You guys remember the announcement about the formation of Tronc, the entity formerly known as Tribune Publishing that proved once and for all that media people can come up with shitty names just as well as ad agency folks.
Along with that nonsensical news came a video … and what a video it was, dear readers. This is the future of content if by “content” you mean dull, soulless crap.
This is real and it is terrifying. Hide your children. Hide your pets.
Tronc may have anticipated everyone and his mom talking shit about that effort, because they disabled the comments on YouTube. But the takes still poured in hot and fast.
Enter Portal A, the content production unit you may know for its spoof of that TBWA Airbnb ad and its own campaigns like this WTF? group dance effort for Lenovo. (That budget, though.)
In another attempt to bring attention to its own production capabilities, Portal A has created a spoof of the above attempt to convince someone that the automation of journalism is upon us. It’s appropriately titled “TRONC: What the ACTUAL fuck.”
See, we find the same things insufferable!
In case you didn’t get it, this is part of the Ad Hoc project, which is a sort of side thing that Portal A uses to promote itself by making fun of the work of others. The most successful Ad Hoc video to date mocked Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign.
As managing director Zach Blume puts it, “The AdHoc channel is a chance for our team to let loose, flex our comedy chops, and have some fun with the ad industry. We get to see the lighter side of the space every day, and these videos are a perfect outlet for that.”
Regarding the project in this post, he writes, “When we saw the Tronc video, we knew we had a Hall of Famer on our hands. We counted dozens of indecipherable buzzwords in a span of 90 seconds. Inspiring stuff. We began riffing on a script the moment after we stopped scratching our heads.”
We will now quote a character from a television show: “This is ripe for parody. This is ripe!” Good thing there are no thin-skinned people in the creative advertising or media industries.