Pouring tequila into the internet

Anna Rose Kerr
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read
ATL work from W&K Amsterdam

In 2015 we worked on the relaunch of Desperados tequila flavoured beer. At Work Club we were charged with executing the idea online/ in social. The idea “Way of the Desperados” was a celebration of millennials not playing by the rules. Somewhere out beyond the employment crisis there was fun tot be had, and this drink was going to be your way in. A fight against all the things people think you should care about when you grow up.

My creative partner and I had been talking a lot at the time about how the internet was getting really dull. Big companies were finally starting to understand “big data”, and search results were starting to get predictive/ predictable. A brief to help millennials “break out of normal town” seemed like the perfect chance to do what we did best… make lols for the internet.

My biggest “viral” was a website that solved boy problems with Beyonce songs, theirs was a video that Spielberg had taken down after 3 million+ views.

Our idea “Desperados.DOT” was to flood the internet with opportunities to do things differently. To fuck the system.

Months away from the official launch of Top Level Domain (TLD) names, we proposed buying a Desperados URL at every single one (about 370 in total).

Desperados.ac
Desperados.academy
Desperados.accountants
Desperados.active
Desperados.actor
Desperados.agency

My favourite site was desperados.discount which would automatically start printing £20 bills from any printer you were connected to, and also send up this alert.

Each one would be filled with a puzzle, a prize, an invite or just a good joke.

On Desperados.love you could get 5,000 new Twitter followers in return for using our hashtag.

Desperados.gal had a makeup tutorial on it, how to use foundation to pixelate your face and avoid detection from CCTV cameras.

Desperados.beer asked how important privacy was to you… and offered you a free bottle of Desperados in return for all of your cookie data.

Desperados.paris, desperados.london, desperados.budapest etc would be opportunities for local markets to promote underground events.

Although our clients were excited about the idea, it never got made. Eventually W&K Amsterdam made a few nice posters, someone else did an activation at a festival and we made some social GIFs.

We made a bunch of the sites ourselves (sans the Desperados URLs). I’m not the best coder, so most of the sites don’t work anymore (plus I’ve let most of the domain names slide).

Here are a few of the sites we made:

A mirror, but on the internet. This site just plays your webcam back to you. You look great, by the way.

Does what it says really. Was a big Facebook Like button that when clicked would post to your Facebook timeline saying you’d liked the Like button.

A realtime tracker of our boss’ beard length updated via his frequent Instagram selfies.

One of the more functional sites, probably because our friend Tom Hoad did most of the work on it… You could input two of your Facebook friends and the algorithm would present you with a famous movie scene that represented the compatibility of the two. “I will return. I will find you. Love you. Marry you. And live without shame.” or “

We love Tom, but his own flaw is a terrible taste in music. When he got stuck in hospital for a month we recreated the music video for one of his favourite songs…

We met some interesting guys who were working on a web-to-voice software. We used this to create a toll free number, where from a website you could call our friend named Ben Tolfree.

I somehow found out that this domain name was available for sale. So obviously I bought it. On the site you could buy a range of merchandise supporting either “Team Mooge” or “Team Sandoz” (the names of our two ECDs). I got in quite a lot of trouble when someone found out about it, but then managed to exchange it for a new laptop. So win.

Once we got bored of pouring tequila just into websites we tried a few other things too…

Sparks was an idea for a new dating app based on mesh networking. So even if the telecommunications infrastructure has been obliterated you can still find hotties in your area. How would it work? 1. Survive the apocalypse 2. Open the app to find a nearby lover 3. Repopulate the Earth

…and our latest venture…

A set of tarot cards which are as easy to read as texts from bae. Which you can back now on Kickstarter >>

Anna Rose Kerr

hello at anna rose kerr dot com

Anna Rose Kerr

Written by

I also have an art blog.

Anna Rose Kerr

hello at anna rose kerr dot com

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