Marcel Winatschek

Robert Downey Jr. Is Holding a Cat

In 2013, HTC hired Robert Downey Jr. to explain what HTC stands for. The answer, delivered across a series of increasingly strange vignettes, was: everything. "Hungarian Tuba Concert." "Hot Tea Catapult." "Hot Tempered Cheerleaders." Ships wrapped in aluminum foil. Trolls washing cars. Downey cradling a cat with the precise energy of a man who knows he’s being paid generously enough to carry a cat through an advertisement and is making his peace with it.

What made it work, at least briefly, was that Downey had enough charisma in surplus to sell the joke without condescending to it. He was deep in Iron Man cultural saturation at the time, and the ads used that familiarity to do something slightly self-aware—here is a famous person behaving absurdly, and we’re all going to agree this represents freedom. The "Happy Telephone Company" reading was the one that actually landed. Probably the most honest thing in the whole campaign.