The Drink Cart: Wading into the slop

The things you learn when you read every ad industry newsletter and item on social every day of the week.

Hey Drink Carters. I think at various times this week when my power and internet has been working, I’ve been dating myself with random 1980s references every chance I get. In honour of this, I was reminded of 1986’s Club Paradise.

The Gen Z mind could not comprehend Robin Williams, Peter O’Toole, Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy in a single movie about, “A retired Chicago firefighter partners with a reggae singer to turn a seedy Caribbean nightclub into a resort for affluent tourists.”

It’s just too much! Let’s see Glen Powell remake this! They don’t make them like that anymore for reasons we’ll get into. This week I’m going almost all in on whatever advertising industry gruel is spooned on to our plastic trays and giving you my takes.

Would you rather I stick to more dogs eating hot dogs content at baseball games? Sorry, best I can do is a link to darling of the political world this week, Babydog.

Today’s “newsletter” surfs on all the slop the industry is dishing out like

• Agency mergers and being political is now out for brands

• World building brands, the art of ugly ads and the slopification of all content

• Condiment crossovers, robots take over cocktails and how to be funny for Gen Z

• Plus you want summer hats and a can’t miss summer trash cocktail you make your beer bottle

1. Cool Agency Super Groups are out

The agency business is funny, right? They work for brands and are brands. But also maybe kind of hate brands too? This story covered in Campaign and Strategy Magazine about merging the BBDO, DDB and TBWA brands into one powerful and very inspiringly-named “Omnicom Advertising Group” is typical agency vibes.

They say they are merging, but they don’t even wait until the first paragraph to state that they’ll all remain as active brands. Holding co’s have been doing this kind of thing for years. They buy up agency brands. Let them run for a bit. Then merge them together like Legos and throw away the brands they paid for. So they can buy other newer brands and do it all over again.

And we wonder why clients are trying their luck in house and with independent agencies like, oh I don’t know this one. Absolutely shameless. Zulu Alpha Kilo says goodbye to the brands. Here’s the metaphor: This is Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 5. The budgets are high, the box office is low. Imagine buying up agencies and shutting them down when you can have the joys of “Stegosaurus Money.”

2. So can brands be political? Or no?

I like Stuff About Advertising and their video’s on ads. This one cracked me up because for the last four years the industry and people have been tellings brands to get more political, to voice stronger public opinions because staff and consumers want them to stand up for things they care about. Yes, unless your razer blade brand is rallying about the "National Beard Length Regulation Act" it should probably just sharpen blades and sell them.

Wait, the Verge is covering this? We shouldn’t have to hear about your sticker brand’s political views. But I also agree if they own it, they can do whatever they want. In this case I just want them to be a great sticker company. The goal of your brand should be to sell your stickers, and wading into politics even in the name of some post assassination attempt unity is madness. Lesson: When in doubt, just sell your stickers.

3. Is world building cringe?

I find the term “world building” as it applies to consumer brands and marketing a bit cringe. But I’ve also loved the fauxstalgia branding of Poolsuite that recreates the 1980s across their social, newsletters, websites, playlists and more for their popular sunscreen product Vacation. And let’s not forget that I’ve been the President of Friday Afternoon Swim Up Bar Team Meetings since November ‘23.

It’s a lot of work creating all these pieces and committing to the bit of living and breathing in the eighties across all those touch points. But it can work.

4. Ugly Ads

I’ve been following the Growth Newsletter from Demand Curve for a number of weeks. This week they had a great little bit on ugly ads and why they work. It’s frustrating for agencies that stuff like this converts and that messy or unbranded stuff moves the needle so well in places like social.

The example they shared for Surreal is a fun one. “Screenshot of PowerPoint on a billboard, lolwut? Hilariously bad graphic design. Purposely lazy, fourth-wall breaking ad copy. This campaign went mega-viral as a result.”

Worth your time: Spend 10 minutes surfing and studying Barry Hott’s Ugly Ad archive for inspiration.

5. Slop Content

Now that’s some real slop slop.

