Fair credit: Ryan over at Boozeblogger (Taking the pretension out of liquor… one dick joke at a time) put up a post a few days ago that pointed me to the fact that 42 Below has waded in, once again, to the field of YouTube marketing lunacy. His, post, which you should read, uses a review of 42 Below Kiwi-Infused Vodka as an excuse to write a post highlighting some of their new ads.

Mon Dieu!
He is fiendishly clever!

True. But ya’ll hold my beer and watch this: I don’t need no stinking excuse to post funny booze-related videos! All I need is to tuck most of them under the fold to keep the page-load time to a reasonable level. I just love good ads.

I’ve written about 42 Below’s ads before, here, when 42′s Vodka Professor was indulging himself in Something About Mary-level humor, and I was belittling such betters of mine as Somerset Maugham and Eben Freeman. The new round of vids from New Zealand mostly feature a spokespuppet/cyborg (cypuppet? pupborg?) kinda guy who pokes gentle fun at his own country, and not so gentle fun at everybody else.
Oh, and fair warning: The language is not always safe for work, often without warning.
This first one makes me want to swoon. In it, they poke fun at the fact that Vodka is, um, hard to differentiate? The tacit admission that beyond minor quality issues, you should make your vodka buying choice based on who entertains you the most is worth me buying another bottle of their hooch right there.


Then we jump on the ultimate celebrity bandwagon—Why, Nelson Mandela would make an awesome endorser, no?

Here’s some of that gentle fun at their own country’s expense:

The last one I’ll embed is this dark little gem that also enjoys some of that rather less gentle fun at another nation’s expense.

The last video you need to see is the first one in Ryan’s post, so once again, I encourage you to hit his blog and watch the vid there. There are two weapons-grade funny lines toward the end.

UPDATE: I notice that these vids are nearly two years old. In the future, 42 Below needs to do a better job of reaching out to time-wasters like myself. (Your time, not mine. Writing this stuff is what passes for productivity for me!)
The good news about this is that they have also produced this last (I promise) video I’m embedding. It features “Flare Johnston” as the. greatest. bartender. evar!
It is refreshing to see a maker of poor, much maligned vodka get some of their own back at the expense of the craft cocktail types.