Everybody's Dying to Be Brave and Eat Product.
The only newsletter that connects a bad website, a martini and a hatred of open letters.
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:
Guy Fieri
Original Roseanne era John Goodman
Chris Farley doing fat man in a little coat
William Howard Taft
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
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.
I like those McDonald’s ads. Very few brands could pull that off. So if you can, why not?