Take this ballad-esque Jameson Irish whiskey commercial:
If you regale people with your stories, they'll buy your booze.
This is about as good as a television ad gets. It has a brooding (but somehow winning) visual style, charming narration, and a crisp conceit that makes the cooked hawk at the end laugh-out-loud funny. Its straight storytelling makes those catchy "Most Interesting Man in the World" commercials look like strings of Chuck Norris jokes made up on the fly.
Don't get me wrong: I don't disdain The Most Interesting Man in the World. My family will pause a discussion when a Dos Equis commercial airs and be in better spirits after having watched it through. Yesterday, my sister texted me a short list of The Man's Most Interesting Attributes.
But the Dos Equis commercials are basically 30-second responses to Seinfeld brought to you in the form of a Far Side cartoon. "He once had an awkward moment––just to see how it felt" is the hip millionaire's retort to the awkwardness of Larry David's culture of self-consciousness. In David's world, visiting your dentist might embroil you in the drama of his kitschy conversion to Judaism. In The Man's, speaking French in Russian somehow works out.
It's The Man's world; we just live in it.
Seth Stevenson, writing for Slate, suggests that The Man is modeled on who the beer-swilling masses (mostly man-children under 35) want to be when they grow up: worldly, bearded aficionados. But the hipster humor Dos Equis deploys is far from sophisticated, getting most of its yuks from puns and half-ironies. "He lives vicariously through himself," the voice-over tells us, though we're left to wonder if that's even possible.
Stevenson offers The Man in the tradition of Wes Anderson and the stead of "cheesecake and frat humor," but that doesn't mean he has ascended to the heights of a true alternative to juvenile humor.
This is nowhere more evident than in the Keith Stone commercials. A combination of The Man's salt-and-pepper suavity and that cheesecake and frat humor, he looks more like a burnout Guns 'n Roses roadie than someone we might call "smooth."
What's more, he's shilling the brew of choice for house parties that only end when the cops arrive. Both Dos Equis and Keystone are yeti piss (chilled yeti piss if you're lucky), but at least Dos Equis is foreign yeti piss. And while The Man is someone young men want to be when they grow up, Keith Stone is at best someone young men want to be for Halloween.
Keith Stone is the poor man's Most Interesting Man.
What these Jameson, Dos Equis, and Keystone campaigns have in common is consistency. They are focused efforts at building their brands through stock characters or familiar motifs; and it's here that Stevenson proves to be somewhat prophetic in identifying the influence of Wes Anderson's protagonists of "infinite skill and superlative quirk."
I should point out, though, that the farther away these campaigns get from Wes Anderson's source material––and the closer they become to each other––the more the Andersonian protagonist's image degrades. So far, we've seen his influence on three campaigns working directly in his shadow, but it's the prerogative of ad men to keep their secrets, well, secret. Disaster strikes when good campaigns are mimicked by bad.
What, do they sell beer now at DQ?
It isn't that Dairy Queen doesn't sell alcohol. It's that we never learn the name of this mustachioed gardener. It's that he does the improbable––he does the impossible. He has the mustache and imposing voice of his predecessors, but he has none of the panache. He is what happens when bad ad men draw their inspiration from better ad men instead of outside source material. He is the most derivative man in the world.
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