Bluth In Advertising

If a bizarre alternate universe existed where Mad Men's Don Draper mated with Don Rickles, the resulting love child would look something like DumbDumb, the new marketing venture by Arrested Development alums Jason Bateman and Will Arnett. "We're the CEOs of DumbDumb, but that's a hilarious moniker to give us," Arnett says. "We're actually co-chief executive dummies. That's our official title." Since launching in 2010, DumbDumb has released a handful of videos online, similar to comedy content on sites like CollegeHumor and Funny or Die, but with one key difference: the videos are sponsored by brands whose products inspire and are featured in the sketches.

"I've always wanted to make commercials, but I wasn't really sure if I had the skill set," Bateman says. "I'm also a big fan of sketches that people are doing online nowadays, and a lot of our peers are doing these sketches. I just wondered if there was a way to do both."

With DumbDumb, Bateman and Arnett discovered a unique way to produce quirky comedy content for the Internet and have Madison Avenue foot the bill. Arnett explains, "There's a tremendous amount of instances where you'll be talking to a friend, and you'll say, 'Oh, that
would be a really funny video if we went and shot that.' But then you just don't do it, because you're like, 'What am I going to do? Go get a camera? I'm going to fucking write this sketch? And then I have to get some people to come do it with me? Ugh. Why bother?' And you end up not doing it. So we thought this would be a great opportunity to have the mechanism in place to take advantage of stuff we wanted to do, and then find a brand who would underwrite that. But the original impetus grew out of the desire to just fuck around."

That impetus paid off when Bateman and Arnett starred in "The Prom Date," DumbDumb's first video. Underwritten by Orbit gum, the sketch features Bateman as a doting dad shocked by the revelation that his teenage daughter (Parks & Rec's Aubrey Plaza) is taking her lecherous and mustachioed social studies teacher, played by Arnett, to the senior prom. The messy situation gets straightened out once everyone starts chewing Orbit.

"Somehow, at the end of it, you're left feeling, 'Well, that's not so creepy and bad. Orbit actually ended up making the situation better,'" Arnett says. "That seemed like something a big brand might not want to touch, but they trusted us enough to know that at the end of the day, we weren't gonna make them look like an unseemly bunch of creeps. The flipside is that we did it in a way that was also palatable to us, and didn't feel like it was too shilly. That's always the dance, figuring that out."

Since the advent of DVRs, corporations have been relying on branded entertainment to pitch their products to viewers -- whether it's Randy Jackson sipping on a Coke during American Idol or the Situation dousing himself with Axe Body Spray on Jersey Shore. With branded content already ingrained in mainstream entertainment, why would corporations choose to work with DumbDumb over a traditional ad agency?

"Well, first of all, you don't have to hang out with those ad guys," Arnett deadpans. "That's actually not true. I need to make the distinction that we're not an ad agency, we work in concert with the ad agencies. So we're not out there thinking that we're Mad Men. We're just a couple of jackasses."
 
"Ad agencies do an amazing job creating commercials that drive sales, and then we come along and write some sort of dumb booger-eating content," Bateman elaborates. "We're sort of a compliment to the more traditional marketing efforts."

With the recent release of "Always Open," a talk show web series set in a Denny's and hosted by David Koechner (Anchorman), business is brisk for DumbDumb. "We have offices in Los Angeles, New York, London, Tokyo, Madrid, Santiago, Chile. There's a lot happening in Chile right now. It's really hot. Actually hot," Arnett jokes. "No, we just have an office here in L.A. And what you'd see if you walked in is a very nicely dressed Jason Bateman and me in gym shorts and sneakers. I don't know when I became that guy. When I came to Los Angeles years ago, I'd look at these middle-aged jackasses wearing gym shorts and sneakers in the middle of the day, and I thought, 'God, I hope I never become one of those tools.' Anyway, I'm one of those tools."

Fans of Bateman and Arnett's TV and movie careers need not worry about DumbDumb becoming more of a priority than, say, the long-overdue Arrested Development movie. "[DumbDumb] is and always will be in second position to our day job," Bateman says. "When we're not working, which is often for an actor, we're in here putting in long days of writing."

In addition to the "Always Open" videos, DumbDumb has a plethora of projects in the pipeline, including a potential dream collaboration for Canadian-born Arnett with the National Hockey League. With this flurry of activity, expect Bateman and Arnett to continue pushing the boundaries in the marriage between comedy and commerce. "Our daily objective is to try and stay true to the idea that we're not going to become a neon sign for these brands," Arnett says. "We'll just always try to do the funniest thing within the realm of our own capabilities."

Despite the buzz surrounding their fledgling business, the DumbDumb duo tries not to look too far into the future. "Who knows?" Arnett says. "In a year, we might be in PAPER magazine's Where Are They Now? issue. Headline: 'What Happened to These Dumb Dumbs?' With a big picture of me and a really small picture of Jason. Contractually, he has to be one third the size of me."  ★

DumbDumb stills (top to bottom): David Koechner with Will Arnett and Jason Bateman in "Always Open" for Dennys; Bateman in "The Dancer" for Orbit gum; Rachel Harris with Bateman and Arnett with Aubrey Plaza in "The Prom Date" for Orbit gum.