(Photo: Patrón)
Patrón Tequila is tripling down on its additive-free marketing push with a billboard rollout that misspells all the important details. The move is the latest in a cheeky war of words with Mexican regulators, who’ve butted heads with the brand over the verbiage of its past campaigns.
In July, Patrón began introducing murals and digital kiosks across major US markets including New York City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Austin and San Francisco. In each city, passersby will find slogans like “No Atrificial Flvaor” and “No Atrificial Swetness” plastered with enough confidence to warrant a second glance. Some billboards obscure the brand’s bottle behind a swarm of bees or agave leaves, while others use needlessly complicated phrases like “100% caramel-coloring-well-actually-any-kind-of-coloring-free.”
No, these are not the errors of an unchecked AI bot. The tequila maker is taking a jab at additives, one of the most talked-about topics in the agave spirits landscape over the past decade. Regulators currently permit the use of four additives — glycerin, oak extract, sugar-based syrup and caramel coloring — in 100% Blue Weber agave tequilas, and brands aren’t required to disclose their presence so long as they make up less than 1% of the total volume.
Patrón maintains that its recipe only uses agave, water and yeast — a claim that has ruffled more feathers than you might expect within a quarrelsome, and at times combative industry.
In early 2025, the brand unveiled a nationwide campaign that plainly described Patrón as “100% Additive-Free.” The news was not received kindly by the Tequila Regulatory Council, which has long sparred with brands and third parties that purport to detect additives or the lack thereof in spirits. Patrón was slapped with a four-day global export ban, repealed only after the brand removed the offending language from its website and marketing.
Months later, Patrón doubled down. The brand rolled out “Censored Truth” billboards that bleeped out words like “additive-free” with oversized black rectangles, prodding consumers to research what couldn’t explicitly be said in regulator-friendly messaging.
Now, Patrón is swapping the censorship for intentional typos. In New York City, the campaign has made a complete takeover of the shuttle between Grand Central and Times Square, in addition to media placements encompassing the entirety of the Times Square 1/2/3 station. The push also includes two 3-D billboards, one at 7th Ave and 33rd Street in Manhattan, and the other on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
“This campaign turns a creative challenge into some of our most original storytelling yet,” Laila Mignoni, VP of Global Communications at Patrón, remarked in a news release. “Each of these concepts in the campaign hands the audience a puzzle: a typo, a workaround, a hidden bottle. It lets them arrive at the truth on their own, and the truth is a simple one: Patrón is a tequila made with just three ingredients and nothing else.”