Here at Consumerist headquarters, we enjoyed Netflix’s original programming for April Fool’s Day 2014: streaming films of bacon frying and rotisserie chickens roasting. They had a lovely, meditative quality, and made fine sleep aids. Would they make a good advertisement, though? That’s what Arby’s aims to find out with their mission to create the longest-ever TV advertisement.

Maybe it’s a natural evolution. The first-ever TV ad was only 10 seconds long, and now we have program-length extended infomercials. Why not run 13 hours of meat-roasting footage?

The Arby’s ad promotes the chain’s new brisket sandwich, and the crew who made the video say that it was filmed in the smokehouse where the actual briskets that will be used nationwide are cured.

“The real news about this sandwich is the brisket is smoked for 13 hours and really nobody knows that,” the man behind this ad told the New York Times. What better way to get the message across to customers that the smoke flavor isn’t bottled than to show the meat being smoked, live on camera?

The whole 13-hour smoking process will show on broadcast TV in Duluth, Minnesota tomorrow afternoon. (It has to show on a real TV station, not just online, in order to make the Guinness Book of World Records.) The rest of us will have to wait until next week, when they will stream the ad online, offering cash prizes to viewers that will pop up at random. At the end of the epic film, the company’s executive chef slices off a piece and assembles a sandwich on-camera. Of course.

Televising Sizzling Meat to Bump Up Sales of a Brisket Sandwich [New York Times]

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