In praise of the Dos Equis radio campaign

I’ve praised the Dos Equis “Most interesting man in the world” radio campaign previously. (The TV extension of this campaign is okay, but the radio campaign is the gem.) But I feel compelled to revisit this campaign in light of a couple of new spots I’ve heard recently.

The spots from this campaign are the only radio spots I can recall laughing out loud at in recent memory. Even the “Real Men of Genius” campaign, in its early days, evoked smiles, not out loud laughs from me.

The writer or writers of the Dos Equis spots are funny and inventive in a way that we seldom hear. It’s almost as if whoever the agency is (Euro RSCG? Which office?) put their “A” team on this assignment.

For those who aren’t familiar with the campaign, it consists largely of a series of one liners providing instances of why the most interesting man in the world is the most interesting man in the world, or consequences of being the most interesting man in the world.

Allow me to hopefully not butcher just three of the lines in these current spots that made me laugh. Each line carries an implied “He’s so interesting that . . .” (I’m pulling these from my addled memory, so I may not be precisely word for word):

Alien abductors ask him to probe them.

He is the only man in the world to have aced a Rorschach test.

Many years ago, he built a city out of blocks. Today, 600,000 people live and work there.

As you may be able to tell from this brief list, it is the cumulative effect of several of these grouped together that makes the spots so funny, and, of course, they are meant to be read out loud by the very well cast voiceover guy, rather than read in a blog post.

The reason I’m spending all this time adoring this campaign is that it is a graphic reminder of just how lame and un-funny almost all presumably humorous advertising is. It doesn’t have to make you laugh out loud to be funny, it might simply bring a smile. But SO MUCH of the stuff I see and hear that is intended to be funny is just not. It is failed humor. Humor-like in structure, form and pace. But devoid of actual funny content.

It’s only on the rare occasion when we experience genuinely funny ads that it becomes apparent how bad faux funny advertising (namely, most advertising) is. And how invaluable genuine humor can be to a brand. I’d love to know how Dos Equis sales have been going over the last couple of years. Anybody know?