• Miami Herald, Monday, November 6, 2006 11:30 AM

The special ingredient in the success of 42 Below--an ultra-premium vodka from New Zealand that Bacardi is offering to buy for $91 million cash--is controversy. Such politically incorrect antics as a "Win a Russian Bride" contest have positioned it as a hipper-than-thou vodka in 25 countries--getting the requisite press.

A video on the company's Web site struck a New York bar owner as anti-gay and sparked a boycott of 42 Below. An obscenity-laden response from James Dale, the brand's chief marketer in the U.S., garnered a blurb on Page Six of the New York Post. Then there was the poster that provoked protest from the Colombian Consulate: "Purer than the driven snow, even if you drove it yourself from Colombia." "I saw I wasn't going to get any cut-through without organic marketing," says Dale, who heads his own company, Panache International.

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