THE AD GROUP OF DEATH
The only newsletter that cleaning algae goes better with Whispering Angel rose.
This month the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got repainted “American flag blue,” for over fourteen million dollars and within a week it bloomed green with algae and the fresh paint started peeling off in strips. Oops.
Now people are spending hours fighting about it in the comments like this is the only thing worth talking about.
Do they not know that Cannes is on? Have they not heard about the World Cup? Are we not drinking Whispering Angel while writing this newsletter? Sacre blue.
EVERYONE HAS A HOT TAKE, NOBODY HAS A POINT
So let’s settle the only matchup that matters. Which take is worse?
The Cannes take, from a dude in linen who expensed a flight to France to photograph a glass of rosé and announce that AI is the worst?
Or the World Cup take, from someone who’s never sat through a full ninety minutes, explaining what the sponsors fundamentally misunderstand about the beautiful game, FIFA’s wonderfully oppressive rules or talking about how Vancouver really nailed it to people from Toronto.
Coin flip. Both unbearable. Both about to get commented on Linkedin by someone adding “this 👏 exactly.”
And we may as well admit it. The take is the one thing both industries are genuinely elite at. Not the ads. Not the 0-0 draws. The takes about the ads. The takes about the VAR. We are world-class at explaining, after the fact, what the work should have been or how the play should have been executed.
This newsletter is also takes. I’m very aware.
THE CLEAN STADIUM RULE
FIFA has a rule called “clean stadium.” Host a World Cup match in a building named after a brand that isn’t an official sponsor and the brand has to vanish. Tarps, tape, the works. For a month AT&T Stadium is just “Dallas Stadium.” Gillette Stadium is anonymous. Levi’s Stadium is a stranger to itself. They even cover up the condiment labels. Heinz is not a sponsor.
In some very small navel gazing circles it turned the whole tournament into a fight over whose logo gets seen, and the brands sorted themselves into two piles. The ones who can read a room, and the ones who can’t.
Start with the ones who can.
FIFA bagged the Levi’s batwing on top of the stadium under a plain white tarp. The shape is so lodged in people’s heads that a blank tarp in that silhouette reads as Levi’s louder than the logo would.
So Levi’s changed its Instagram profile photo to the covered-up logo. Said nothing. Then it took the bit global and draped the awning of its Paris store too, because when a stunt is working on Linkedin you don’t explain it, you just keep doing it in more cities.
Then came the part that always comes. The copycats. Within days every brand was throwing a white sheet over its own logo and calling it a campaign. A biscuit brand. A smoothie shop. Bananas.
And they all missed the one thing that made it work. It only works if your logo reads with the lights off. Levi’s survives a tarp because it’s burned into our culture. A logo nobody’s memorized under a sheet is just a lumpy white blob. The trend instantly sorted brands into iconic and wish-they-were, in public, for free.
Did the normies notice or actually care? That’s the real hot take.
THE MISTAKE WAS THE WHOLE CAMPAIGN
The other pile is DoorDash, and it might be the lamest thing I’ve watched a brand try all year.
The setup. New Zealand has a defender named Tim Payne. Two weeks ago an Argentine influencer told his followers to boost “the least-known player at the World Cup,” and Payne’s Instagram jumped from a few thousand to over five million overnight.
So during New Zealand against Egypt, DoorDash starts tweeting about the match and tagging @TPAIN. The rapper. Yes the Auto-Tuning, two Grammy-winning, does-not-play-soccer T-Pain. Nine times.
So T-Pain finally posts “Are you all okay??? @DoorDash stop tagging me. I literally don’t play soccer.”
DoorDash signs off with “Oh not @tpain... Tim... goodnight.”
You’re meant to read it as a careless intern. It wasn’t. It was clearly a whole paid gag the whole time. You don’t tag a Grammy winner nine straight times by accident. Somebody built this in a deck, presented it, got it approved, pitched it to T-PAIN. Paid the man.
Who watches a brand pretend to fumble a name nine times and thinks, comedy gold? The fake-oops is the most tired move in the social playbook, act dumb on purpose, pray the screenshot travels, file it under engagement. A brand doing an impression of a funny person and blowing the timing on purpose, because somebody told it imperfection plays as relatable.
DoorDash typed nine times and got a courtesy chuckle from its own senior VP. That’s the difference between a joke and a brand that wants credit for telling one.
CANNES YOU BELIEVE THIS
Last week I made the case that Cannes is the one award show with no dark horse. No public to surprise, a few hundred judges in a room who already know the ending. We traded the festival a whole country used to stay up and watch for a ticketed yacht party.
Update from the Croisette. The yacht’s being repossessed. By AI.
Monday’s first Grand Prix winners were human. A soccer pitch reimagined as a giant working barcode took Outdoor. Heinz doing something clever about the fry box, The Ordinary, a Novartis health campaign, a Hyundai spot out of Puerto Rico.
But nobody flew to France to talk about the winners. They came for OpenAI, working the beach and walking advertisers through how ads are going to live inside ChatGPT.
Adobe announcing “agentic AI at scale” with WPP, Omnicom and the rest, software that segments and writes and ships the campaign while a human “reviews the outcome.”
Here’s the dirty little secret: the festival hands trophies to humans on a stage at night and rents the beach to the companies building the thing that does their jobs by day. Paul Feig spent the same week planting a flag for the other side, his “we are HI, we are human intelligence, keep telling your stories.”
No wonder Matt Belloni laid this take out, “Cannes is the Festival de Cannes, a prestigious global film event where talented creative people display and sell their work (and look glamorous doing so). Cannes Lions is… not. It's a tacky business conference for selling advertising and announcing brand partnerships, populated mostly by paunchy middle managers and YouTubers. They call it an "international festival of creativity," but that's just to make the suits and the media people feel better about their soulless corporate boondoggle. Enjoy the rosé.”
A hundred creatives liked this because every one of them has sat in the meeting where that pitch was halfway serious. The robots are coming for an industry that was already running on a formula.
The yacht era isn’t over. The yacht just has a new owner, and it doesn’t drink rose or sleep.
COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: CANNES STRAWBERRY-ELDERFLOWER SPRITZ
Fitting, because the key ingredient is the most-copied bottle behind the bar. When the late Robert Cooper launched St-Germain in 2007 it was the first commercial elderflower liqueur anyone had seen, and bartenders fell so hard they nicknamed it “bartender’s ketchup,” the thing you grab to fix any drink.
Then every spirits company on earth rushed out its own elderflower knockoff. You can measure how well Cooper nailed it by how many people tried to be him. None of them stuck.
Same lesson Levi’s is teaching this week, just with a bedsheet instead of a bottle.
And it happens to be the official drink of every beach the industry is currently selling itself on. Late June, strawberries are in, drink what they’re drinking on the Croisette while you read about them handing it to the robots.
Strawberry-Elderflower Spritz
1 oz strawberry syrup
1 oz elderflower liqueur
Soda water
Fresh strawberry
Build over ice in a wine glass, top with soda, one gentle stir, garnish with a halved strawberry. Want it boozier, sub prosecco for the soda and make three times as big.
You know what I’m thinking about more than Levi’s logos or Cannes Lions? When Kentucky Fried Chicken also went into the Roast Beef business.
The Drink Cart is the newsletter version of sitting at a really good bar with someone who thinks too much about advertising and won’t shut up about it. Subscribe to get it on Wednesdays and Fridays.
No one likes a copycat.