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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O' Carroll in Chicago. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and do give our show a five star rating on any of the podcast platforms if you're enjoying the show. That always helps increase our viewership and listenership. We appreciate it. Hey, a lot of things going on. We are going to be at the New York Effie's judging, which is happening early next week, which is what, the 9th or something like that? So we're going to be there. This will be my first time at the Fes judging event and what's exciting for me is I get to sort of go in and out of the judging rooms and sort of see if I can sniff out some great new cases and get to interview a bunch of people. And then we're doing a special fireside chat on Tuesday night for the FE judges. I mean, I think there's like 150 judges that come through over the course of the two days that were there. We then head to San Francisco for our live show on Thursday night, March 12th at 6 o'. Clock. We're recording live at Uber and we've got a great panel that are going to be joining us. We have the heads of marketing for Uber, for Airbnb, for Coinbase, and for Colab, which is a private equity and venture capital group. And our conversation is going to be centered around life in the Valley. So join us there. You can learn more and get tickets on our website@onstrategyshowcase.com on the homepage you'll see the Live Tour tab. Give that a click and get your tickets today. We appreciate it. The other thing is we are starting our six episode series planning for effective Outcomes. You may remember we did this a couple of years ago. It was really popular. We're updating it for 2026 and what we in retrospect realized we didn't do was include client voices and media strategy voices. So that's what's going to be included this year. And I'm really excited that we're kicking off our first episode with a roundtable of CMOs and we're going to be talking about the process they go through internally in defining business goals, defining marketing goals, how they get to them, how they ensure that they're as valid as they can be, and how they ultimately get to a client brief and in making sure that the client brief reflects all that they've planned for internally. So the series is going to work this way, where we take the steps in the planning process from the initial stage inside the client all the way to the execution and metrics on the back end. We're going to break it into six separate shows and have experts in each of those episodes. So, for example, for our first episode with clients, we have Adam Craw, global head of prime marketing for Amazon. We have Colin Cavanaugh, CMO for Pernod Ricard out of New York City, and George Felix, CMO for Brinker International Brands. That's the restaurant brands. You may know George most recently for his brilliant work on Chili's, and so excited about that. Then our second episode, we have another great panel. We'll talk more about that later on. Let's get back to today's show. This is a campaign that has made what we hope will be a triumphant return. Dos Equis, the Most Interesting man in the World, is back, thanks to Heineken and the creative gurus over at lep. Now, you may be amongst the many people like me who were like, why did this campaign go away? It had started, I think in roughly 2006, had done tremendous growth for the brand right through to 2016. Then things started to slow down in terms of growth. And the general sense was that the actual campaign, the Most Interesting man in the World, would need to evolve somehow. So then that sort of evolved into Dissolve, and the campaign ended around 2016. And now 10 years later, it is back. And I couldn't be happier to see it back. It's a great example of a campaign that reflects everything we're taught about what makes for effective work long term. We're going to hear about that during this conversation with Jim Curtis, Chief Creative Officer at Lapubre in New York City, part of the Publicist group. And Matt Saltzstein is VP Brand Marketing for the Dos Equis, the Tucati and the Red Stripe brands inside Heineken in New York City. I loved this conversation. This is just my kind of shit, where we dig in deep and we sort of expose some of the great things that happened along the way. So is the story about the return of the most interesting man in the world? Here's a spot from the old campaign. If you end the new campaign about about its return, hope you enjoy it.
- [05:22]
B
He was the most interesting man in the world. Then the unthinkable he forgot everything. For 10 years he's been uninteresting but when all seemed lost there was a light at the back of the garage fridge. Hey, I don't always drink beer. When I do, I think I prefer Dosakis he is once again the most interesting man in the world. I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I still prefer dos sakis. Stay thirsty, my friends.
- [06:19]
A
Just for those who are outside the US market and those who don't, who aren't in the know, can you tell us, Matt, a little bit about the Do Equis where it stands today, both as a brand and as a business?
- [06:33]
C
Yeah, I appreciate the question there for context. So big picture, you know, both the brand and the business are, are in healthy shape. Business side, you know, we effectively before the most interesting man ever ran and Starting back in 2005, we were about number 57 in US market share and then over that 10 year period climbed all the way up to 19 or 20.
- [06:55]
D
Right.
