The Drink Cart: Rerun Issue

It's Boxing Day, Christmas is over. Santa is drinking many a nog. Ad agencies are snuggled in their homes away from the briefs and timesheets. So let's hit the rewind button.

Dear Drink Carters

This entire newsletter started on a lark. As I wrote in that very first one, “I’m in awe of my business partner Sandy Fleischer who has recently been cranking out weekly newsletters on here about his passion, records and music. I feel compelled to try some new things. God damn it Sandy.”

I said right there, “Maybe we can see how this goes and maybe I’ll be back next week.” And yet here we are at forty newsletters (plus another four indulgent baseball ones). I even blew it by not offering a drink in that first one. Sacrilege really.

I think my favourite one I wrote was my tribute to our dog Renly, but I’ve selected some of my favourite bits from the last year and I hope you enjoy. Unlike other ones, this one features 10 great drinks too you can read in the original newsletters. I think my favourite might be the Wisconsin Style Dive Bar Old Fashioned. But plenty of good ones to add to your cart. Happy holidays!

1. Let’s talk about Hallmark Wines.

April 4th, 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: Guy Caballero's Smooth Operator

You knew the first highlight had to about Hallmark right?

If you know me, you know I’m a sucker for watching Hallmark movies. But these wine bottle labels are just wild. It’s a Tuesday after a hard day, are you really reaching for a bottle of Loveuary merlot?

This is what they describe it as: “Celebrating Loveuary just got a little more delicious. Our reserve Merlot is the perfect pairing with a Hallmark Channel original movie. Our Loveuary Reserve Merlot offers notes of strawberries, raspberries and layered dark fruits. Rich and romantic with a velvety smooth finish.”

Where’s the romance? Where are the small town vibes? Where’s the god damn gingerbread cookie festival/contest/store? If there’s not a story on these label, what are we doing? That’s just a lazy branding experience right there. I want Hallmark wine to be as immersive as the extended Liquid Death universe.

2. Hot Dan The Mustard Man

April 25th, 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: Wisconsin Style Dive Bar Old Fashioned

This was one of the first in what has become Ad History posts. I still am thinking about old Hot Dan: Can we just talk about Hot Dan the Mustard Man? Yes, French’s mustards old timey mascot character. This is electric branding stuff. Aside from the olives, I only want to eat hot dogs presented in a star pattern platter with a mustard dip in the middle from now on. Absolutely electric. Bring. Him. Back. You cowards.

3. The new 2024 ad playbook has dropped

May 15th 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: The Drink Cart Mai Tai

I feel this still holds up and this was months before the Jaguar brand launch. This issue was also when i went to a more streamlined numbered format.

Last week Apple’s new iPad ad fell so flat they didn’t roll out the media and then apologized. This week Bumble was well into it’s launch for their new campaign when they tore it all down and apologized.

Here’s your new advertising playbook for 2024:

1. Make an ad that completely polarizes at least one subset if your core users.

2. Ensure that it also enrages the the active posters in social from the ad community (or at east some of them).

3. Apologize but only after everyone’s talking about it.

4. Pull your paid media after it goes viral.

5. Calculate that ROI over champagne bottles.

4. What do we think about green croissants?

June 13th 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: The Drink Cart Jungle Bird

What do we think about green croissants?

Last week in pop ups was Jaquesmus, this week it is Lacoste. Speaking of the Lacoste brand, they also have a tennis themed room in the Brach Hotel in Paris that is equally stunning. And honourable mention goes to these Roland-Garros clay looking Stella Artois beer glasses.

And thanks to this, my FYP is now 30% tennis content. (Full disclosure: I don’t even play tennis, nor do I want to.)

I’m so glad I got on this Tennis kick and didn’t have to post the Corona beer shoes. But all this volleying got me thinking about some old Lacoste tennis branding and ads that were in my feed a few times. Look. At. Them.

5. 2024 Design

August 8th 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: The Drink Cart Champs-Élysées

Who could have predicted that despite all those vibe shifts by August Donald Trump would actually win? Maybe it was the donate pages after all?

Wait? Neither of them are looking at the donate buttons? I’m always interested in what graphic design comes out of the US election. You can tell a lot about it from first impressions as this race is experiencing multiple vibe shifts over the last 3 weeks.

