Long before craft beer sold itself on hop varieties and barrel-aging, brewers sold beer with faces. “Beer models” – the pin-up contestants, bikini teams and identical twins that fronted decades of beer advertising – are one of the most documented (and most cringeworthy, in hindsight) threads running through 20th and 21st century beer marketing. Below is the real history: the full list of the campaigns that used them, which ones were the most provocative, which ones are genuinely the most interesting stories, and why the beer industry largely walked away from the whole approach.
What a “beer model” campaign actually is
A beer model campaign puts a person (almost always a woman, almost always young) front and center as the brand’s face, rather than the product, a mascot, or a slogan. It shows up in three main forms: a beauty-contest format where the public votes for a winner who then represents the brand for a year, a recurring cast of promotional models who appear at bars and events in branded outfits, and a TV ad campaign built entirely around the models rather than the beer itself. All three formats show up repeatedly across US, UK and Asian beer markets from the 1940s through the 2000s.
The full list of beer model campaigns
This is not exhaustive, beer advertising has used models in some form for a century, but these are the campaigns with enough documented history, sales impact, or cultural footprint to matter.
| Campaign | Brand | Market / Era | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miss Rheingold | Rheingold Beer | US, 1941-1965 | Annual public-voted beauty contest |
| Bud Girls | Budweiser (Anheuser-Busch) | US, 1980s-2000s | Promotional appearance team |
| Lager Lovelies cans | Tennent’s (Tennent Caledonian) | Scotland, 1960s-1990s | Pin-up photos printed on the can itself |
| Swedish Bikini Team | Old Milwaukee (Stroh Brewery) | US, 1991 | TV ad campaign |
| “Love Songs” Twins | Coors Light | US, 2002-2004 | TV ad campaign (identical twins) |
| “Catfight” | Miller Lite (Miller Brewing) | US, Jan-May 2003 | TV ad campaign |
| Beer Queen / TVC image models | San Miguel Beer | Philippines, 1980s-present | Decades of TV commercial casting, shifted to celebrity ambassadors |
| Orange Dress stunt | Bavaria | Netherlands, 2010 World Cup | Guerrilla/ambush marketing stunt |
| Camp Light Gen Z ambassadors | San Mig Light | Philippines, 2024 | Social-media ambassador search (modern successor format) |
Sources: missrheingold.com, beerhistory.com, NYT (1991), Denverite/AP (2017), USA Today (2003), Adweek/Ad Age (2003), PEP.ph, adobomagazine.com, BBC News (2010).
The most provocative ones
Two women argue over whether Miller Lite “tastes great” or is “less filling,” and the argument escalates into a clothes-tearing wrestling match that ends in their underwear. It ran heavily during NFL playoff broadcasts in January 2003, drew immediate backlash including from a group of New York advertising women who gave it an “ugly award,” and Miller quietly phased the campaign out by that May, saying it did not want its flagship brand defined by a sexual sell.
Five models in bikinis “rescue” groups of men on camping and fishing trips, with the tagline “it doesn’t get any better than this.” It became one of the most talked-about campaigns of 1991, and also one of the most consequential: female employees at Stroh’s Michigan office cited the ad campaign directly in a real sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the company that same year, arguing it fed a hostile workplace culture. No official upload of the original spot survives online, but Thrillist’s retrospective on Medium has period photos and background on where the five models ended up: Remembering the Swedish Bikini Team.
Rather than a TV campaign, this one put pin-up photographs of models directly onto the beer can itself, making it one of the longest-running examples of the format anywhere – it ran for roughly three decades before the brand rebranded away from it in the late 1990s as the approach fell out of step with the times.
Technically not an ad at all: roughly three dozen women were flown to South Africa and dressed identically in short orange minidresses carrying a Bavaria beer tag, then seated together at a Netherlands match. FIFA treated it as illegal ambush marketing, had the group ejected from the stadium, and two organizers were briefly arrested (charges were dropped days later). It is one of the only entries on this list that produced an actual criminal case rather than just editorial backlash.
The most interesting stories
Rheingold Beer ran an annual contest from 1941 to 1965 where customers voted for their favorite of six finalists using ballots handed out at bars and grocery stores that sold the beer. By the early 1950s the contest was drawing over 20 million votes a year, a number exceeded in the US only by that year’s presidential election. It is widely credited as one of the most effective beer marketing campaigns in American history, and at its peak Rheingold held around 35% of the New York beer market on the strength of it alone.