- [06:56]
C
So just, just inside the top 20. A big run. I'd say more recently from the brand or from a business perspective, you know, we've effectively had flat share for a while now. So if you look at us pre Covid just before to now, we're just around that 1% mark. It's fair to say we're looking for the next era of growth for sure. From, from a business perspective, from a brand perspective, you know, you might not know this. We're actually about 10th or 11th in mindshare. So if you look at brand equity, we all have different ways of measuring it, but it's a loved brand. Right. It's clearly still irrelevant in the minds of a lot of consumers. Heads the challenge we have and what one of the things we were trying to address with this campaign was our awareness or just being more top of mind. Right. Because the reality is when we really dug in with consumers, we didn't, we really weren't making people talk enough about Dos Equis or think often enough about the brand. And that was sort of the frame from which we, you know, brought the brief to Jim and team.
- [07:53]
A
So when you, when you look at the Do Equis drinker, can you describe who that person is?
- [07:59]
C
Yeah, you know, generally, yeah, it's, it's, it's sort of a broad profile. We have a, we have a real geography or geographic strength in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, certainly in, in the Southwest. Definitely we are a national brand. If you look at our kind of demographics, you know, we, I think we did a good job recruiting a generation of drinkers that you might call Gen X today and you know, are probably people that are shopping a lot of grocery stores around the country. We've been working on recruiting a new generation. Right. And if you look at actually our split, you know, we, we have, you know, roughly 40% of our consumers are Hispanic and 40% are general market. So it's pretty broad base of consumers and we have a job to do both to, let's say, reawaken that generation we had recruited as well as recruit a new generation to the brand.
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A
So Modelo would be a big competitor
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C
for you, certainly big competitor for anyone in beer, you know, really effectively, basically
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A
number one now, right? In certain.
- [08:59]
C
Yeah, depending on which channel you look at, which year, you know, you'd have Nicola, Vulture up there too. Two massive brands that have done a good job certainly building their brands.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So when you talk about the brand and you said that business wise you've gone, you went sort of flat. Was that post 2016 or that more recently that that has happened? Do you, do you connect that in any way with the end of this campaign, the original campaign?
- [09:26]
C
I, I think if you, if you look at the, let's say the end of the, the original campaign, you know, there was a period there of roughly double digit growth for, for 10 years and at the tail end of it, in the final year there was still growth, but it was much smaller. It was 1 or 2% category was probably around the same at the time. So let's say share growth had tailed off. And I think the team at the time were trying to find a way to bring fresh consistency to the campaign. Right. And so they obviously kept a lot of what was working. A lot of the music, a lot of the lines. They, they did change actors and you know, you'd probably say that that execution fell flat for different reasons that we could explore. But commercially, really over time, I would say it was a still like, more like a steady share performance, not a sudden dip up or down. If you look at the last 10 years, it's fairly steady, around 1% of the US beer market. We never really lost that love. It's just that we haven't done a good enough job of bringing a new generation in.
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A
So Jim, for you, how would you describe the whole legacy of this campaign? I mean, it's amazing to bring it back. When you look back on that creatively, I don't know how it stands up for you in terms of the, the uniqueness of that work and the power of that campaign.
- [10:43]
D
I mean, it's a big question, Fergus. I mean, I think it's one of the most iconic ad campaigns of all time. I mean, I remember a conversation with Matt when we first started working together and I said, hey, I'm really excited to work on this. When I was studying advertising, I had a, A CD of the. The best, most interesting man lines in my.
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A
In.
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D
In my car. That's how insane that, that's how insane I am about just listening to the audio. No, my friends honestly thought that I'd lost my mind because we were driving along and they were like, when are the ads going to be finished? I was like, no, this is it. This is, this is, this is the good stuff. So look super daunting, obviously to take it on, but also a good daunting. You know, I knew the idea extremely well, obviously, because I knew a lot of the old work. And then Matt and the team laid out the challenge really clearly. So we were set up very well.
- [11:51]
A
So before we go forward, I want to go back and. Because there's some really interesting things that I've sort of read and, and I wanted to kind of run it by you guys. First of all, let's just talk about the 800 pound gorilla, which is why did this campaign stop? Because I think most people kind of go, holy shit, this is like the perfect example of what we're told we should do in marketing with evidence and with best practices and with all of the effectiveness, effectiveness metrics. And you're bringing it back. And I think most people are applauding it. Why did it go away? I mean, what happened, Matt?
