How Chili's Ride The 'Dente Turned a Margarita Into a NASCAR Moment
Chili's Ride The 'Dente is a February 2025 integrated campaign created by agency JM&D in the United States, built around a country-rock music video and a multi-race NASCAR partnership with Spire Motorsports, designed to relaunch the brand's Presidente Margarita through humour, cultural spectacle, and motorsport-scale reach.
The campaign launched on February 11, 2025, anchored by two media assets: a full-length country-rock music video and a 30-second broadcast spot, as documented by Clapboard. The music video gave the Presidente Margarita its own original theme song, a creative direction that agency lead Jonathan Marshall of JM&D described as the inevitable conclusion once the team heard the phrase aloud. The campaign's signature product extension was a newly designed blue Presidente Margarita Shaker — styled as a mechanical bull riders could metaphorically mount — giving the pun layered physical form across on-premise, social, and broadcast contexts.
In the United States, the campaign secured naming rights to an actual NASCAR race. The Ride the 'Dente 200 became the season-opening ARCA Menards Series event at Daytona International Speedway on February 15, 2025, as reported by PR Newswire. The No. 7 Chili's Ride the 'Dente Chevrolet, driven by Justin Haley during Daytona Speedweeks, gave the campaign a literal vehicle — a racing machine wearing the brand's pun at 180 miles per hour. A 30-second spot was scheduled to air during FOX's Daytona race coverage on February 16, 2025, extending the campaign's reach into one of American motorsport's highest-profile broadcast windows, per MediaPost. The campaign ran across Chili's owned social channels in parallel, consolidating the entertainment-first strategy that the brand has pursued since 2024.
Chili's operates in a casual dining segment under sustained competitive pressure. The casual dining category represented a substantial share of the full-service restaurant market in the United States in 2025, a space where Chili's competes directly against rivals including Applebee's and TGI Fridays, both of which have invested heavily in their own bar and cocktail identities. Against that backdrop, Chili's chose to differentiate the Presidente Margarita not through ingredient claims or price promotion, but through cultural ownership — giving the drink a genre, a sound, and a motorsport stage.
The strategic logic connects directly to what Chili's established in 2024. That year, the brand launched The Big Smasher burger, positioning it as containing twice the beef of McDonald's Big Mac as part of a broader Better Than Fast Food value campaign, as reported by MediaPost. Ride The 'Dente extends that same combative, entertainment-led posture into the drinks category, replacing competitive beef with competitive fun. The move signals a consistent brand philosophy: where fast food competes on price, Chili's competes on personality.
The NASCAR tie-in with Spire Motorsports is strategically precise. NASCAR's audience skews toward a demographic that overlaps strongly with casual dining regulars in the United States — adults who respond to unpretentious, high-energy entertainment and value brand authenticity over aspiration. By naming a race and placing the Presidente Margarita Shaker at the centre of a country-rock video produced in Nashville, Chili's and JM&D constructed a campaign that feels native to its chosen cultural territory rather than imported into it. The humour is the strategy, not decoration applied over it.
Alex Alvga directed the Ride The 'Dente music video, with production taking place in Nashville, as documented by Muse by Clios. Nashville was not an incidental location choice. Producing the campaign's centrepiece in the home of country music gave the creative execution a geographic credibility that a studio shoot elsewhere could not replicate, grounding the humour in an environment with genuine genre authority.
Jonathan Marshall of JM&D served as the creative force behind the campaign's conceptual framing. As reported by Muse by Clios, Marshall stated: "Once we started saying 'Ride The 'Dente' to ourselves, it became pretty clear that it was the big idea and it needed a full-length country music video." That instinct — to follow the energy of the line rather than impose a conventional advertising format onto it — defined the campaign's structure. Rather than treating the music video as a social asset supporting a TV spot, the team built the TV spot in service of a music video conceived as genuine branded entertainment.
Marshall further described the campaign's tonal ambition, per Muse by Clios: "We wanted this to be the most authentic margarita-themed Country-rock ballad possible." The Presidente Margarita Shaker — reimagined in blue and styled as a rideable mechanical bull prop — gave the creative a physical object that unified the music video, the on-premise experience, and the NASCAR track presence. Marshall noted the layered coherence of the campaign's central device: "We've got a NASCAR driver literally riding the 'Dente this season, we've got a mechanical bull shaker you can ride — and a fun thing to say when having a good time drinking margs." The campaign comprised two media assets in total, as recorded by Clapboard, representing a deliberately focused creative package built for maximum cultural surface area from a lean production footprint.
No independently verified post-campaign performance data for Ride The 'Dente is publicly available at the time of writing. Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 63 out of 100, reflecting a creative execution that demonstrates strong conceptual coherence and cultural targeting but stops short of the benchmark set by Chili's own 2024 campaigns, which generated documented consumer response across social and earned media channels.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on several observable strengths. The decision to name a race — the Ride the 'Dente 200 at Daytona International Speedway — secured a category of earned media exposure that paid advertising cannot replicate, embedding the Presidente Margarita into sports news coverage at the start of the NASCAR season, as reported by PR Newswire. The FOX broadcast placement during Daytona race coverage on February 16, 2025, per MediaPost, reached an audience already primed by the race name itself, creating a closed loop between the media buy and the branded entertainment context.
The campaign's weakness, which the Clapboard score reflects, lies in its depth of product integration. The Presidente Margarita Shaker functions as a strong visual and comedic anchor, but the campaign does not visibly extend beyond the entertainment moment into a durable brand platform. Compared to competitors like Applebee's, which has built multi-year equity around its drinks occasions in the United States, Ride The 'Dente operates at the level of a highly enjoyable campaign event rather than a strategic repositioning. Its humour lands; its staying power is the open question.
Ride The 'Dente is a February 2025 Chili's campaign created by JM&D in the United States. It promoted the Presidente Margarita through a country-rock music video, a blue Presidente Margarita Shaker, and a NASCAR partnership with Spire Motorsports that included race naming rights at Daytona International Speedway.
JM&D created the Ride The 'Dente campaign for Chili's. Jonathan Marshall of JM&D led the creative concept, with Alex Alvga directing the country-rock music video. Production took place in Nashville, grounding the campaign's humour in an environment with genuine country music cultural authority.
The Presidente Margarita Shaker is a newly designed blue shaker introduced as the campaign's signature product. Styled to evoke a mechanical bull, it unified the music video, on-premise experience, and NASCAR presence, giving the Ride The 'Dente concept a physical object that worked across every campaign touchpoint.
The Ride the 'Dente 200 was the season-opening ARCA Menards Series race at Daytona International Speedway on February 15, 2025, as reported by PR Newswire. Chili's secured the naming rights as part of a multi-race partnership with Spire Motorsports, with Justin Haley driving the No. 7 Chili's Chevrolet.
Ride The 'Dente continues a strategy established in 2024, when Chili's launched The Big Smasher burger under a Better Than Fast Food platform, as reported by MediaPost. Both campaigns use humour, cultural spectacle, and direct competitive confidence to differentiate Chili's from fast food rivals and casual dining competitors including Applebee's.
Clapboard assigns Ride The 'Dente a score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong conceptual coherence and precise cultural targeting through its NASCAR and country music framing, while noting the campaign operates as a high-quality entertainment moment rather than the foundation of a durable long-term brand platform.
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