The Drink Cart: Summer With A Vengeance
The only ad newsletter written by three sweaty copywriters crawling through an air vent, moonlighting as dive bar shot enthusiasts and yelling “Yippee-ki-yay” at your summer slop ad.
Dear marketing and Nakatomi Plaza fans, anyone wearing sweaty tank tops as a personal brand and OOH creatives who just duct-taped a JPEG to the side of a bus.
Real talk. We have reached that time in summer where I expect to be neck deep into multiple Christmas campaigns by this point. And I’m not. So far only one little project has even talked about Christmas. What’s the point of me watching Hallmark’s Christmas in July if I’m not getting any reason to break out my Christmas Ideas? It’s almost football season already for goodness sake. Where does all the time go?
So, to wrestle back a little bit of summer back, and after watching every single clip from the Jersey Shore 2.0 social show Barstool Beach House (which got 105 million impressions just on X alone in the first week), I had to watch a quintessential summer movie from 1995.
I was tempted to just go deep on this 1980 BMX-themed bursting with summer Kool-Aid ad kick that is also happens to be a musical.
But Die Hard with A Vengeance was a better call. The movie feels like a heat wave. It’s a sweaty movie. Some people are saying it’s the sweatiest movie since Cool Hand Luke. If the first Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The third one is most certainly a quintessential summer movie. There are so many intersting things about watching this movie thirty years later. Starting with that incredible poster. Iconic.
More importantly while there are cell phones, they’re mostly useless bricks and there are multiple coverage and dropped calls. Without smart phones characters can’t doom scroll or quickly use to Google directions or to solve Simon Says riddles. It’s a simpler time. Feels like just a Magnum P.I. rerun where he has to stop at a payphone to call TC.
But one thing I’d forgotten is that this movie is a full-blown Aspirin ad. Willis has a hangover the entire film and spends most of it asking if anyone has an Aspirin. The bottle is basically a co-star becoming a key plot point. Well played Bayer.
And in 1995 Bayer Aspirin ads looked like this. I’m sure is some sort rule about movie character endorsements of pharmaceuticals, but I can see the brand paying Willis dump trucks of gold to have the idea of, “if it’s good enough for John Mclane’s hangover days, it’s probably fine for your little too many glasses of wine” ads. Instead of doing all those movies recently, Bruce could have just been shilling aspirin as John McClane all these years.
There is a lengthy blog take on all the product placement of the Die Hard series. I’ fairly certain that Bumble Bee canned tuna would be having a moment if this was released in 2025.
Another thing I’d forgotten, is the completely elbows-up world of cross-border drama, when the bad guys end up at a Quebec truck stop. Mon dieu! In 2025, this is basically a tariff war subplot. The alternate ending—read the Wikipedia—is insane. McClane plays a psychotic version of “Simon Says” with the villain involving a rocket launcher, trivia questions and pure spite.
One other marketing related note. I saw this observation from Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg, “‘Marketinggg👏’ is now one of the best compliments a brand can get in their comment section on Instagram.”
The fact that everyone is talking about the marketing is fascinating. I can’t decide if this is a good development or another trend that undermines society. On the one hand, as a comment on Sundberg’s post notes, “marketing is usually an ick. If people are complimenting it, then you have them for the long run.” But if you’re comments are about the marketing, and not the thing it’s marketing, is it really working? Think about it.
Drink Cart Approved™ agency discussion topics
Is there a start to an inevitable influencer backlash happening?
People seem to be losing their minds over this social post.
I want to know everything about anyone still on dial up internet.
I would watch this idea of a robot fight club. Discuss.
I dare you to un-see Pedro Pascal in the ET movie reboot.
The Labubu Dupe Marketing Onslaught begins
Seeing these Pita Chip Labubus from Cava for their new Hot Harissa Meal is such a great play first out of the gate. But you can imagine where these are going next (beside your Q4 marketing pitch decks).
And they better work quickly as soon as this launch happened the same store sales came out and it’s not looking good. Also the stories now include the term bowlslop economy in how Cava’s stock completely crumbled.
Ad history: Commodore 64 (1983)
I saw one of these 1980’s ads on X but couldn’t find it on Youtube. But I actually liked this one even better as a window into the eighties aesthetic and casting in ads.
