Tommy’s Margarita

Jose Cuervo teams with NASA for an ‘80s ad campaign

By Marge Radael

HOUSTON • 1983 — Tom McGonnigle couldn’t believe he was sitting with officials at the Johnson Space Center. He was 10 when the space race began in 1955. He got his driver’s license the same day the Soviets launched ​​Yuri Gagarin into space. And as a 19-year-old at Baruch College, he watched with the rest of the world as Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for mankind.

Two decades later, McGonnigle was the newly-named art director at Brannigan, Foster and Pettle, a small New York ad agency that “frequently plays against the big boys and wins,” according to The New York Times. And now he was in Houston, pitching a partnership with NASA for the agency’s biggest client, Jose Cuervo. He was excited. He was nervous. He was sitting next to K. Rampart Foster. 

Foster, an ad legend who founded Brannigan, Foster and Pettle in 1969, was known as a creative genius who channeled out-of-the-box ideas. He was also known as an asshole. The year after starting the agency, Foster created a print ad for Silva Thin cigarettes. “Cigarettes are like women,” the ad read. “The best ones are thin and rich.”

---

Tommy’s Margarita

• 2 oz tequila

• 1 oz lime

• ½ oz agave

Shake ingredients until chilled • Serve in a rocks glass over ice • Salt rim

---

Foster had landed the Cuervo account a couple of years ago. In 1982, his first campaign for the tequila brand, “Bust Loose with Cuervo,” featured a self-assured man, drinking Jose Cuervo in a variety of social circumstances (coaching a beach volleyball team, for instance, or taking off his boots après ski), surrounded by a group of women and their breasts. 

Foster’s new idea for the brand was less misogynistic and more ambitious. 

What if, Foster had proposed to his fellow BF&P creatives a few months back, they made a margarita that could travel to the stars aboard the second flight of Space Shuttle Discovery the following November? It would be an epic way to introduce Jose Cuervo to a new audience, one that was interested in things like space. Foster put together a plan and assembled a pitch for Cuervo. It was solid. 

The Pitch: As soon as NASA agreed to the partnership, camera crews would collect footage of Space Food Systems Laboratory (SFSL) researchers in Houston translating tequila, lime juice and triple sec into space edibles. A campaign using that footage would launch in the summer of 1984 and tease the mid-November main event. On November 15, the day before Discovery STS-51-A was due to return to Earth — Jose Cuervo would launch its Big Bang! print campaign featuring a self-assured astronaut, drinking Jose Cuervo in space surrounded by a group of aliens. 

That same day, the astronauts up in the Shuttle would film themselves making margaritas before beginning the process to return to Earth. After the astronauts landed, a Jose Cuervo-branded vehicle and camera crew would meet them on Runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center and take them directly to Bongo Ron’s on S. Washington Road in Titusville where they would each order a Cuervo margarita. All of that footage would be the basis for a monster Big Bang! campaign through 1985.

The Cuervo guys loved it. Foster made a call to Ivanhoe Skortez, an old drinking buddy who was a shelf-life extension researcher at SFSL. Soon, Foster and McGonnigle were sitting in a sterile conference room at the Johnson Space Center. McGonnigle was pinching himself and dreaming big. 

Skortez came in, gave Foster a big hug, and introduced the lab’s director, Robert Ferb, and NASA’s Alcoholic Beverage Partnerships coordinator, Magdalene von Huush. 

Foster and McGonnigle walked through their pitch, Von Huush nodding along in appreciation of Foster’s moxie. She had been chasing an alliance with Heublein Spirits, Cuervo’s U.S. marketer and its deep pockets for years. This was her best shot yet.

When the ad men were done, Ferb ran through the hurdles: rim salt could clog air vents; triple sec turned viscous in zero gravity and could ooze into equipment and contaminate it; lime pulp would likely find its way into an astronaut’s eye.

But Skortez and his fellow researchers at SFSL were paid to problem-solve, Ferb said. One option was to freeze a fully-prepared margarita to minus 40 degrees, place it in a vacuum chamber then reheat it so the water present in each ingredient transformed from solid to gas, then suck the vapor out, little by little. They could also try thermostabilization or ionizing radiation. 

To avoid the triple sec problem, they could substitute agave syrup, which actually deviscousizes in zero gravity. Von Huush had brought a bottle to show them. She’d also made up a sample agave margarita without the triple sec. 

Foster and McGonnigle were beaming. McGonnigle asked if SFSL researchers would have enough time to figure out all the challenges before the November launch. It was doable, Ferb said, for about $76 million. 

“Our budget for the campaign is just under $11,000,” McGonnigle said. 

Everyone in the room looked at the floor. Ferb looked at the agave margarita Von Huush had brought. It was next to McGonnigle’s left hand.

“Well, drink up, Tommy,” Foster said. “We’ve got a plane to catch.” 

Editor’s Note: Fact-based cocktail historians claim the Tommy’s Margarita was created by Julio Bermejo at Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco in 1990. 

SOURCES

K. Rampart Foster, Creativity Is Spelled B-A-L-L-S: My Life In the Ad Racket (New York: KRF Books, 1991) 

C. Jasper Meech and P. Vasquez Torres, “Fractional Fourier Domain Decomposition and Sorting for Particle Flow Simulation in Margaritas on the CRAY Y-MP,” NASA Space Food Systems Laboratory Research Publications (Issue 203, 1986), 74-75

Samantha Pagz, “Sam Pagz’s NASA Is Cool Blog,” last modified 1998, www.sampagzblog.mapquest.com

Contributors Notes:

Marge Radael’s chapbook, “Feel It In All The Ways” won the 2001 Skooch Prize for Chapbook Brilliance from the Greater Metropolitan Fresno Chapbook Association. She teaches writing and sentence diagramming at Fresno City College. Last year, she was one of seven chapbookists chosen to read before Dwayne L. Hortense, founder of the Kaliope Stuttgart School of Chapbook Arts.

Next week: Dark and Stormy • A famed Scottish storyteller finds a cure for writer’s block