Desus & Mero

The (fake) Brief: Viceland is putting all of their weight behind the network's late night talk show, Desus and Mero. 

Desus and Mero is the best late night show out right now. It's brilliant, hilarious, and nightly appointment viewing for me. The two Twitter-famous Bronx natives that host it have an undeniable charisma on top of being two of the most skilled joke writers on the planet. But that alone is not enough. Viceland is deep, deep, deep in the recesses of your cable box (it took over the spot from History Channel 2 when it began airing), and while the network has made the correct push to on demand and online video content, if you're going to have a TV channel you might as well boost the TV-ness of it all. 

That was the idea behind the first of my D&M campaign ideas. A common refrain on the show is referring to itself as "the number one show in late night," despite this being patently untrue. Then again, as Desus says, "Facts don't matter."        

"Number 1."

I tried to harness that “Facts don’t matter” energy for the first set of ads. I used quotes from the hosts, dialog from the show, and a pun based on the name and scheduling of the show. The ads were fine, but they didn’t lacked a certain punch. That oomph that Desus and Mero deserve. They’re not a typical late night show. Every weeknight they make something special, and should be advertised as such.

I pivoted and tried something different. From my experiences trying to turn friends on to the D&M “Bodegaverse,” I remembered them always saying some variation on the same thing. Everyone uninitiated person I showed their stuff to said “I don’t know what half these words mean.” So, why not make that the focus of the ad?

The Desus & Mero Dictionary

Here I highlighted some of the more "colorful" bits of the hosts' vocabularies, and formatted them as entries from a dictionary, the Complete Desus And Mero Outer Borough Dictionary, to be precise. As the language used on the show has etymologies that range from Jamaican Patois to early internet chatrooms, a clearly set definition goes a long way. All of the sentences come from tweets from D&M themselves, thus keeping the show's guiding light, Desus and Mero's voices, entact.