- [12:35]
C
Yeah, I think obviously hindsight's always 20 20. And I should preface by saying I've been in this role for a couple years. I was not here when those decisions were taken. I love that.
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A
It's a good start. I was not there. This is not me. But I'll explain it. Well, it's not.
- [12:48]
C
That's not really where I'm going. I'm more just saying I wasn't, you know, I didn't have all the context. Of course, we've been trying to piece it together ourselves. I think if you look at it, I think we all know as marketers, you want to be consistent with a very clear, relevant message over time. Over time, just use your assets and bang at home, right? Don't be changing every year. I think that the team knew that and they knew they had gold in this campaign. That's why it was there for 10 years. Certainly that's a long time. First of all, how many campaigns go for 10 years? So I do wonder how many times maybe before they thought about it and just sort of stuck with it in the right ways. I think what they tried to do was actually to keep, keep the idea, but to evolve it and try and keep it modern, try and keep it fresh. And probably what happened was the execution perhaps didn't land and maybe one of the learnings would have been, you know, maybe that execution wasn't the right one. But you. You probably still have an idea there that you could keep going. And instead of, of course, the. We went, we went down a path of trying some new things that just over time drifted not only the advertising, but also the brand itself. Because one of the things I discovered in the role as I came in was in our brand position. And this is, by the way, I know you had to eat big fish on recently. I was listening to that episode. They actually helped us take a step back and look at the brand position and get really sharp on the role of interesting at the very center of it, because we'd lost a little bit of that over time each year. And so that's one of the things that really led to us getting that sharp brief back to Jim and the team was, I think, in the course of sort of trying to evolve the most interesting man and evolve the advertising, we had lost a little bit of sight of our brand essence and what really made us who we were. But yeah, no doubt when you look back on it, it's easy to say now, of course, that looks like a mistake and there are certainly some lessons in there, but we ourselves have the same questions as we've tried to sort of unpack the last 10 years.
- [14:43]
A
Yeah. So, Jim, what was the case for bringing the character back?
- [14:48]
D
I think that a lot of ad agencies make the mistake of client comes along and says, this is the challenge we want to do. And the agency says we want to flex all our muscles and we want to wipe everything clean. And we want to create something that no one's ever seen before, that we own entirely. But in this case, Dose Equis arrived in the room with a suite of brand assets that I knew were just unbelievably powerful. Obviously, you have the man, you have the lines, you know those one liners. You have Will Lineman the voiceover, you have the music, which is super. Like, I bet you you can't have hummed it now, but I bet you if you list hear it for two bars, you'll know it. So I knew I had these ingredients that were just so powerful that all I needed to do. Well, all we needed to do was remix them in a way that brought them across in a fresh way, but also kind of brought them into 2026. Because when the man first Came out social, wasn't where it is today. And in a weird way, it's the perfect social media campaign. And it became that. So after 2016, yeah, of course, they moved in a separate direction. But the most interesting man never left the Internet. He lived in memes in that culture. So that was the challenge in my mind. I was like, we gotta start with the brand assets that you invested salience in over time, and we need to deliver it in a totally different way.
- [16:29]
A
So how tough was it or how easy was it to make the case internally for bringing the character back? Because, you know, it's easy to say that something was popular when it, when it finished, or, you know, in 2015, 2016, when it finished, how did you make the case or build that case in order to bring it back and, you know, bring it back 10 years later?
- [16:49]
C
Well, I mean, I'd start by just saying we were blessed to work at a company like Heineken, who has such a creative legacy, really understands these topics. Of course, that does make it more difficult when there's a lot of experts that you do need to convince. What we did was, you know, we started like anyone I think should here was with the consumer and just try to get a baseline understanding, qualitatively and quantitatively of what consumers today thought of that character, whether they recognize him, knew him, etc. Couple of stats that I think you, you may find really interesting. One is if we just showed consumers a picture of the most interesting man, but not the brand, and just the picture said, can you attribute a brand to this person? Over half, just over half of America and different cohorts could do that. Right. So the power of a distinctive asset was very high to start with. We also just took the step to retest the ads from the past. Right. Said, hey, like, if you just ran these today in the way that we test ads, what can we learn? And learned a lot there. Two main things I'd say. One is that again, the recall was off the chart. So it's like a 97th percentile brand recall of these ads that you're like, you know how hard that is to do. The other thing is they're just very entertaining and they stood the test of time. And so in the end, you had about over 80% of consumers wanting, saying they wanted that character to come back. Right. Different reasons for it, but a lot of it was the humor and the entertainment and just helping them imagine an interesting life. So we certainly, qualitatively and quantitatively, I'd say, had a, an inkling that there's something there. Clearly it's a distinctive asset. Clearly still relevant. The question was, and that's. This is what we brought to the team. You know, our. Our headline brief was we wanted to make Do Equis interesting again. Right. And we thought we had a distinctive asset that we wanted to awaken.
