When Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips took over his family's liquor business in 2000, he oversaw a raunchy ad campaign used to sell Revelstoke, a spiced Canadian whiskey.
The ad campaign used strippers to sell the whiskey and suggested that men should drink more of it to deal with overweight, unwanted women.
It also used creative technology so that the whiskey brand's name would appear in urinals when male customers went to the bathroom.
Phillips has used his business background as an advantage since launching a political career in the wake of former President Donald Trump's 2016 victory.
The Minnesota Democrat was dubbed the “charming liquor heir” when he flipped a Republican seat blue for the first time in 60 years in 2018.
During the early tenure of Rep. Dean Phillips as CEO and president of Phillips Distilling Company, he oversaw an advertising campaign for Revelstoke whiskey that suggested men should drink more of it if they had to be around unattractive women.
The same ad campaign, which ran in the men's magazine Maxim, featured a man in a strip club getting a lap dance from a half-naked woman. “In Canada, the average paycheck rarely lasts two weeks. It's more like 20 songs,” the ad said
Rep. Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat, decided to launch a Democratic primary bid against President Joe Biden in late October. He hopes to perform well in the New Hampshire primary, where Biden will not be on the ballot
Phillips' mother had remarried the heir to Phillips Distilling Company after his father died in Vietnam when the congressman was just six months old.
In his early 30s, Phillips took over the company as president and CEO after earning his MBA from the University of Minnesota business school.
Profiles of Phillips — who launched a primary bid against President Joe Biden in late October — often mention that part of his career as the congressman is credited with bringing Belvedere vodka from Poland to the United States.
What has received less attention are some of the marketing tactics the company has deployed.
A strategy article from February 2001 the ad campaign was noted as being, by design, not “politically correct” and a “throwback to campaigns of yesteryear, when fun was still fun, and advertisers were a bit more libertarian in their willingness to offend.”
The ads were designed for men's magazines Maxim and Stuff and are aimed at men aged 20 to 35, the article said.
They mock Canada with the slogan: 'Strong, smooth whiskey from a country that needs it.'
Some of Revelstoke's advertising from that period also included heat-activated urinal ads, which displayed the brand's name while a man went to the toilet.
And each ad portrays a scenario in which “a massive consumption of whiskey is required to complete the task,” according to the Strategy article.
One such scenario involves a man dealing with an overweight woman who has sat next to him at the bar.
That ad shows a man in a flannel shirt looking at a pale blonde woman wearing an ill-fitting tank top and skinny jeans.
'There's something to be said for occasions like this. Like, “Make it a double,” the ad says.
Another ad shows a half-naked stripper giving a man in a Hawaiian shirt a lap dance.
“In Canada, the average paycheck rarely lasts two weeks. It's more like 20 songs,” the ad says.
Peter Holmes, a partner at Toronto-based advertising agency Holmes & Lee, acknowledged that part of the ad campaign was intended to fool Canada.
“And since the one thing most Americans know about Canada is that they don't really want to go there, we felt we needed to remind them exactly why they don't,” Holmes told Strategy.
And Phillips himself spoke about the ad campaign a July 2001 article in AdAge about use scantily clad women to sell alcohol.
“It is indeed the easy and effective way,” Phillips said at the time. “It's hard to be in this industry and not look at the success of beer advertisers and say it's not working.”
In the AdAge story, Phillips said the stripper ad was designed specifically for Maxim and would not be used further.
Phillips said he received no complaints about the ad, but rather 75 requests for posters.
When asked by DailyMail.com whether Phillips would now sign the ad campaign, a spokesperson for his presidential campaign said Friday: “Dean Phillips does not like these ads and would not sign them.”
As a congressman and presidential candidate, Phillips has characterized herself as a fighter for women's bodily autonomy amid the fallout from the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
Phillips, now 54, jumped into the presidential race over concerns about Biden's age.
Biden turned 81 in November and is the country's oldest president.
Phillips hopes to gain traction in New Hampshire, where he won't have to compete with Biden in the vote.
The president will not appear as a candidate on the Jan. 23 ballot because of a Democratic National Committee move approved by Biden to reshuffle the Democratic primaries.
While New Hampshire traditionally hosts the nation's first primaries, Democrats wanted to give honors after the Iowa caucuses to South Carolina, the state that revived Biden's 2020 primaries.
New Hampshire's Republican leadership declined to change the date for the Democratic primary, so an “unsanctioned” primary will take place on the same day that Republican voters go to the polls.
Even as a write-in candidate, Biden has a lead of about 35.6 points over Phillips, according to the newspaper Polling average for Real Clear Politics in New Hampshire.
Biden receives 47.3 percent support from New Hampshire Democrats, compared to 11.7 percent for Phillips and 8.7 percent for self-help guru Marianne Williamson.