First link is Dos Equis's own channel. The second is a fan compilation, which is honestly the better way to meet him, because the whole trick only reveals itself once you have heard eight of these in a row.
Imported beer advertising in 2006 was a single ad remade forty times. Beach, boat, friends, a cold bottle held up to the light, a life you are supposed to want. Corona owned the beach. Heineken owned the party. Everyone was selling the same aspiration with the same footage, and the aspiration was always you, but on holiday.
Dos Equis was a small brand with a small budget and no way to outspend any of that. So the useful question was not "what do beer drinkers want?" It was "why does none of this land?" And the answer is that a man being told to aspire to a beach can tell he is being sold to. Aspiration delivered directly is embarrassing. Aspiration delivered as an anecdote about somebody else is a story you repeat at work the next day.
The other half of the insight is sharper and slightly rude: nobody believes an endorsement from someone who is paid to give it. Every celebrity in the category was there to tell you they loved the product. Every viewer knew they did not.
Invent a man whose legend is so absurd that the beer becomes a footnote, then have him decline to endorse it.
Read that first line again. It is a negative. The brand's entire ninety-second build ends with the hero telling you he mostly drinks something else. There is no product benefit anywhere in the campaign. No taste claim, no ingredient, no occasion, no reason to buy. The proposition is a man's raised eyebrow.
The structure never changes, which is the point. A narrator reels off escalating, unverifiable feats over grainy pseudo-archive footage of a much younger man. Then we cut to the present: a silver-bearded gentleman in a bar, surrounded by beautiful women who are listening rather than draping, and he delivers the two lines to camera.
Jeff Kling, then a creative director at Euro RSCG New York, wrote it. Jonathan Goldsmith, a working character actor for four decades who had mostly been killed off in Westerns, played him. Steve Miller of @radical.media directed. Goldsmith reportedly won the role partly by improvising in the audition as though the character were an old sailing friend, which is exactly the register the ads run in.
Then the format did the work. Because the joke lives in the narration and not in a set piece, a new spot costs almost nothing to write and can be made forever. It ran nationally from 2009 and starred Goldsmith for a full decade. The lines became a meme template before most brands had worked out what a meme was, which meant the public wrote and distributed thousands of free Dos Equis ads on the brand's behalf.
The stupid: your brand is a challenger import with no money, so cast a seventy year old man nobody has heard of, give him a beard, film him not doing anything, and have him tell the audience that he does not usually drink your product. Spend the entire ad on obviously false claims about a fictional person. Say nothing whatsoever about the beer. The client's brand manager reportedly rejected it and asked for something more conventional, which is the most predictable sentence in this entire email.
The smart: the withheld endorsement is the endorsement. A man of that stature saying he prefers your beer when he does drink beer is a far higher-status recommendation than any enthusiastic one, because enthusiasm reads as paid and restraint reads as taste. And the character solves the budget problem structurally. Dos Equis could not buy share of voice, so it built an asset that generates its own: a repeatable joke format with a catchphrase, which turns viewers into distribution. Every "I don't always X, but when I do, Y" on the internet for a decade was unpaid media. Most importantly, it is not transferable. Corona could copy a beach. Nobody could copy him.
The steal: when you cannot outspend the category, do not make a better version of its ad. Make an asset the category cannot borrow, and let the audience carry it for you.
What we keep coming back to is the discipline of the sign-off. It would have been so easy to let him love the beer. One rewrite, one nervous client note, and the line becomes "I always drink beer, and I always drink Dos Equis", and the whole thing collapses into every other ad. The campaign's entire value sits inside one word, "always," used in the negative. That is what a decade of holding your nerve buys you.
The second thing worth stealing is the format. This is not a spot, it is a machine for making spots. Compare it to Snickers, which we ran on the first of this month: same species of idea, a rule rather than an execution, which is why both survived long enough to become furniture.
Straight talk, and this one needs it. The +22% figure and the "sales doubled" claim both trace back to the agency and to press reporting rather than to audited disclosure, and Heineken has never published the underlying numbers. Treat them as directionally true and precisely unproven. The two figures we trust most are the recent ones, because they were used to justify spending money: when Dos Equis tested bringing the character back, the decade-old ads still scored in the 97th percentile for brand recall and 83% of people exposed to the original campaign said they wanted it to return. That is a fifteen year old idea outperforming whatever was made last quarter.
And the honest coda: it stopped working, or rather the brand stopped it. Goldsmith was retired in 2016 and sent to Mars in his final spot, replaced by a younger actor, then by "Keep It Interesante." Dos Equis retail sales fell 8% in 2025, badly underperforming Modelo and Corona. In January 2026 they brought Goldsmith back, the conceit being that he had spent the lost decade in an amnesiac fog, ironing socks, until he found a Dos Equis at the back of the fridge. Which tells you what the character was actually worth, and how expensive it is to find out the hard way.
Client: Dos Equis (Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery; Heineken USA in market)
Agency: Euro RSCG New York, later Havas Worldwide
Creative: Jeff Kling, creative director and writer
Director: Steve Miller, @radical.media
The man: Jonathan Goldsmith, 2006–2016 and again from 2026
Launched: 2006, national from 2009
Wikipedia, campaign history, taglines and casting
PR Newswire, the Sustained Success Effie
Forbes, how it almost did not happen and who fought for it
MediaPost, the 2026 return and the testing behind it
Muse by Clios, the rise and the fall
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: