist Urn, now the dead can listen to their favorite jams for all of eternity. Upgrade any post-life experience with this latest revolution in being dead.”

Or selling stylishly garish branded caskets for nearly $4,000. They also launched absurd cash dispensers, idiot podcast mics, a four-slice toaster and a 20-foot boxing ring for good measure.

Two of the most stunt-dependent brands in the world independently landed on death-as-aesethic must have products in the same week right before a war started.

But when you really look at it. Liquid death is just doing its same old death thing. And Supreme is just desperate to stay relevant in any way it possibly can including launching on The Sphere.

Which gets us back to story of the grandson of the man who invented Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and made a really mediocre website to pick a fight.

In a badly stolen revamp of Julia Robert’s line in Notting Hill. “He’s just a grand-nepo, standing in front of the company that bought his grandfather out, convinced they've been messing with the recipe ever since. Armed with the ugliest possible website, a strongly worded open letter, the greatest bio ever asking for big chocolate to love him.”

He’s attacking Hershey without an agency, a strategy deck or even brand consultant.

In a world where authenticity is so manufactured that when you see the real thing you can't look away.

The McDonald’s CEO was not trying to go viral. Brad Reese isn't trying to go viral. They’re not optimizing for shareability. He's not A/B testing his headline.

One is a face made for boardrooms not Instagram feeds. The other is just mad. Genuinely, personally, familially, generationally mad. And that reads instantly.

It has to be real. I’m not sure if I could clock the real change in recipes over the years. Or remember the last McDonald’s CEO. But we should be doing a Brad Reese undercover boss situation to find out.

Maybe it will result in, pardon the pun, a nothing burger. A Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults type situation, but this story should be cracked wide open like the Epstein files.

And we should now expect weekly shows from the McDonald’s CEO. That’s just how it works.

McDonalds, Liquid Death and Supreme spent money to seem kind of subversive.

Brad Reese and McDonald’s spent nothing and actually was.

Drink Cart Approved™ agency discussion topics

• A great story on a brand deal still paying off.

• If you want to know about creative control, remember that David Fincher micromanages the subtitles.

• Sorry Draft Kings licensed Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler for responsible gaming ads?

• Turns out brands may actually benefit when next to AI content. How convenient.

• The retro NBA on NBC score bug made watching the game 1000% better.

• In case you are wondering we will accept drinking partnerships if this is a trend.

• I strongly believe that protein bars might achieve sentience before AI. They already have names too.

Last Call: The Vesper Martini

This week’s drink is the Vesper. And like everything else in this issue, the original recipe has been quietly changed on you.

Ian Fleming wrote it into chapter seven of Casino Royale in 1953. James Bond orders a dry martini, changes his mind mid-sentence, and gives the bartender a spec: three measures of Gordon’s gin, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shaken until ice cold. Large thin slice of lemon peel.

Then he says: “I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I can think of a good name.”

Two chapters later he meets Vesper Lynd. Names the drink after her. She turns out to be a double agent. She dies. He never orders another Vesper again in any Fleming novel. The drink dies with her.

In the 2006 film, Vesper asks Bond if he named it after her “because of the bitter aftertaste.” He says: “because once you've tasted it, that's all you want to drink.” That line wasn’t in the book. But it’s perfect.

Here’s the Brad Reese callback. Kina Lillet was quietly reformulated in 1986. They removed the quinine. Sweetened it up. Rebranded as Lillet Blanc.

The drink you make today isn’t really the drink Fleming wrote. Gordon’s gin has also been quietly diluted over the decades. Two of the three original ingredients have been changed on you without anyone making a fuss about it.

If only the grandson of Ian Fleming had a website.

Use Lillet Blanc if that’s what you’ve got. Use Cocchi Americano if you want something closer to the original — it still has the quinine, still has the bite. Either way, make it cold. Make it strong. And apparently only ever make it once.

The Vesper

• 3 oz gin

• 1 oz vodka

• ½ oz Lillet Blanc

• Lemon peel

Shake until very cold. Strain into a chilled coupe. Express the lemon peel and drop it in. Shaken not stirred, because that’s how Bond wanted it and this is his drink, not mine.

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

There’s no sugar coating it. Domino's is the world’s best trash pizza.

The best part, it’s not even really a pizza company. With their tech stack and the world famous Pizza Tracker, they are technology company.

The tracker can reasonably trace its origin story to one of the most unlikely brand mascots in ad history.

The entire promise that Domino's built its brand on is that your pizza will get to you fast, hot and correct.

That idea was actually born from a claymation gremlin in a red jumpsuit whose whole job was to ruin your delivery.

The tracker is the brand’s modern version of "Avoid the Noid."

A ridiculous campaign that ran during the 1980s - the era of all good and truth.

The campaign solved the same anxiety, gave the same reassurance, just as the digital does now.

MEET THE NOID

Despite the hyper nostalgia of the 80s. It really was a dark time for pizza.

Pizza arrived cold, soggy and more often than not, late.

You know what happens next: Advertising agency to the rescue.

Group 243 out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and creative director Ernie Perich and his team zagged.

