Proximo Spirits, the owner of Jose Cuervo, launched a global marketing campaign called Liberate Your Spirit in June 2024, aiming to move the world's best selling tequila brand beyond its reputation as a party shot, Campaign UK reported.
The push followed Proximo's appointment of London agency Creature as Jose Cuervo's first retained global creative shop in January 2024, alongside Mexican production company Oxigeno, ending a stretch in which the brand had worked without a single agency of record.
What the Liberate Your Spirit films actually show
The centerpiece film runs 60 seconds and opens on jimadors, the farmers who harvest blue agave, gathered around a campfire wondering what becomes of their crop. The scene cuts to a crow that travels from the agave fields into city bars and clubs, weaving past young drinkers, before returning to the farmland where one jimador raises his glass to his companions. Creature also produced two 30 second films with 15, 10 and 6 second cutdowns, spread across digital out of home, social media and paid and organic digital placements. The work is running in markets including the UK.
Who signed off on the new direction
Manuel Orive Guajardo, global director of tequila and mezcal at Proximo Spirits, said the digital push was meant to reset how tequila is perceived across EMEA and APAC. Creature's chief creative officer, Stu Outhwaite-Noel, described the brief as a chance to show the drink could be sipped and savoured rather than shot down in one. Creature won the account after a competitive pitch against undisclosed rival agencies, with the brief calling for work that would drive consideration of the brand at scale, protect and grow share of mind, and demonstrate the versatility of tequila.
The company and family behind the brand
Jose Cuervo is distributed worldwide by Proximo Spirits, a company the Beckmann family founded in 2007 that now sits under the publicly traded Becle, S.A.B. de C.V. Juan Domingo Beckmann Legorreta, sixth generation of the founding family, chairs and runs Becle. The ownership history has not been a straight line: the Beckmanns sold a 45 percent stake in the brand to Grand Metropolitan in 1989, a holding that passed to Diageo when Grand Met merged with Guinness in 1997. Diageo tried and failed to buy the rest of Jose Cuervo outright for more than 3 billion dollars in the early 2010s; when talks collapsed, Proximo took over global distribution from Diageo starting in July 2013. Becle went public on the Mexican Stock Exchange in February 2017, raising more than 900 million dollars while the Beckmann family kept majority control. Cuervo remains the top selling tequila brand by volume, moving 8.9 million cases in the United States in 2024 according to trade tracker The Spirits Business, though that figure slipped from prior years as demand shifts toward 100 percent agave tequila. Production runs through the La Rojena distillery in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, registered as NOM 1122 and frequently described as the oldest active distillery in Latin America.
What this means
A wire story about advertising is not a claim about what is in the bottle. Nothing published around Liberate Your Spirit describes the composition of the Cuervo expressions carrying the new creative work, and no producer disclosure has been reviewed here. Tequila's premium tier has spent the past decade building reputation on published production detail rather than film; Siete Leguas Blanco, for one, carries a TW Score of 86 of 95 built on that kind of disclosure. Whether a mass market flagship's new image holds up in a category that increasingly asks producers to show their work is the question this campaign does not answer.