Hidden in hours of Twitter livestreams, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy did the greatest ad read ever. This is how I found it.
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So, about a month ago I wrote an article about Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and how he was dominating quarantine Twitter with hilarious content.
As fate would have it, Trends — the newsletter I write for — sponsored Portnoy’s Twitter feed all of last week. Specifically, we were the first people to sponsor Davey Day Trader Global (DDTG), which is Portnoy’s one-person day trading firm.
In the absence of pro sports, Portnoy has turned DDTG into a must-watch livestream. Fans get to enjoy his antics as he “wins” and “loses” hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on random stocks.
Portnoy’s sponsorship included ad reads during the livestream and banners for Trends.
See below.
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Portnoy’s Improv Genius
Watching Portnoy’s livestreams, I was reminded of Larry David’s genius sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. The show is famous for its free-flowing improv process that allows the on-screen talent to create the most memorable moments.
As Variety explains:
“Curb uses no script; instead the actors improvise their dialogue based on a bare outline. Two opposing cameras simultaneously record the action, and then in post the editors must comb through all the footage to find the beats of an episode that can take up to three weeks to finish…The editors will sometimes use different takes to finish sentences based on performance or what’s deemed funnier. Cutting on specific consonants — like s, t or p — is a trick they commonly use to combine two takes into one sentence. They’ll also turn to the opposing cameras as a way to cut around the actor’s face.”
As with any sponsorship, Trends provided Portnoy a general outline on talking points. These notes were comparable to an outline that a Curb actor might receive.
However, as with the HBO sitcom, we all knew the magic would be in letting Portnoy do his thing. He has a two decade track record of creating the most engaging internet content and can improv anything.
As Barstool’s CEO Erika Nardini puts it:
“[Portnoy] has stood the test of time and what he created because it was authentic. It was constant. It was real. It was unexpected. It was funny. And it was raw.”
While I wasn’t able to watch all of Portnoy’s ad reads in real time, I had access to the videos. And, like a Curb Your Enthusiasm editor, I combed through hours of Portnoy’s livestreams in search of a golden nugget…and I found it.
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The Greatest Ad Read Ever
As Trends is in the information services business, Portnoy masterfully riffed on the word “information” in one of his ad reads.
The transcript won’t do it justice, but here is a sample:
“Go to Trends. They got the information. Where do we get the information? We get the information from the information.”
It was so good, I knew I had to extract the clip from the hour-long livestream and cut it for the internet.
I combined Portnoy’s minute-long ad read with relevant clips from Billions, Wall Street, Top Gun and Finding Forrester. To emphasize the epic-ness of the clip, I laid the Lord of The Rings: Two Towers theme song over the entire video.
Then, I tweeted it out…
…and — perhaps in recognition that I had identified a moment of true improvisational genius — Portnoy blessed the video by tweeting it with these immortal words:
“Information is the new information” hahahahahha
The video was viewed 140k times within the first 24 hours (I am personally responsible for about 65k of those view).
To cap the story off, I tweeted something everyone was thinking:
In sum, Dave Portnoy improv-ed the greatest ad read ever and I love the internet.