Identical twins Diane and Elaine Klimaszewski were not professional models when they auditioned for Coors Light’s 2002 “Love Songs” campaign, they got the callback almost by chance through their agent. The ads made them recognizable enough that Coors kept running new versions of the campaign for two more years, and the original 2002 spot is still referenced in advertising retrospectives today.
San Miguel Beer has cast new “image models” and, later, A-list celebrity ambassadors for its commercials continuously since at least the 1980s. It is different from the American campaigns above in one key way: it never really stopped, it evolved. The format shifted from anonymous print/TV models into named celebrity endorsement deals (Catriona Gray, the reigning Miss Universe at the time, became a San Mig Light ambassador in 2019) and, most recently, a 2024 open casting call for Gen Z social-media “lifestyle icons.”
From a pure attention standpoint, the orange dress stunt is arguably the most efficient beer marketing campaign on this list: a small print run of dresses generated a genuine FIFA legal complaint, an arrest, and international news coverage, for a fraction of the cost of a TV buy. It is now taught as a textbook case of ambush marketing in sports marketing courses.
The brands that used mascots instead
Not every brand went the human-model route, and the ones that didn’t have generally aged much better. The Hamm’s Bear, a cartoon bear drawn for Hamm’s Beer starting in the mid-1950s, sold the same “good times” feeling without a real person attached, and Hofmeister Lager’s UK campaign did the same thing in the 1980s with a bear mascot named George under the slogan “Follow the Bear.” Both are still remembered fondly decades later, which is more than can be said for most of the human-model campaigns above. We cover more of these brand mascots in our full list of the best beer commercials of all time.
Why the industry moved away from it
The shift was not sudden, it was a slow accumulation of backlash (the Catfight ugly award, the Swedish Bikini Team lawsuit), changing buyer demographics as women became a bigger share of the beer market, and formal industry pressure. In 2017 the Brewers Association, the trade group representing US craft brewers, updated its marketing and advertising code to explicitly bar “sexually explicit, lewd, or demeaning brand names, language, text, graphics, photos, video, or other images,” and tied compliance to a brewery’s ability to use Brewers Association trademarks like the Great American Beer Festival medal. Around the same time, organizations built by and for women already working in beer, most notably the Pink Boots Society (founded in 2007 by brewmaster Teri Fahrendorf), had spent a decade building an actual professional presence in brewing that made the old “beer girl” framing look increasingly out of step with who was actually making and drinking the beer.
What a “beer ambassador” looks like today
The word survived, the job changed. Modern beer brand ambassadors are far more likely to be a certified cicerone doing tasting content, an athlete or fitness personality (Michelob Ultra’s whole modern positioning leans this way), or a social-media-native creator recruited through an open application, like San Mig Light’s 2024 “Camp Light” search for Gen Z lifestyle ambassadors with an existing following, rather than a beauty-contest winner picked to be looked at. The throughline from Miss Rheingold to a modern Instagram beer ambassador is real: brands still want a relatable face attached to the product, they have just moved from crowning someone to recruiting someone with an audience already built. Not every brand founder-as-ambassador story ends cleanly either, as our Real American Beer review covers, the Hulk Hogan-founded lager quietly dropped his likeness from the can six months after his death.
FAQ
An annual public-voted beauty contest run by Rheingold Beer in New York from 1941 to 1965. Customers voted for their favorite of six finalists using ballots distributed at bars and stores, and the winner represented the brand for the following year. At its peak it drew over 20 million votes annually.
Beyond general criticism of the ad’s content, the 1991 Old Milwaukee campaign was cited directly in a real sexual harassment lawsuit filed by female employees against Stroh Brewery that same year, who argued the campaign contributed to a hostile workplace culture.
Yes, two separate cases. The Swedish Bikini Team campaign was cited in a 1991 workplace harassment lawsuit against Stroh, and Bavaria’s 2010 orange dress World Cup stunt led to two women being briefly arrested in South Africa on FIFA’s ambush-marketing complaint (charges were dropped within days).
Miller Brewing phased the ads out by May 2003, about four months after they debuted, after real backlash including criticism from a group of prominent female advertising executives, and stated it did not want its main brand defined by a sexual sell.
Not in the old pageant format. Today’s equivalent is closer to a brand ambassador program: certified cicerones, athletes, or social-media creators recruited for an existing audience rather than crowned in a beauty contest.