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A
It wasn't that you. You didn't say, we want to use Jonathan Goldsmith again. It was just.
- [18:48]
C
No, we. We just said, look, we have just learning. We have this learning that went with that brief to say, there could be something here, there might be a lot of other ways. And Jim's team were very creative in thinking about a number of ways they could do it. It just happened to be that in the end of that process, bringing him back to the campaign was some of the secret sauce we thought to have a successful relaunch.
- [19:13]
A
So, Jim, you get that brief, which doesn't necessarily dictate bringing back the character. How do you get to the process of saying, well, he is the best solution?
- [19:25]
D
Well, look, I asked the teams for both ways, you know, so I think that. I'm trying to remember it now, Matt. But. But we presented a few ideas with him and. And a few without. And then you just try and stand back like a normal human being, go, what's going to. What's going to cut through? And I think that the huge advantage of bringing him back is that he's a character that's already in people's lives. He's already in people's minds. So when we flipped him and when we went, okay, we're going to bring him back, but he's come back from Mars. So in 2016, he went to Mars. That's how he left. When he comes back, he's actually been back, and he's been living in suburbia, building model ships and ironing his socks and, you know, eating plain yogurt. I knew that would get cut through because you're taking a character, an iconic character, and you're completely making them act like no one. No one remembers. So it's so, you know, we. We say that it's. It's like what happened to, you know, when Hulk Hogan's flipped or when Michael Jordan went and played baseball or, you know, when Anakin Skywalker, like, you just. Things aren't the way they're meant to be.
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A
But the other. The other thing, though, is that you guys have got to approach him again. So how does that go, Matt? I mean, you guys think you want to include him? Number one, he's in his 80s now. Does he even want to do it? I'd love to hear how you guys approach this. So how do you go and connect with him and invite him back in?
- [21:04]
C
Yeah, obviously we wanted to do that in a very human way. So we wanted to meet him and we had it in quite some time. So my boss and I, he could
- [21:13]
A
have looked very different physically. He could have become a lot less sophisticated looking and worldly.
- [21:19]
C
We just hadn't been in touch in a while. So yeah, it was a really intriguing. We had a little pub lunch with Allison Payne, our cmo and I, with Jonathan just catching up. And you know, one of the things that just struck me was just how many stories he has to tell in real life. You know, like he's just a really interesting person and he kept us entertained just for the lunch itself and his kind of life story. But it was evident from the very, I'd say, second we sat down that he was very interested to reprise the role if it made sense for the brand. I mean, he told us it's hard, kind of hard to believe. But you know, he said he gets more fan mail today than he ever has. This is before we revised anything. This is last summer. He'd say you'd never know it. But yeah, I get letters in the mail from somewhere, some corner of the earth talking about the impact that you've made or made me laugh or whatever it was. So he was extremely excited when we came back and yeah, we're very happy that it worked out.
- [22:21]
A
I watched a clip of him, a recent clip of him on a morning show in, in some part of the world and he was talking about the time when he initially auditioned for this campaign and he said that there was like 500 young guys, great looking young guys. And here's this 65 year old or roughly 65 year old guy who was going to also audition and he auditions and the audition seems to go well. But then the, the audition folks call his representative and say that, well, you know, he's a little old. Tell us about his response. Do you remember what his response was from his agent and who his agent was at the time?
- [23:05]
C
His, actually his wife today was his agent then and I know she had a strong role in, I think pushing back on some of the feedback that they might have had there, effectively saying, like, no, you need an older gentleman to play this role. Because if, you know, if you're going to teach, let's say, people about entertaining stories in life, they need to have wisdom and experience and have really lived. So yeah, I think Barbara gets a lot of credit, rightly so, for helping to seal the deal. And that was for us. I mean, like, if you think, if you reflect on the greatness of that campaign, one of the things was who actually cast like that in beer? It was something totally unexpected, totally different.
