Vice is a company that would like you to think it is cool all of the time. In fact, Vice is only cool when it does stories about Ebola and stuff. It is not so cool when it tries to be the cool face of Bank of America, which would like to rip you off.

Forget I said that last part— BoA is the fucking bomb ass bank!!! To have!!! For millennials!! Only a Wall Street bank that cares about your youth-ass generation would pay money to Vice Media to sponsor a talk show about money—that’s on fleek! Is it fleek, or flake? Did we say that right? Yeah! This Bank of America-sponsored infomercial should not be thought of as just any infomercial. It is a raw and authentic and unfiltered conversation with you, the millennial consumer, and is not “fake” like most Wall Street bank advertisements, because as you can see in the trailer above:

  • It has a “Vice News” logo on it.
  • It appears to be held in some sort of warehouse, a popular congregating site for millennials.
  • Just look at all the millennials pictured smiling and nodding at the Bank of America-sponsored personal finance information being conveyed to them via Vice News. Enough fucking said.

Lest you think that Vice Media is somehow selling you, the credulous idiot millennial consumer willing to base your banking decisions on what you think is superficially cool, to Bank of America like the mark that you are, please direct your attention to this Variety story explaining what is really happening in this new on fleek personal finance Youtube show: “The show will display the sponsor’s logo at the beginning of each episode, which is similar to the ‘traditional PBS-model of sponsorship,’ a Vice spokesman said. Vice News retains complete editorial control over the program, he added.”

Vice is the PBS of a new generation, so this BoA infomercial is in fact more or less the PBS News Hour of a new generation—yours!!! Have you seen Downton Abbey? They loved to fuck!! On fleek!! With the stipulation that we, Gawker Media, are an organization of “haters” jealously bent on the destruction of Shane Smith, a man much richer than us, allow me to offer you an alternate set of personal finance tips that may require less time to absorb than an entire Bank of America/ Vice News Fucking Raw Ass Banging YouTube Series of a New Generation.

  1. Wall Street banks, such as Bank of America, would love to have your business if you are the sort of person who might be influenced by a Vice YouTube show, because you are probably also the sort of person they can easily rob through the use of overdraft fees.
  2. Most commercial banks are out to suck you, the millennial with relatively little wealth, dry using stealthy fees, but Bank of America is actually shady even by banking standards.
  3. Vice Media chief Shane Smith loves brands and respects brands and that’s how you know that he would never allow his own brand to be tainted by associating with a Wall Street bank that is anything less than on fleek!!

The Bank of all of America. If you think about that shit, it’s crazy.

Update: Former Gawkerer and current New York mag writer Maureen O’Connor appears in this show, and she sent us this about her experience:

As someone involved in the show but still holds a certain level of tribal affection for Gawker, I feel compelled to tell you that I don’t think “infomercial” or even “branded content” is the right description for this show. I was a panelist on an episode about love and marriage, and Bank of America never came up, before or during the episode. The other two panelists had backgrounds studying romance in numbers-driven ways; one was an academic who wrote a book about it, another was a data journalist who knew a lot about demographics, etc. We talked about marriage rates, studies about who falls in love with whom, that sort of thing.

I haven’t seen the ads of course — the same way, if I wrote an article for a magazine, I wouldn’t know what kind of ads were going to appear next to my article. (Hamilton’s blog post was the first time I heard about BoA.) But we taped the entire episode in one go — I even saw Moynihan delivering the intros/outros — so unless something crazy happens in post-production, it’s going to feel like a talk show.