Ryan Reynolds Perfected The Art Of #SponCon With This Viral Share

Ryan Reynolds: movie star, film producer, doting husband and father, and...marketing genius?

The Deadpool star juggles many roles, and his latest has him overseeing creative direction for Aviation Gin, the Portland-based spirit brand Reynolds owns a stake in. After the deal was struck in February 2018, Reynolds said he planned to be directly involved in daily business operations, per The Oregonian — and indeed, over the last year, he has become the very ubiquitous face of Aviation.

In the process, Reynolds made the smart move of infusing Aviation Gin’s public image with his sly and irreverent sense of humor. Aviation Gin ads have since taken the internet by storm, as evidenced by his latest #spon post: a fake Amazon product review by the user “Champ Nightengale” [sic] that grows more darkly hilarious by the sentence.

“I loved this review of Aviation Gin someone sent me after I wrote it,” Reynolds tweeted on Saturday. An accompanying screenshot of the review, complete with a photo of the gin bottle, opens with the subject line, “Love this product... BUT...”

The review goes on to praise Aviation for being the “smoothest Gin I’ve ever tried,” but Nightengale did have some issues with it: namely, he wished “they’d provide some kind of warning about how much you’re supposed to have.”

The evening really took off after that (no pun intended).

“When I woke up the next day, I mentioned to my wife Linda that last night must have been a REAL blowout because I slept in my clothes. Even my shoes!” Reynolds as Nightengale wrote, leading into a very amusing, alcohol-driven plot twist: “I also noticed it was really hard to look out the window at the Seattle skyline. Partly because of the bright sun (I've always been sensitive to light) but also because I don't live in Seattle. I live in Coral Gables, Florida. Also, it's important to note, until that morning, I'd never met anyone named Linda.”

Like many of Reynolds’ online jokes, this post went very, very viral, with nearly 10,000 retweets and over 97,000 faves on Twitter and more than 627,000 likes over on Instagram at time of publication.

Deadpool established Reynolds’ track record as a clever, personable, social media-savvy ad man — remember the Deadpool Bob Ross parody? Or his collab with Céline Dion? — and his work with Aviation Gin just solidified that.

“I literally chew and blow bubbles with pop culture; I love pop culture so much,” Reynolds told Adweek. “Deadpool loves pop culture the same way I do, so you really get to kind of stretch the boundaries of your own imagination and you get to do things you never thought possible, certainly in a marketing world. That’s also what we do with Aviation. It’s, ‘How can we tackle something that is culturally relevant right now and play with it and have fun with it and be self-deprecating and not take ourselves too seriously?’”