They created an antagonist. The personification of everything that can go wrong in a pizza delivery.

Just like last week’s story about the California Raisins, they turned to Will Vinton Studios to bring the Noid to life.

They made a disgusting creature in a skin-tight red jumpsuit with rabbit ears, buck teeth, beady eyes and a black "N" on his chest.

Fast Company called him, “a unique grotesquerie.”

Then they gave him the most annoying voice ever.

Avoid the Noid was born.

Domino's dropped $75 million on the campaign to counter Pizza Hut.

The Noid appeared in Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker film.

In two video games: Avoid the Noid (1989, PC/Commodore 64) and Yo! Noid (1990, NES by Capcom).

Yo! Noid sold 500,000 copies.

Merchandise was everywhere.

Then it gets dark.

THE FALL

On January 30, 1989, A 22-year-old named Kenneth Lamar Noid walked into a Domino’s in Chamblee, Georgia.

He had a .357 Magnum and paranoid schizophrenia.

He believed the campaign was about him.

Two employees. Five hours. A hostage situation.

He demanded $100,000. A white limousine. And an obscure Robert Anton Wilson novel.

Then he got hungry. Made them cook him two pizzas.

While he ate with the gun in his lap, they escaped.

The police chief told reporters he was “para-Noid.”

Domino’s says it wasn’t the hostage situation that killed the character.

But the Noid was gone by the mid-90s.

Pop culture didn’t forget.

The Noid lived on in The Simpsons. Family Guy. 30 Rock.

Everyone remembered. Domino’s just stopped talking about him.

What’s little remembered and likely important for agency-folk.

That little Michigan agency would sell for $40 million in 1988.

By 1991 they would lose the now $50 million Domino's account. Three months later the agency would be rebranded.

That in a nutshell is the agency business.

THE AD LESSON

The Noid invented the anti-mascot.

Not a hero. Sort of a villain. The thing between you and your hot pizza. What a jerk.

Instead of “our pizza is great” — It’s “everything is trying to ruin your pizza and only we can stop it.”

That’s a narrative. That’s a promise. That’s why the Pizza Tracker exists as one of the greatest technological achievements of all time.

But when the character gets bigger than the brand, you lose control of who connects with it. That is a-noid-ing.

THE HIGHBALL

The Highball might be the most honest or maybe humble drink ever made. A perfect foil for the world’s best trash pizza. Legend says that some actor walked into a New York bar in 1887 and asked for a scotch and soda. The bartender poured it. That was the innovation.

It blew up during Prohibition because ginger ale made bootleg and bathtub made whisky drinkable. Then it died. Then Japan saved it. Suntory opened 1,500 bars in the 1950s selling whisky and soda to salarymen who couldn’t afford anything else. It became the country’s default drink. Then it died again, it was an old man’s drink.

Then in 2008, Suntory hired Koyuki — Japan's biggest actress, The Last Samurai — to make highballs on TV. That's it. That was the ad. That was the concept.

Whisky, soda, ice. Don't stir too hard. The YouTube version got a million views. On the ground they installed highball taps set at champagne pressure in bars across Tokyo.

Bars serving highballs went from 15,000 to 40,000 in one year. Kakubin whisky sales jumped 70%.

Then canned highballs hit every convenience store and vending machine in the country.

A drink that rose, died, came back, died again and was resurrected by a great ad. A tale as old as time.

You’re on the couch. The Pizza Tracker says two minutes. You don’t need a craft cocktail. You need whisky and ginger ale in a tall glass with ice.

• 2 oz whisky (whatever’s in the cabinet)

• 4-5 oz ginger ale

• Ice

• Lemon twist (only if you’re feeling fancy)

Build it in a tall glass. Don’t stir too hard or you’ll kill the bubbles. Enjoy. All thanks to the Noid.

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

How do you say, “Aahh, now, are you going to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon?” in Italian?

By now, everyone knows Canada lost the men’s hockey gold medal in overtime on Sunday morning. If you watched it, you know.

If you didn’t, it wasn’t the 3-on-3 overtime, or the silver medal that broke Canada. It was that the players were handed a stuffed animal and looked at it the way you look when someone says "we've brought snacks" and then put down a stupid tray of baby carrots.

I think my first idea for today’s newsletter was outlining some brand winners and losers of the Olympics. As thrilling as writing about the boxes of Puffs that surrounded the figure skaters as they awaited their scores might be (what did the deck say? We want to be associated with complete heartache and crying, let’s call it “The Kiss and Cry Area”).

That sounded like Ad Age content. Not Drink Cart content. Sure enough they were talking about all the Gold medalists you’ll want to be partnering with. (Spoiler alert: this whole idea is also something that really clicked with me). They have added how Olympic Memes are our last shared language. Although I do quite like this: “The meme is the stadium.” Ironically the article shows none of the great memes.

I was pretty much on X the entire game, enjoy-scrolling the reactions on both sides of the border and honestly wishing that we could pass a bill that forbids politicians from posting on social around major cultural events.

In the last period and the moments after overtime in what became collective Canadian grief, something clicked.