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A
So what I heard was he said that, he said that, or she said that. How can the, how can the world's most interesting man be young or how can he not be old to get all of that wisdom? And it was on the basis of that comment that they went back in and they originally hired him, which is a pretty great, fun thing. I'm sorry, Jim, I cut you off there.
- [24:03]
D
No, no, I was just saying that I think that decision probably really opened them up creatively because if you actually look at all the old work, a lot of it is retrospective, you know, so this is the life that he has lived, you know, and it's multimedia, it's black and white footage, it's Super 8. It's, you know, and you can't do that with a, with a 20 year old guy. You know, you go back five years and, you know, he's, he's in his teens. So I think that it was an amazing decision for them to do that because you can say this is, you know, in his 30s, of course, he was doing this. In his 20s, he was doing this. In His 40s, he was doing this. So, you know, when we brought him back, we just had. He had lived more life for us to look back at, which is good.
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C
Yeah.
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A
You know, the case could be made that Will Lyman was a more iconic part of this campaign than the actual actor himself. The voiceover artist for here in the US we know him also as the voiceover for Frontline on pbs. How is it getting him back? I mean, and what would have happened if he wasn't available?
- [25:08]
D
I would have cried. No, I mean, look, that would be the case. I think that, I think Jonathan just takes the. Jonathan's probably just slightly more important in the ingredients. But Will is right there. You know, you hear that voice and even the way that he reads the lines, he brings a lot of character too. So that was never in question. That was a decision that I never explored. I just went, that's, that's the way it's gonna, it's gonna work. And I knew that. So once we had cracked the, the, the launch idea of the, the least most interesting man, which Matt had the, the, the courage and support to buy. Thank you, Matt. I knew that by using his voice against the lines. That didn't. You didn't expect that was the mix that was gonna work really well. Because I knew that, you know, if you had a line like, you know, he arrives at the airport two and a half days early, it's Will lineman's voice. So your brain's going this work, you know, So I knew that. And if we didn't have him that, luckily, Ferguson, that was never a part that I had to deal with.
- [26:20]
A
Love it. So let's talk about how you decided to reintroduce him. Obviously you couldn't just jump into running old work, which we'll get to in a second. But how did you. What was the process of thinking through, okay, this guy went off on a rocket ship or a capsule. How did you get to the point of realizing or coming up with that direction of the way to bring him back? And then we'll explain how you've done it.
- [26:50]
D
Well, look, yeah, obviously we explored a whole bunch of different, different ways, but that was one of the ways was to explain his absence. And I like that a lot. I like creative ideas that take into account really what has happened in the world. And the fact that he hasn't been around for 10 years. I even just want to skip over that. So the unlock was, okay, he hasn't been sitting on Mars for 10 years. He's actually been in this, you know, suburb living a very normal life with amnesia. Because then he has no memory of. Of who he is. And what that allowed us to do is start to create the drip out this content of him acting in a completely different way, unbranded. So again, we were branding it with the iconic assets. We had the music, we had the man, we had the. We had Will Lima, we had, we had the lines. But it never ended with Dose Equis. So the goal was to create that conversation and get as many people as possible thinking, what is this? Who's behind this? What's going on? Which would lead into the launch. Look, in terms of the decision of going like that's what we're going to do. I mean, I think you just remember some moments and obviously Matt and I will scientifically look at everything as much as we can, but then there's a moment, you just feel it in your gut. And yeah, and the, the. One of the lead creative directors on the, on the brand is Sean Buckhorn. And he. I vividly remember him reading the. One of the first scripts we, we wrote and he read the line, stay yogity, my friends.
- [28:39]
A
Yeah.
- [28:39]
D
And the second he read that line. I was like, yeah, that's it. Yeah, because I was like, that's like. It's just the right balance of what you're not expecting.
- [28:52]
A
What you've done is you've created this character. You explained the fact that he's actually. He hit his head in the capsule, in this rocket capsule, space capsule, and now suffers from amnesia, and that's why he's been away for 10 years. And then each of these spots are explaining how he is now the least interesting man in the world, living this vanilla sort of suburban life. So let's play a couple of those spots.
- [29:19]
B
His fashion makes a statement, and that statement is, I love beige. His favorite word is nifty. He is the least most interesting man in the world. I don't always build ships in bottles, but when I do, I prefer to use polyurethane wood varnish. Stay varnished, my friends. When adventure calls, he lets it go to voicemail. He has never met a volume knob that he didn't want to turn down. He is the least most interesting man in.
