AriZona Iced Tea's Open Letter to Miley Cyrus
By Dashiell Driscoll
Published October 08, 2013 Immortal More Info »
Dear Miley,
Jim Sterch here from AriZona Iced Tea’s marketing department. I wasn’t going to write you this letter, but today I’ve received two emails from interns asking me to remark upon your most recent Terry Richardson photo shoot…So this is what I need to say…And it is said in the spirit of a dude whose job it is to sell giant aluminum cans of refreshing iced tea for the low price of 99 cents.
I am extremely concerned that we might not have enough inventory on hand to fill the massive orders we are getting in the wake of these racy photos. Whoever around you led you to believe that posing half naked with a can of AriZona Iced Tea is in any way “cool” is spot on. Their cool barometer, in this humble marketing guy’s opinion, could not be much cooler. Heck, I’d go so far as to say their cool-o-meter is set to, “iced!”
Nothing but sales will come in the long run from you holding one of our cans of delicious AriZona Iced Tea like a big, hard cock and it is absolutely NOT in ANY way costing us anything for this advertising. Thank you for taking a picture with the label out so people can see that 99 cents for a tall can of iced tea is a great value (even for you) and then also the thing where you hold it like a thick boner and stick your tongue out. Just fantastic stuff all around.
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I am happy to hear you enjoy our iced tea and hope you pay close attention to what I am telling you.
The iced tea business is out of touch with kids these days. Up until these pictures came out, our most innovative marketing strategy was to capitalize the letter “z” and lock the price in at 99 cents. We just don’t give a shit about you, or anyone under the age of 45. Have you been to Arizona? It’s mostly people over the age of 45.
We’re not kidding ourselves. We know none of the creepy perverts oggling your pictures give a shit about AriZona Iced Tea. Many’s the man mistook jerking off for stock dividends. If Joe from Palm Beach wants to print out a picture of you holding a can of AriZona Iced Tea like a penis and masturbate onto it (as thousands with access to a working printer no doubt already have) that doesn’t mean Joe gives a fuck about our beverage. But one day, maybe tomorrow or maybe the day after tomorrow, Joe will walk into a gas station with five quarters in his pocket and leave with a cold can of AriZona Iced Tea.
Yes, I’m suggesting you are helping us sell iced tea. I don’t encourage my daughters to walk around naked posing with cans of iced tea, but that’s only because they’re not famous and, like the distressing majority of their middle school peers, not that hot.
Thanks to you, our cans are worth more than 99 cents. It used to be you just got a refreshing drink when you purchased a can of AriZona Iced Tea. Now, you also get a fond memory of that time Miley Cyrus posed in a red thong-leotard thing where you could almost see her vagina lips, or whatever. Don’t be under any illusions.. ALL our cans of iced tea will still be sold at the affordable and clearly printed price of 99 cents.. but it’s cool that drinking one might make some dudes want to masturbate for confusing and hard to pin down reasons.
I repeat, all our cans of delicious AriZona Iced Tea will still be available for the low price of 99 cents. Some stores might try to sell it for more, but you shouldn’t let them make a fool of you. Don’t think for a moment that the guy behind the counter at your local convenience store has the authority to charge more than 99 cents for a can of our refreshing iced tea. He’s just there for the money.. we’re there for the money also, but we only want 99 cents. It has always been that way and it will always be that way. The sooner people realize that, the sooner they can REALLY buy some cans of iced tea.
You also can see your nipples in some of the Terry Richardson photos. Very cool. I am happy you made that choice, because now that I am almost 47 years old I like to masturbate to people closer in age to my daughters than my wife. The heart wants what the heart wants. Unfortunately for me, that means frequently clearing the browser history on the family computer in the living room that we all use. I hold my breath every time my wife Carol goes to show me a video on YouTube. All my dads out there using the communal family computer to masturbate know what’s up with that last sentence.
Real empowerment of a beverage doesn’t come from printing the affordable price right on the can or even from delivering a consistently excellent product for decades. It comes from having one of the most famous young stars on the planet pose semi-nude holding your can. I’ve been in this business long enough to know we are making more money after these almost nude photos surfaced. It’s really so cool. And it’s sending a great message to other young women. Please pose half naked with our iced tea! We would love nothing more than for this to become some kind of thing like that “iced” fad that gave Smirnoff a Q3 bump in 2010. Maybe we call it Getting Zon’d? Getting Iced 2.0? I’ll leave it to smarter people to come up with the name, but you get the idea. And with the raise I’m getting for this future phenomenon I hope to be able to buy my mistress diamonds.
As for the shedding of our 99 cent price.. whoever is telling you we are ever going to do that is absolutely NOT accurate. Our tea is talented enough that we could charge twice that, but we don’t because our market research shows us even our most loyal fans would be waaaaaaaaay pissed by that move and probably switch to a cheaper copycat drink.
Whether we like it or not, and we definitely do like it, your photos have launched us to the next level in the canned drink game. It’s so cool, Miley. It’s dangerously cool. I am encouraging you to send a message to your peers that they should all pose in red thong leotard things with cans of AriZona Iced Tea, then post pictures on social media sites with reckless disregard for their futures. And if anyone from my company leads you to believe otherwise, I will kindly fire that motherfucker because they don’t care about AriZona Iced Tea.
