The Drink Cart: Summer Games Edition

While you're at home yelling at water polo matches from your couch, covered in Cheeto dust, we are talking marketing. And Olympic marketing. And cheese.

Dear Drink Carters. Grab that ‘ole cigarette and let’s hit the rings, it’s Olympics season, baby! Just like my commentary on the inner workers of fencing and water polo we can armchair quarterback the heck out of everything happening in Paris and beyond.

Today’s “newsletter” is getting a 6.9 score from the East German judge on this week’s line up:

• We get into Olympic venue aesthetics, AI ads, luggage ads and cheese sponsorships

• We’ve got AI Friends, the death of rotoscoping and the ROI of The Rock

• Plus creamed beef hats on toast and a call back on last week’s brat summer

• And most importantly we’re shaking up the Side Car cocktail for some Parisian vibes

1. The Instagramable Games

I would hate to host the games after Paris. I’m not going to talk about the Opening Ceremonies as that seems like so last week. But the venues for the games this year are the equivalent of what restaurants do these days to be instagram ready.

I think my favourite quote about them: “It’s cool they do international skateboard trick competitions on top of where they executed the king. RIP Louis XVI, you would have loved this sick kickflip frontside lipslide.”

2. AI is coming for your fan letters too

I love that Google’s Gemini AI ad running during the Olympics is getting blasted as absolutely not the right use case for using AI. If you can’t write a heartfelt fan letter to your hero, what are you even doing?

New York Mag’s Intelligencer noted in it’s Everyone Hates That Google AI Olympics Commercial article, “Why would a dad who is ‘pretty good with words’ need an AI model to help his daughter write a heartfelt message to her favorite athlete? Aren’t these moments what parenthood is all about?” But you don’t worry, the AI news will get worse in today’s newsletter.

3. Olympic Style

Luggage maker Rimowa shows you how you Olympic while leaning into the visual language of your product - and of course, these are four-figure luxury suitcases we’re talking about - and the games themselves in this print assets. This seems so much more intersting and less ‘beaucoup awkward’ than the fictional Rimowa and Pierre Cadeau suitcase collab from Emily in Paris.

4. The Cheese Sponsorship

Sure, you could be sponsored by Nike. Or in Canada you get that sweet, sweet RBC or Petro-Canada Olympic money. But in Italy, like it does in so many ways, they have it all figured out.

This is gymnast Giorgia Villa. She won the silver medal in the Team All-Around Gymnastics. Her Olympic money? She's the ambassador for Parmigiano Reggiano. Like you’re just sponsored by Cheese? Incredible. Canada needs to start sponsoring athletes with Maple Syrup and Poutine immediately. Banks? Stupid. Forget about it.

5. Your new AI friend?

My feed was all over the launch of this new AI product called Friend this week. Mostly it was VC nerds mocking the team for spending most of their investment money - $1.8 million on the url, Friend.com. The video feels like it’s a skit on a comedy show.

Some said this was genius, others hit it with headlines like, “New AI companion launches – and is hit by immediate mockery”. Hilariously more people said things like, “Please say this is a trailer for a new season of Black Mirror” or “This better be guerrilla marketing for a horror film.” The memes are pretty darn good too.

Despite the endless mocking, the launch video now over 13 million views, and everyone knows the url and product. So maybe the expensive URL and video mockery is just a new marketing tactic unlocked. If you can stomach it.

6. Rotoscoping is dead

This quick video about Meta Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) which shows off “the first unified model for real-time, promptable object segmentation in images & videos” is pretty incredible stuff. The implications for video editors for masking and rotoscoping is going to be pretty interesting to watch and incredible for speed moving forward.

7. The ROI of the Rock

I’m fascinated by this story of the Rock. He’ll be taking this week’s content spots previously held for this newsletter’s mockery of Ryan Reynolds. It was this headline from Military.com that caught my eye: “The Army Bet $11M on The Rock and UFL Ginning Up Enlistments. It May Have Actually Hurt Recruiting Efforts.”

So The Rock worked out a deal with the Army to be the ‘presenting sponsor’ for his fledgling football league, the UFL - formerly the even more fledgling XFL which then merged with the United States Football League (another football league of no importance?) - both with uniform logos, 50 yard line logos and supporting military content. But the issue is that, “The high-dollar, high-profile deal likely didn't lead to a single new Army recruit and may possibly have had a negative impact on finding new enlistment.”

Like not a single one? Ouch. This confirms, to me at least, that logos on uniforms could possibly be the biggest boondoggle in marketing. Sponsored by cheese - a home run. Logo on uniform? The worst. Turns out, the Army could not smell what The Rock was cooking.

Bonus Rock hate content: Shwinnabego goes to town on The Rock’s energy drink for referencing acronyms from 2018.

8. Hat of the week: Reading Cream Chipped Beef

First things first. Why are the hats for the Paris games so medicore? Why are there 15 different toques? For the Summer games? This makes zero sense. Secondly this is cream chipped beef hat. I had to look that up. The things I do for this newsletter.

So the beef part is “a form of pressed, salted and dried beef that has been sliced into thin pieces.” Okay, okay. And the creamed part is a white sauce that you mix to serve over toast. And this is the theme hat for a morning game (breakfast baseball) of the Philadelphia Phillies Double A team, The Reading Fighting Phils. And since we’ve sold at the trade deadline in Toronto we’re repping the Phililes now even after they have been swept by the Yankees this week? (Editor: Are you sure about that?)

9. Cringe brat summer lives

Remember last week when we went full brat in this newsletter? Well, as commentators far and wide praised Kamala Harris’ campaign for leaping into the brat summer, we did speculate on using this incorrectly may just very well make you the oldest person around your boardroom table.

So imagine our surprise when the Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change steps into the fray of Canadian politicians with the total “hey fellow kids” move using “Affordable housing is brat.” It’s worth just cruising through the comments section of that post for how this went over. And in case it hasn’t reach you yet, brat nights are also a thing now too. So you’ve been warned.

10. Last call: The Drink Cart Side Car

As we enjoy the second weekend of summer games from Paris, it was fairly obvious to share this impeccable cocktail inspired by Paris. And since Cognac is very underrated, as are simple three ingredient masterpieces, I give you the Side Car.

The dirty secret about this cocktail is that while everyone assumes that the cocktail was invented in WWII in Paris and named for the motorcycle side car of a certain guest, it’s more complicated than that - as all great cocktails are. Some say the side car moniker was due to the one sided sugar rim on the glass - which almost no one adds now. Thankfully.

Was it made popular by Harry MacElhone at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris? Or by Frank Meier of the Ritz Paris’s famous Hemingway Bar? The truth is more likely that it was first created at the Buck’s Club in London by Pat MacGarry the club’s celebrated bartender.

It almost doesn’t matter, other than this is a historic cocktail and perfect for mixing with the Olympics playing in the background. The only decision you really need to make is if you want it French School (equal parts of the booze) or English School (two parts Congnac and 1 part cointreau). We like the English School. Go sports!

• 2 oz cognac

• 1 oz Cointreau

• 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

• Shake with ice and strain into a frozen coupe glass. Garnish with a simple lemon twist.

À la santé! What did you think of this week’s newsletter? Drop me a comment or question below or tell me how your weekly drink turned out.

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