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D
In the world.
- [30:05]
B
I don't always iron my socks. Oh, wait, I do always iron my socks. Stay wrinkle free, my friends.
- [30:18]
A
Is Jonathan a really interesting guy? This is the character. Is he somebody you can roll out on a, on a, on a ship in front of a bunch of media and people and he's really interesting to talk to? Or is he. Is it just his character risk that he's just not that interesting when you meet?
- [30:35]
D
No, he's the real. He's the real deal. Like. Yeah. And I, I was, I was quite. I was. Because I had met him a couple of times through the creative process online, and, you know, you could tell immediately that he, he had a. He has a fantastic personality. But not until I got to the. The first day on set, which we were shooting in, in Chile, and we were up. There's a scene. I just want to confirm something. There's a scene where he is doing an oil painting of himself blindfolded and the paintings of himself. But he. He's on a cliff top. He's on a snowy cliff top, right? There's no green screen in that at all. You know what I mean?
- [31:17]
C
He.
- [31:17]
D
He literally is standing on that with this incredible. And so I get there on set and he. And. And one of the first things I see is him, Jonathan, looking out across this unbelievable view, smoking a cigar with these aviator sunglasses on. I was like, we're not shooting for like another two hours. But he's. He's this Is him. He's the guy. He's the guy. So, no, he. He has led an unbelievably interesting life. And I think that because of that, the authenticity is kind of like seeps into the lines in the character.
- [31:51]
A
So this I'm going to play. That spot's called Self Portrait. And, you know, listen to some of these lines here. It's like his phone is addicted to him. His sneezes. Bless you. He once won a staring competition with the Sun. I mean, who's writing this stuff?
- [32:10]
D
Well, look, there's. This is. There's a small team, you know what I mean, of, you know, creatives here. We write a shitload of lines. I think that the volume is the key. I wasn't involved in the, you know, the first iteration of the campaign, but I'm guessing it would have been the same for them. Just write a lot along lines. We actually wrote a character bible. We looked at all the old work and we kind of was like, okay, stuff like this works. Stuff like this doesn't work. But there was a final rule in the Bible, which is, this is all subjective. And here's your, you know, use your gut. There are some lines that. That just work better than. Better than others, and you don't know why, you know. So, yeah, I think. Matt, Matt, you even. I think your team wrote a few lines as well.
- [32:57]
C
I think the thing that's. Jim touched on it before because of Will's voice. It's also very hard when you look at the written lines to know which are actually going to land the funniest. So we even have recorded a lot of lines sometimes just to see, well, how do they sound? Because they might look funny. It can work both ways, but you'd be surprised sometimes, like, the very best ones seem to be ones maybe that it needed his magic to just get it over the line.
- [33:22]
A
Yeah, that's Will Lyman, the voiceover guy. Yeah. So here's that spot there. This is Self Portrait.
- [33:30]
B
His phone is addicted to him. He once won a staring contest with the sun. His sneezes. Bless you. He is still the most interesting man in the world. I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer those haggis. Stay thirsty, my friends.
- [33:58]
A
You know, one of the questions that probably a lot of people in. In the effectiveness world will ask you is, can the old work come back? Is there plans to reuse a lot of that work? Because it might just be as ageless as the overall campaign. Those individual executions. How are you guys thinking about that? Jim,
- [34:20]
D
the Shorter answer is yes and no. So we have a. I think we call it the archive map. Well, the first thing is this. A lot of the ads are structured in a way. They're not linear stories. You know, they're vignette scenes. So in a way you can. You can mix and match. And one of the magical rules that we noticed is that the voiceover never is csay of the scene. So it's never. The voiceover is never explaining the vision that you're saying. They're actually two. Two different jokes a lot of the time. So you can move things around really well.
- [34:56]
A
But.
- [34:56]
D
So yes, a lot of the all scenes can work and I think the brand will be. Will be using the best. The best ones and mixing them in here and there. But some of the old scenes aren't as funny anymore because times have changed. You know, we're the world's different. And some of the new things that we're writing and new lines that we're writing wouldn't have been funny 10 years ago. You know, in 2007 or 2006, the line his phone is addicted to him would not have landed. Yeah. You know, so I think that that's. That's what we're doing a lot of it. We're making sure that the lines are landing in. In today's context
- [35:33]
C
and.