In the second period I’d seen another round of commentary about Wayne Gretzky from The Globe and Mail (How are we still talking about this?) and was thinking about how to reply to some of the posts in a fun way.

It hit me: Could I turn Wayne Gretzky into the Ben Affleck smoking meme? Would that be funny?

I tried Grok - surely it was crazy enough for the challenge. It was not.

I tried Gemini - Not even close.

I had been experimenting with Hedra, more for video, but its interface seemed geared to this idea of remixing memes.

It did it in one shot. Exasperated Wayne. Only issue? I think I was the only person that thought this was remotely funny.

Then the stuffies happened.

Here’s the actual process, because I think there’s something sort of useful in it:

Step 1: Find the feeling everyone’s already having.

X told me everything I needed to know. The mascot handout was the moment. Not the overtime goal. Not the celebration. The indignity of players like Marchand and MacKinnon standing there after losing holding a ridiculous little white stuffed animal.

My first output didn’t really land. It was smoking Affleck holding the mascot. Funny, but not that funny.

It didn’t capture the real story. There was too much Affleck. Sorry Ben. That and how merciless people were to the poor mascots. So on two fronts I was making sad and exasperated memes into stuffy gold.

Step 2: Have your tools warm before the moment arrives.

I’d already been in Hedra for the “Gretzky Afflecking”. Already understood what it could do. So when the image hit, I wasn’t scrambling to figure out a new tool — I just pointed it at the new moment. Feed in the Ben Affleck meme, the mascot, used Claude to sharpen the prompt. The output: Tina exasperated, smoking. Then Tina crying like Michael Scott.

Nothing is sadder.

Step 3: Borrow the format that’s already working.

Then Topps Now started posting gold medal cards for Team USA in real time — clean, official, beautiful. I took their format, the aesthetic, then flipped it to the Canadian silver and put Marchand and MacKinnon on the card with the caption: “The indignity of getting a stuffed animal after losing a hockey game.”

That made me laugh so hard (it’s also still racking up likes, saves and impressions). Then I made a relic patch card with an “Authentic Olympic Mascot Plush Swatch.” Like Marchand had ceremoniously sliced up poor Tina to put in a limited edition batch of commemorative cards. Cruel and hilarious.

Only one small text anomaly on this one - but more than good to ship. One day I want to share about my battle with Claude on creating a prompt for a funny but absolutely tasteless Prince Andrew English Pub sign. Claude said the idea was beyond satire. We disagreed.

Joke’s on Claude. Turns out you can trick it and then get Hedra to do the dirty work. It will be our little secret. Suffice to say that whole ordeal while writing this newsletter is something Ricky Gervais would have burned Claude to the ground over like it was the Golden Globes.

Here’s the actual ad industry lesson hiding inside this ridiculous story.

Cutting through is about arriving at the right moment, in the right format, with the right instinct behind it.

AI wasn’t sitting around thinking of remixing Tina and Ben Affleck or making Topps Now cards. But I was there to figure it out and get into posting mode in 90 seconds or less.

To throw in a remixed meme that utilizes the real moment context is so much better than posting the same old memes could ever be.

You just need some warm hands, the taste to make something completely outrageous, the fearlessness to post and the right AI tools to let you cook in real time.

Thank you Tina and whoever at the Olympic games who thought giving out plush toys to people who just lost gold medals was a good idea. Silver really is the worst.

Drink Cart Approved™ agency discussion topics

• This is an abomination.

• Are you ready for Sailingcore?

• Are you ready for Dr. Pepper Sausages?

• Am I the only one depressed that in 10-years we’ve gone from Conan O’Brien to someone called “the kombucha girl” as Vanity Fair’s The New Late Night. Or just old?

• I fail to see who this content is designed for? Sunny the mascot from Raisin Brain making terrible fiber memes.

• Breaking: Being chronically online is gauche now since tech bros have discovered “taste”.

• This is probably the craziest graphic in AI right now.

Last Call: The Silver Bullet

Canada came for gold and went home with silver and a stuffed animal.

That feels like a drink is warranted.

The original Silver Bullet is gin, kümmel and lemon juice — and it’s been in the Savoy Cocktail Book since 1930, which means Harry Craddock was making it for Prohibition-era Americans who’d crossed the Atlantic just to legally have a drink. Nobody knows who actually invented it. Classic cocktail history move. The original is basically a “kümmelised gin sour.” I can see why only weird old golfers are interested.

Kümmel really is the weird part. It’s a caraway and fennel liqueur that started in Latvia, became Peter the Great’s favourite drink after he snuck into Holland disguised as a shipbuilder, then somehow ended up as the official nerve-calmer of Scottish golf clubs, where it’s still called “putting mixture.” It is allegedly also Prince Philip’s favourite cocktail. The Silver Bullet has a type.

The gin-and-scotch version of the same drink once went by the name “Poor Man’s Champagne”. Both feel right for a Sunday morning hockey loss. Both feel right for a Wednesday newsletter.

The Silver Bullet

• 2 1/2 oz gin

• 1/4 oz Scotch (a rinse, really — just enough to hurt)

Stir with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Lemon twist. This one is terrible idea.

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.