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Biz Stone and Biz Stone Replicant Want to You to Drink Stoli

by Matthew Zuras on October 18, 2010 at 03:45 PM

You've noticed that Twitter has slowly begun to encroach on your television with the sitcom-ization of '$#*! My Dad Says,' 'Shh...Don't Tell Steve' and, lately, some feed called 'Dear Girls Above Me.' Well, now Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone will be invading your cable box himself, appearing in a Stolichnaya Vodka commercial, as well as a print ad.

In the video ad (after the break), two Bizzes sit down in a club and lightly debate the value of Twitter. "Did it ever occur to you at that maybe Twitter is just a constant stream of meaningless babble?" asks one Biz. "You're not seeing the big picture. Astronauts are tweeting from space," replies the other. Meta!

But why pick Biz? We're not entirely sure, ourselves. Stoli's been doing these 'Would You Have a Drink With You?' ads in which so-called "original" people (like Hugh Hefner and, inexplicably, '10 Things I Hate About You' actress Julia Stiles) sit down with a dopplegänger version of themselves, chat and sip Stoli. Biz Stone is, by many measures, an outrageously influential human being, but do average vodka drinkers know who he is?

"We are not looking for face recognition," Andrey Skurikhin, partner in the firm SPI, which operates Stolichnaya outside of Russia, told the Wall Street Journal. "What is more important is the core of the person." Biz himself doesn't seem interested in any cash attached to his celebrity endorsement (allegedly donating the money to a nonprofit he's launching), but did say that he saw the ad "as great messaging." Despite the unctuous term "messaging" (we think it just means "advertising"?), it's true that Twitter-as-brand doesn't have much of a TV commercial presence. Maybe some people don't know it exists? Or maybe Stoli's just trying to get into the #drunktweets market?

Tags: ads, advertising, biz stone, BizStone, celebrity, socialnetworking, stoli, stolichnaya, twitter, vodka, web

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