For Harris, we have the now clear Obama 2008 take over donate screen - but unlike his innovation, they aren’t looking at the buttons at all. I guess now that we are running more on vibes, do you need to? It clearly doesn’t matter as donations have been rapidly coming in - over $300 million and counting.

Their actual donation page is unremarkable, but it is where Harris is actually looking at the buttons. It’s kind of wild that while the site now has running mate Tim Walz front and center, they have no policy content whatsoever, just bios and a store where they are now selling Camo hunting baseball hats for Harris Walz. Which may be ripped off from pop star Chappell Roan? Probably funniest 2024 branding thing I saw is where Creative Director Aisha Hakim redid the Harris Walz logo with complimentary re-kerning. (Type nerds, that one was for you!)

Meanwhile Trump is not looking at the button either - and that seems very on brand Trump. But he is bucking the trend and using the CTA of Contribute vs. Donate. Now the actual contribution page is the most chaotic ecomm experience I’ve ever seen (So many fonts. Gold. Donor ticker. What is happening. So much random content. Warning: Wear safety goggles). What’s interesting is that Trump’s site has lots of policy and not a lot about running mate J.D. Vance. They do also have a camo hat. Check mate.

6. The Villains of our time

September 26th 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: The Drink Cart Sweater Weather Sour

There was a lot of my favourite things in this issue, including my story about an agency Octoberfest that is worth the read. But sports owners are the worst:

Sports owners kinda suck. Following sports teams can feel like they are, “an experiment created by some ivy league university psychology department whose purpose is to measure how long people can be tortured until they break.” This is the story of the Oakland Athletics. Who’s owner John Fisher has unlocked platinum villain status reserved only for vintage Batman TV characters with long cigarettes. Maybe sports owners like Fisher are like Jack Nicholson’s Joker in this iconic scene taking over Gotham Museum to the score of Prince.

Right to the last series, Fisher has gaslit the city and fans saying he tried his best, but somehow couldn’t build a new stadium, so the team has to leave. No wonder fans are holding up signs with the timecode for the specific scene in Ted Lasso where Rebecca goes ham on the other club owners. As one fan was overheard saying on the second to last game in Oakland, “It’s like a playoff game crossed with a funeral.” The fact that this hat was on sale this week tells you everything you need to know about the owners of the A’s.

And how can you not be romantic about baseball when the groundskeepers are letting fans getting a little dirt from the stadium after 56 years. Or when current manager and former player Mark Kotsay takes a walk with his wife in the field he once patrolled. Maybe the taking out the seats is a little much.

Saying goodbyes in public is hard. Take time to watch the last moments for the Montreal Expos before they moved. For teams and players. This week, long time Rockies player Charlie Blackmon announced his retirement. While it could be that I’m watching House of the Dragon Season 2, or that he looks like he’s from central Westeros casting, his 3-part goodbye to fans sounds like he was joining the Night’s Watch and going way north North of the Wall.

Which only got me thinking that both the A’s and Blackmon and the market for an agency that only does the goodbyes. Here’s my pitch for $10 million valuation. The agency is: Retired Jersey Inc. The agency tagline: Honouring the close of every chapter in the game. Who’s in?

7. Critical Chicken Tender Content

October 3rd 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: The Drink Cart PS Fashioned

This one has one of my favourite drinks plus chicken tender content, plus some great memories of Pete Rose.

Emily Sundberg from Feed Me caught this after I completely missed it in my weekend reading. But we have just celebrated 50 years of chicken tenders and the New York Times went deep. Although, I wouldn’t have done them dirty by describing them as, “the floppy strips of white meat in a deep-fried crust.”

Can I share a brief story? Editor: Who is going to stop you? It’s your newsletter. I guess that explains how I snuck so much baseball content in this week. Anyway, after rather lengthy stint tending The Keg’s long forgotten Salad bar. I still laugh about how the Keg destroyed massive amounts of today’s favourite greenery, Kale that just decorated never touched three-bean salad for a few days before being thrown away. And I still remember coming home and smelling of blue cheese and vinegar after long shifts.