- [35:36]
D
Yeah. Using the scenes that still work.
- [35:39]
C
Yeah.
- [35:40]
A
What do you think, Matt, about the work?
- [35:43]
C
I think you're coming into our kitchen table. As we were having the discussions on how to go about this, there was a greatness there that we also had data to show us still can work, we think. Right. Like, you can look at the data scoring and say. But we also applied some judgment to say, you know, we. We thought we needed to modernize the campaign and have a balance. And actually, if you look at even the. The reveal spot that ran in the national championship game, that does have a few scenes, they're quick, but that were reminders of. Of. Of the most interesting man when you knew him last and you loved him. You know, we. We had. We've had conversations about like, this was not just like a sort of campaign return. This was. This is like an entertainment. This is a sequel. Right. And sequels are full of potential traps. Right. And trying to navigate those to still give the entertainment that people love. But also the other learning I'd say we had is. And we've learned it from that least most interesting man face. Consumers were quite hungry and gave us a lot of permission to explore that character. So they were very intrigued by him not being interesting, and that made him even more human, even more relatable. So it just gives us more confidence that he's got a sort of life story that we would never want to skip over. That that's amazing. And then we just want to do our part to add depth to his travails.
- [37:04]
A
How do you begin to roll this out outside of the commercials? How do you see it rolling out in social and experiential, given that this guy is in fact pretty interesting when you meet him, does he now go on tour or how do you roll him out?
- [37:20]
C
Big question. And actually also in the brief was that we wanted a social first approach to this whole thing. Right. So I know we've talked about the advertising, certainly at the big moments, but we revamped our own social team internally and in partnership with Jim's team to make sure we had enough thinking beforehand and then, let's say, capacity to really do this differently than we had before. So deliberately, actually, in that first phase, we spent a lot of time, the least, most interesting man, giving him Personas like he had a LinkedIn profile, he had his own Instagram profile, he was involved in conversations. You know, he was a real person online for that, for that week. And we're just carrying that through to everything we do. You might, you may have seen, leading into the big game this year, Jim and team came up with an idea to, to effectively have a Super bowl ad, which we had, but we were only going to run it if the networks paid us.
- [38:16]
A
Right.
- [38:16]
C
And, and there was quite a fun website and, you know, interaction that people could have. That's right.
- [38:22]
A
I forgot about that.
- [38:23]
D
We're still waiting, Fergus. We're still waiting. We haven't. There's no, no one's played up.
- [38:27]
A
Matt, what did you learn along the way that surprised you as a marketer? What do you, what do you think some of the lessons should be for others?
- [38:36]
C
Yeah, I think, you know, when I came into the room a couple years ago, you know, one of the things I was trying to wrap my head around was and I tried to do this, probably a lot of people do, you know, when was this brand at its, at its best? When, when would. Often you'll have a golden period or you'll have periods of spikes just getting under the skin of those spikes of what. What was happening then. Right. And, and for this brand, the most interesting man in the world campaign was happening. And so, you know, try to diagnose what was working. And I do think there's a specific learning around distinctive assets or, you know, we all call them different things. Fluent devices or the things that are only you right and truly make you stand out could only be you, right? And for us, those two things were the most interesting man. No other brand could could have him or see him. And it's red X's. And really we done a pretty good job with Red X's the last 10 years, but we had fallen off from this really fluent device in people's minds. So, you know, pay attention. I used to say it was. It felt a little bit like trying to market Frosted Flakes without telling the tiger. Right. For a while it just didn't quite feel right. And, you know, we've only been back here a month or two, but things just now feel right. And I think that there's always going to be something in truly understanding your one or two distinctive assets and making sure that you laser focused on using them visually in your stories, in your packaging, all of it is an important part of the mix.
- [40:01]
A
Listen, guys, thank you both so much. Good luck as you roll this out. We'll be watching to make sure it's as great as it could be. It is. Matt Saltine, vp brand marketing, the Heineken company. He's in New York. And Jim Curtis, chief creative officer of Lapubre in New York, part of the publicist group. Great to have you both on. Thanks a lot. And we're excited to see where everything goes.
- [40:23]
D
Thanks, Fergus.
- [40:24]
C
Thanks, Fergus.
- [40:25]
D
Great to meet you.
- [40:26]
A
Likewise. And we'll see everyone on the next episode.