El Gaffney

This Is How You Do Viral

A few months back Absolut Vodka approached Zach Galifianakis to make an ad for them. He said, yes…as long as he could do whatever he wanted with no restrictions. Then they said (wait for it), yes!

There is a reason Absolut approached him in the first place. Likely they felt that his type of humor connected to their target of LDA-25. (That’s a guess, and LDA = Legal Drinking Age for anyone who has not worked with a liquor, spirits, alcohol company.) Sure there were definitely a few rules in place, such as: no underage drinking, binge drinking or death. But otherwise, AV gave him the creative freedom. They realized that there’s no worse way to lose authenticity and relevancy with your audience than to change (even subtly) his brand of comedy!

Zach enlisted Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Coincidentally or not (depending on Zach’s motive for bring those two in), the sign-off to their show is Tim’s father rich saying, “Abso…lutely” and their production company is called Absolutely. (Apologies followers for having to use the term awesome.) And as of now, the first in a series of I hope more than two has around 55K views on FoD, where it was first launched. Don’t let that (low?) number fool you, though. It has 280K on YouTube as well as 138K on MySpace. The second, which was added about two weeks ago, is at about a quarter of that total number. But even if it this number didn’t even reach that illusive 6-digits (the 100K view mark on YouTube I’d say is the metric lots of clients set), I’d call this a successful foray into the world of branded entertainment.

BONUS: As you’ll see, the comedians (I’m assuming) even came up with a great tag-line for the content: “In an Absolut world, friends would get together more often.”

Here’s Part 1:

And Part 2:

Tags: absolut, comedy, viral

Things I Missed/Didn’t Miss About NYC

The weeknight casual drinks.
The weekday/workday casual hangover.

In lots of other places, you just don’t socialize during the week like you do here. (Though I bet the Brits would say our inability to take down a pint or two during lunch is weak.) I’m in the place where after a margherita and 3 draft beers I’m not really going to feel drunk, but I’m going to feel pretty dehydrated the next morning (manana por la manana if you will). Thankfully last night ended pretty early, but most casual drinks end around 11:30PM (assuming you don’t want to be called a wuss or worse). Plus, it’s impossible to pull an Irish Goodbye with a smaller, less intoxicated group.

No the image does not quite match the copy but I had to add it in order to ask if you or one of your friends used to pull Absolut ads out of your parents’ magazines and collect them. Seriously. One of my friends did - how ridiculous it seems now. I used to collect the Penn tennis balls print ads. Nerd alert.

Tags: absolut, bars, drinking, nyc