I eventually worked my way up to some prep cooking for the steakhouse. It was so long ago, that we even made the “Chicken Strips” from scratch. We pulled the tendons out, marinating them in seasoned milk wash and breaded them by hand. I made thousands of orders. My favourite part was making litres of curry mayo dip. Honestly, i still think of that dip. Way better than just plum.

Since this is already a long walk - and my newsletters are getting longer by the week - do you know the best part of prepping at The Keg, besides blasting music on a ghetto blaster at 6 am, hitting each other over the heads with cooking pans in some sort of WWE wrestling league and once playing a head bopping prep cook in a film? To do lists. The most satisfying thing about that job was not making escargot butter with an absurd amount of ingredients or washing potatoes. Nope, it was the mythical prep list. And crossing out every item before clocking out. All this satisfying work nostalgia happened while I started a new notebook and on the first page made a new list of things to do. And that’s my totally random chicken strip story.

8. Good Old Fashioned Fishin’ Hats

October 10th 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: The Drink Cart Spiked Coffee

This issue had everything. A great hat. A deep dive on fishing lure branding and random movie references a-plenty.

I cam across this incredible hat in my feed from one of my favourite posters, eBay jackets & hats. This classic trash beer fishing hat immediately made me think of fishing when I was younger. It made me think of summers in Desolation Sound and in particular one of my favourite places, Squirrel Cove on Cortes Island. If you haven’t been before, you need to go.

So strap yourself in, here we go with another Drink Cart Story Time. First the fishing, we fished a lot back then. Not like Danny Glover and Joe Pesci in 1997’s Gone Fishin’ where they coined the amazing line: “This is gonna be a ten. Ten plus. Borderline 11.” But I do remember one particular day out with Greg Salmon - a family friend. We went out, right off the shore outside the cove - there was a good swell going and we were steps from shore. He was sitting on the outboard engine (I remember thinking how this was such a cool move) and the water was so clear you could see the rock cod when they bit.

Sidebar, and one that I never thought I’d be able to work into this newsletter, was that the best lure for some casual dingy fishing while sitting on the motor was The Original Buzz-bomb. Not only did it have the most bad-assed logo a fishing lure ever could, it always worked - or at least it seemed that way at the time. Must have been the iconic hydrosonic vibrations it made. But you needed to have that pack of extra bumpers at all times.

Two things are amazing to me given that it’s 2024. The first is that the brand’s packaging seems to be virtually the same as it was in the 1980s. I’m sure some nitwit would want to rebrand it to look more like Olipop or Liquid Death. I’m glad they resisted that. It’s perfect.

Secondly, there is a thriving eBay market for unopened vintage Buzz Bombs. So you’re telling me, while I was stockpiling Gregg Jeffries rookie cards for my retirement fund, I should have been buying more Buzz-Bombs in 1989? It all reminds me of making that annual pilgrimage to the Army & Navy store to load up the old fishing tackle box for the season. Just look at them:

You could also convince me to take that boat for a rip over to Refuge Cove so we could get an ice cream from the general store - and maybe a few new Buzz-Bombs. Then return in time for a swim and maybe a float down the cove’s rapids when the tide changed. As luck would have it with all this fish and lure talk, I got an email this week for a lovely looking collaboration between a chef and an illustrator comprising of fishy drawings and simple recipe at the Jealous Gallery in London.

9. Pumped for the Holidays

October 31th 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: The Drink Cart Revolver

This one had some of my favourite stuff. Classic Foaming soap content, a Tribute to Teri Garr, a relaunch of a classic brand, and an absolutely awful photoshop job of Mr. Freeze and some hand soap.

You knew it was coming. But it’s finally here. It’s The 2024 Official Drink Cart Bath & Body Works Holiday Foaming Soap Guide. The foamy and soapy run down you didn’t know you ever needed or wanted. Just like Hans and Franz, I want to pump, you up with completely useless foaming hand soap commentary! Or you can be like Washington Post subscribers and mass unsubscribe from this - you’re call. The headline is working overtime on this email graphic that popped into my inbox earlier this week.

