The US beer market is a tough place to compete.

Hundreds of brands spend billions of dollars to attract drinkers.

While consumers are drinking less beer, are less loyal to brands.

US beer volume growth is essentially flat.

All of this makes the task of promoting Dos Equis beer a challenge for brand owner Heineken USA.

Enter the Most Interesting Man In The World.

A dashing combination of James Bond and Ernest Hemingway, the Most Interesting Man is Dos Equis’ advertising icon, inspiring drinkers to lead a more interesting life. He does not always drink beer, but when he does, the Most Interesting Man prefers Dos Equis.

The campaign began in Dos Equis’s heartland in 2007 and went national in 2009. In 2012, the campaign won gold radio and silver TV lions.

Since the campaign launched, Dos Equis volume sales have more than doubled, while US import beer sales have flat-lined. The brand enjoyed sales growth of over 20% in 2012.

The Most Interesting Man campaign is directly responsible for this growth.

It has built awareness and differentiation for the brand.

It outperforms all other beer advertising.

It has built a fan base on Facebook and driven search volume on Google.

It continues to grow penetration, six years into the campaign’s life.

It has won over distributors, who praise the campaign and even co-fund it.

It has taken Dos Equis from an obscure regional player to a brand legend.

Stay thirsty, and effective, my friends.

Amidst all the lights, glitz and digitization of Las Vegas, we took the oldest medium in history, the painted wall, and turned it into a 50ft calling card for the most interesting man. Our target fears missing out on all of the interesting things life has to offer. So we got their attention by asking a simple question, “Looking for an interesting time?.” It was just enough of a tease to motivate them. That, plus a new take on a rarely used form of media, an answering machine, guaranteed the initiative would resonate with Dos Equis drinkers.

The response from our target audience was overwhelming. To date, the Most Interesting Man’s answering machine has received 2,078 total calls, more than double our projected response, and has been used for a total of 3,888 minutes and counting. Most impressively, the voicemail has held callers on the line for an average of 77 seconds. With popularity far surpassing what we had originally anticipated, this once Vegas-only initiative is currently being prepped for national seeding via in store posters, bar napkins and coasters, guerrilla stickers and other point of sale executions.