Chocolate that forgives
I really like this spec creative for Fatso and the note from the team that created it, “Because in a world of portion control and ‘guilt-free’ snacking, what if the most radical thing a brand could say was: ‘Yes, you finished the whole bar. You’re still a good person.’”
Also so nice to see authentic interactions between the brand and the creatives. That’s how it should be.
Slop OOH
I love how advertising people hate creative like this. It’s this kind of thought that putting Chalamet into an ad with no headline is art, but this all text sloppy mess is simply “slopvertising.” The fact that his ad generates this reaction, “I think the thing I dislike most abt the new wave of tech marketing is just how much it lacks imagination.”
The dirty little secret no one really wants to admit is that ugly ads actually work. They are increasingly are taking over social. And it all comes back to the same thing. Making marketing feel less like an ad.
NSFW MALORT
This new campaign for Malort features incredibly fun writing and boldness in a sea of bland vanilla. To know why this is so good, you only have to read about the team’s favourite line and how it paints such a vivid picture, “Weirdly our personal favorite ‘Like driving through Gary Indiana with your mouth open.’ is actually safe for work.”
That is such a vivid word picture that makes me gag a little. But it does get even weirder than that (and bonus points for a cameo by Aspirin!)
Kendrick Lamar Just Dropped… an Ad Agency?
Kendrick Lamar just opened an ad agency. Because why settle for changing hip-hop forever when you could also sell oat milk and sneakers? After five years of running pgLang like a secret society for cool ideas, he’s spinning it into Project 3 Agency—where brands can pay him to make their product feel like a Pulitzer-winning verse.
Somewhere, a CMO is already nodding too hard at a deck full of “synergy” beef slides that dunk on Drake for a toothpaste brand.
Last call: The Drink Cart Jersey Turnpike
Last week I my feed was overrun with a vodka brands that screamed AI. But this week This week I came across (via the always wonderful read BP&O) a juicy vodka brand that had a real pov and some wonderful tone dripping after swigging directly from the bottle. This is Cash Flow. But the copy here is the best thing I saw this week:
Meanwhile, Gallop just released new news on even less people drinking. “The percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend.” We clearly need to step it up.
I love that some responses to this are with the lens of drinking being the ultimate enemy of clarity, sleep and productivity. Like drinking is some kind of modern Lex Luther villain. “drinking’s one of those habits where the marginal return per unit time/cost is basically negative unless you’re optimizing for short term social cohesion or escapism. even then, you’re borrowing against your own clarity, sleep, & recovery while paying a tax in cash, cognition, & calories. culture finally caught up to the obvious which is that alcohol’s not subversive anymore. it’s just… inefficient as hell.”
Tell me more about how avoiding a glass of wine today means you're maximizing the "marginal return per unit time" while having the stamina of a monk and the cognitive prowess of an MIT grad—except everyone else is just over there having fun, connecting, swapping stories, and maybe, oh, I don’t know... actually living?
Shots! Shots. Shots.
It is in that spirit that we are going full blown trash agency drink inspiration. Some shots are ordered for taste, some for spectacle and others for dares. But the Jersey Turnpike is pure spite. Born from the questionable tradition of dumping whatever’s pooled in a bar’s spill mat into a shot glass (yes, really). It’s the spiritual cousin to Chicago’s Malört, which we clearly showed is absolutely disgusting and less about pleasure and more about proving you can take it.
It’s been known by equally appetizing names like Buffalo Sweat, Gray Snail and even the Matt Dillon. Bartenders hate it, health codes frown upon it, and yet it lives on in bar lore as the ultimate “you won’t” order. So we’ve created a mostly safe, drinkable homage you can make at home or make for your ungrateful agency coworkers with no dirty bar mats required.
Here’s my take on an Agency Jersey Turnpike Shot (Mostly Safe Version):
Splash of banana pepper brine
½ oz dark rum or aged whiskey
⅙ oz coffee liqueur
1 drop hot sauce (optional)
Stir all ingredients over ice, strain into a shot glass, and down it in one. The look says “reckless,” the taste says “actually not terrible.”
And how could I not show this clip from Cocktail when talking about shots. It’s unfathomable. How are they not adding a Cocktail 2 to the Tom Cruise Save Cinema Tour. How?
The Drink Cart is your weekly fuel for pop culture brains and ad junkies. A cocktail of ad insights and hot takes that feel like you’re hanging at your favourite dive bar after launching your latest campaign.