Here are our hot takes on the latest flavours of Bath & Body Works foaming hand soaps for the holidays:

Perfect in Pink: The smell of “that all eyes on you moment.” While you’re opening a present, I guess? Arriving at your holiday work party, maybe? It’s actually just some cherries, pink flowers and whipped almond crème flavour. Like a sad cherry-flower-flavour latte? 4/10

Christmas Kitchen: This one claims to smell like holiday baking day and “all of your fave holiday treats being baked right in your kitchen.” Hopefully not baked by you. That sounds like work for the Keebler Elves. Cookie smelling soap is cool, but these scents of “soft baked bread, candied fruit and vanilla sugar” sound like work. 7/10

Cozy Winter Cottage: Of course it smells like, “sipping a warm beverage inside after a brisk winter walk.” You get winter spices, warm cedar and amber musk - which is thankfully different than Elon Musk. 7/10

To All a Good Night: A baffling description that promises to smell like, “sleeping in on a snow day.” And somehow that really is a cool winter breeze, lavender but in dream form, not real lavender, all nestled in a cozy blanket. Sound like you’ve had one too many egg nogs Bath & Body Works. 6/10

Whipped White Cocoa: Um, “frothed decadence” sounds wrong somehow. Froth smells but make it rich? The fragrance notes seem like they ran out of gas, “white chocolate, frothy milk and whipped.” Whipped what? Like 50 Shades of Grey-style whipped? 5/10

Pomegranate Citrus Fizz: This one promises you a “celebratory picnic in the park–cheers!” Whatever that means. Oh, wait, I get it, it’s a basic pomegranate orange mimosa. Like if Earl’s brunch vibes was a holiday soap. 7/10

Holly Berry Spruce: A Holiday smelling masterclass over here with, “classic holiday memories with a burst of brightness.” I feel like this smells like when Clark Griswold is trapped in the attic and getting all sentimental. Throw in those notes of “fresh holly berries, evergreen spruce and a hint of clove” and you’re practically in 1989 thinking about how awesome it was 1955 (34 years of nostalgia). Knowing that 2024 is actually further from 1989 than that (35 years of nostalgia). 9/10

Chai Sugar Cookie: You know, that “sweet, spiced baked good that feels comforting and warm.” So just a cookie then? Yes, but its more sugar cookie dough with chai spices and vanilla icing. 6/10

Frosted Forest: “Tonight's forecast... a freeze is coming!'“ So this is that totally memorable smell of “snow-covered trees in a vast forest.” Sure it is. Translation: pine needles, eucalyptus and peppermint, but only if you say it in an Arnold Schwartzenegger Mr. Freeze voice from 1997’s Batman & Robin and were super into holiday soaps instead of hating on Batman. 8/10

10. Buc-ees forever

December 5th 2024

Drink Cart Recipe: The Drink Cart Eggnog Daiquiri

I couldn’t leave this year without talking about Buc-ees again and a month of working through Texas and Louisiana.

How can you get more American than Magnolia, it’s got to be Buc-ees. This is like America turned up to 11 - maybe 13. It’s hard to summarize this concept and what it really means. Imagine a gas station so legendary, it makes your road trip the destination. My wife thought I was completely insane dragging her to a gas station, twice, like it was a theme park. You see, Buc-ee’s isn’t just a pit stop—it’s a mega-mart of dreams with endless snacks, fresh brisket sandwiches, fudge stations, endless towers of merch, like my new Christmas hat and the cleanest most efficient bathrooms you’ll ever see.

If Magnolia is Lifestyle Disneyland, Buc-ees is Gas Station Disneyworld where Texas-sized magic awaits!

Here’s a couple of Buc-ees lessons for you to chew on like some Beaver Nuggets (trust me):

• Fans First. The two we went to were massive and the brand’s rep for unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction is everywhere - you think it’s going to be long, but everything moves fast and it’s all humans. No self checkouts. Just vibes.

• Employees Also First. I’m not going to lie, the company offers competitive wages and benefits, with starting pay often exceeding industry standards - right out front is the transparent wages - ie: a GM pulling in $175-225k had me questioning if I should stay and work at Buc-ees.

Thanks for reading! Happy boxing Day. Go buy some stuff after seeing ads for it.

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Drop me a comment below, ask me a question or give me a reco. Or just tell me how your martini turned out.

The Drink Cart is a weekly newsletter of advertising, pop culture, baseball and cocktails from Jackson Murphy.