If you though ugly ads were wild, get ready for slop. Probably better than anything in Adage or Strategy this week was this newsletter aptly named Garbage Day. It’s great in that it immediately cuts into the problem that there is currently a whole universe of slop when it comes to content and tries to define it. There is so much good stuff in this, including my favourite sport, hating on Ryan Reynolds and Rock branding. But this is very interesting:

“Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created. The next important feature of slop is that feels forced upon us, whether by a corporation or an algorithm. It’s in the name. We’re the little piggies and it’s the gruel in the trough. But the last feature is the most crucial. It not only feels worthless and ubiquitous, it also feels optimized to be so. The Charli XCX “Brat summer” meme does not feel like slop, nor does Kendrick Lamar’s extremely long “Not Like Us” roll out. But Taylor Swift’s cascade of alternate versions of her songs does. The jury’s still out on Sabrina Carpenter. Similarly, last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon did not, to me, feel like slop. Dune: Part Two didn’t either. But Deadpool & Wolverine, at least in the marketing, definitely does.”

I won’t spoil the whole read, but there is a really interesting thing where slop content has to immediately fill us up on content and be the best thing ever which is about sustainable as all these run clubs that are making my walks less fun.

6. We had to mention Deadpool & Wolverine didn’t we?

I think we can agree that this campaign has all the trappings of a “slop content loop”. The Garbage Day article above links to a Youtube video from film essayist Patrick Willems, “Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds adapted a strategy lifted from George Clooney, where an actor builds brands and side businesses to fund creatively riskier movie projects. Except Reynolds and Johnson never made the creatively riskier movie projects and, instead, locked themselves into streaming conglomerates and allowed their brands to eat their movies.”

Which explains why tie ins for Deadpool & Wolverine’s marketing just leave us even hungry for more because the characters are red and yellow - Whoa! Just like Heinz ketchup and mustard. OMG. And they called them that on set too! And if you don’t think this is slop imagine this line from Marketing Dive: “The condiment maker is hoping the color of the characters’ superhero uniforms — red and yellow, respectively — will remind consumers of the classic ketchup and mustard combination as summer cookout season remains in swing.”

Genius. They took it further and you can get limited edition condiments with Deadpool & Wolverine accessories for some reason. Of course these brand tie ins aren’t new. Twisters is going pretty wild on theirs too. Deadpool & Wolverine have also done Heineken, The Bachelorette and of course, Reynold’s own Aviation Gin. That’s a wild Venn diagram in a slide deck.

7. Before the robots take over The Drink Cart

At this week’s All Star Game there was a robot bartender. It’s terrifying and looks to take about 4 times the time of a human bartender. This feels like how ChatGPT works when you’re needing one suggestion.

8. What’s the deal with comedy?

When you read all these industry publications regularly. Campaign. Strategy. AdAge, AdWeek. You come across these long thought pieces or round ups. Ask a bunch of agency people what they think of x and hope for the best. This one in particular is typical of that art form.

Guess what, comedy is changing as it tries to keep up to speed of culture, memes and Gen Z. So Gen Z like “internet humour” and absurdist humour over slapstick. That smaller is better than bigger when it comes to playing for comedy. And that everything is faster so by the time you make ads, the joke or meme has died. Sounds about right.

9. Hat of the week: Great Lakes Pontooners

It’s nearly August, and this week Toronto was briefly underwater, so a look at the alternate hat of the Los Angeles Dodgers High A affiliate, the Great Lake Loons play some games as the Great Lake Pontooners. Which is the perfect way to enjoy an advertising drink cart drink in summer.

10. Last call: The Drink Cart Pontoon Week

It’s mid July. You don’t want to mess around with a lot of bartending or some flair robot complexity. You want something to pound back as if you were on that pontoon boat. It’s time to think about the Spaghett or Spagett.

I love the origin story here. A drink named for a certain red sauce loving character from The Tim and Eric Awesome Show on Adult Swim. And the drink was created in their honour by bartender Reed Cahill from the Wet City Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

The concept of a Spiked beer is awesome. And this might be how we roll for the rest of July.

The Drink Cart: Spaghett

To show you how awesome this one is, you should watch The Thirsty Whale show you his version. But it’s super simple. Open a bottle of lager - pour (into your mouth preferably) a few ounces for a cheeky pre-taste, add in some freezer or ice chilled Aperol into the bottle and a little free squeezed lemon juice and drink. Repeat. Now that’s a drink made for day on the water.

• 1 ice cold bottle of lager, preferably Miller High Life

• 1 1/2 oz ounce Aperol or other red bitter liqueur

• Splash of lemon juice and lemon peel

The cool thing is there are many versions of this. Punch suggests, “Do the same thing with Campari and it’s a Camparty. Swap High Life for Pabst and it’s a Nascar Spritz.” And over at Food & Wine, they offer up versions like, "Cynar was called a 'Linguin,' and Berto makes it a "Raviol.’"

Gulp! 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.