After 10 years in retirement, Dos Equis’s Most Interesting Man is back

He’s baaaaccckkk.

After 10 years in retirement, Dos Equis’s iconic character, the Most Interesting Man, is making his return. While the Heineken-owned beer brand has been setting up the return of the Most Interesting Man with teasers since earlier this month, the full story and campaign are dropping Monday during the College Football Playoff (CFP) National Championship.

Dos Equis had been experiencing a bit of an identity crisis for the past couple of years, according to Heineken USA CMO Ali Payne. After some “soul-searching,” her team turned to its archive and decided it was time for the Most Interesting Man to sip again, albeit with some more modern twists meant to bring the “Stay Thirsty” campaign into the social media age for younger drinkers.

“Even if you were actually below legal drinking age when the Most Interesting Man was around, consumers today still remember [him] because of the meme and how it’s lived on socially,” Payne told Marketing Brew. “We think that now, more than ever, given what’s happened post-Covid—people playing it safe, living rather boring lives—that bringing back…the Most Interesting Man as an aspiration for taking the path less traveled and living a rich life was true to the brand, but also exactly what culture and consumers needed.”

Still thirsty

The 60-second spot rolling out Monday explains where the Most Interesting Man has been for the past decade: After hitting his head, he suffered from amnesia and became, devastatingly, uninteresting. Eventually, though, he discovers a Dos Equis in the back of his fridge, sparking memories of his old life.

Teaser content for the campaign started hitting social on Jan. 8, beginning with storytelling around what the Most Interesting Man has been up to, like “wearing beige, doing jigsaw puzzles in the suburbs, watering his orchids, cleaning lint out of his dryer,” Payne said. The content wasn’t heavily branded, but with the original actor and tagline, Dos Equis’s presence wasn’t exactly subtle, an intentional move meant to drive speculation.

The “big reveal,” she said, is going down during the CFP championship game, where the Most Interesting Man will be “sailgating” on a yacht in Miami—as opposed to the less interesting activity of tailgating before kickoff—and the full 60-second spot is set to air during the broadcast.

Logging on

In its original iteration, the Most Interesting Man was purely a TV campaign. Now, consumers won’t just be running into him during live sports—the Most Interesting Man is on social media.

When teasers started running a couple of weeks ago, the character began posting under the handle @leastinterestingman, with content reflecting a lackluster lifestyle. To further lean into the plot, Dos Equis sent mailers to influencers with items like orthopedic sandals, Payne said. The account, though, will officially change to @mostinterestingman on Monday.

The Most Interesting Man is also on LinkedIn, a platform that’s become increasingly popular for athletes and content creators alongside corporate employees. “It has become quite a platform for conversation,” Payne said, and she intends to keep the conversation about the Most Interesting Man going beyond football season.

Her team is already working on the next chapter of the campaign and intends for it to have staying power for years to come, she said. The team has already banked hundreds of “legend lines” for the Most Interesting Man, which are the bits of oft-quotable narration like “all his teeth are wisdom teeth.” Some of those lines will be more modern now, Payne told us, like “his phone is addicted to him.”

Bowled move

The Most Interesting Man’s story will continue during the NFC Championship Game on Jan. 25, but he won’t make an appearance during the Super Bowl, Payne said.

“There’s a lot of noise in the Super Bowl, a lot of revealing early,” she said. “We feel like we may get there anyway, because of all the noise, and that having our own pre-launch was a better strategy.”

Dos Equis already has a “very strong association with college football,” Payne said, including its ongoing college football campaign, “Go for Dos.” Furthermore, starting with college rather than the NFL makes sense for the new campaign, since it’s targeting a slightly younger demographic, especially young Hispanic consumers, she added. The campaign is designed to grow brand awareness, too, which will ideally result in sales and market share growth, Payne said.

“Whilst we can do all this work and it can go viral, where it counts is in the store,” she said, adding that distributors already seem excited about the campaign. “You’ve never seen so much excitement to get out there and build displays with the Most Interesting Man. Our [point of sale] ordering system has gone off the charts…You will be tripping over the Most Interesting Man and Dos Equis displays.”