Bob CollinsMove over, Yule Log, a brisket sandwich is about to take over a TV station in Duluth.
Arby’s is promoting a smokehouse brisket sandwich by running the longest TV commercial in history — 13 hours.
There’ll be no dialog when the ad runs on a TV station in Duluth. Only a brisket being smoked for 13 hours in smokehouse in Texas, the New York Times reports.
It’ll happen on Saturday afternoon on Memorial Day weekend, which is guaranteed to attract literally ones of its viewers.
With the brisket sandwich reappearing now through September, Matt Heath, a creative director at Fallon, Minneapolis, part of the Publicis Groupe and the agency of record for Arby’s, said the goal was to demonstrate that the hickory smoke flavor was the real thing — not something that came from a bottle.
“The real news about this sandwich is the brisket is smoked for 13 hours and really nobody knows that,” Heath said.
To get the entire process in a single take was not without its complications, with the first attempt scuttled when the window grew too dark with smoke, and a second when a light bulb in the smoker burned out. Heath and a small crew stayed awake for about 24 hours, and while he is in on the joke that this is not gripping cinema, there were moments when he got sucked in.
“Drama is in the eye of the beholder, and even the smallest little things to us were the coolest things ever,” Heath said. “When it got to the point where it started dripping and you could hear the sizzle of the brisket as the juices were dripping out of it, that was very entertaining.”
After it airs on KBJR’s alternate digital channel, it will air next Wednesday online, but only once.
Regular programming — Animal Rescue — will return next Saturday. And you won’t want to miss that. It’s about a moose that got tangled up in a swing set in Utah.
