TV camera people know two things: No visual is as dramatic as a burning building at night, and none is as appealing as a cold, foamy glass of beer.

But Pacifico Beer, a Mexican-brewed import whose U.S. sales have so far been held to the Western states, has decided that TV won’t play a part in its drive to reach a national market this year. Instead, the company will promote its brew with a Web site that plays up the adventure of exploring the unknown—and of unknown brands like pacific.

That Web site, www.mexicoviapacifico.com, offers a kind of virtual road trip south of the border, complete with Kodachrome-style snapshots and Super 8 video footage to give the feel of someone’s home movies. Visitors can click on nine locations around a map of Mexico and view 30 different clips filmed along the byways, side streets and hidden attractions of that country.

Most of the snapshots contain multiple interactive elements. Visitors can pan left or right to view the full sweep of a beach in a hidden cove, click on a highlighted cooler to get a recipe for ceviche or on a fishing boat for some commonsense advice on hiring a good one. (“Really tan means they spend a lot of time out and really know the open sea. But less tan might mean they know where all the fish are and they’re efficient.”)

The videos also highlight this theme of exploration and relaxed, free-form fun. One series shows a river trip to the hard-to-reach ruins of Yaxchilan, video of the view from its heights, and a downloadable MP3 of the howler monkeys that inhabit it. Another shows a seaside shack and a game of “pepper roulette”, played with a spinning pacific bottle and a selection of Mexico’s hottest edibles.

“We’d used off-the-beaten-path Mexico in our point of sale creative in the past,” says Paul Verdu, vice president for marketing of Crown Imports LLC, which sells Pacifico and other beer brands in the U.S., including Corona Extra, Negra Modelo and St. Pauli Girl. “The brand began catching on with Southern California surfers who traveled down to Mexico in the ‘80s—not the Cancun-white-beach crowd but the more active explorers who hiked to the hard-to-reach places. They’d connect with Pacifico down there, and when they got home, the brand would remind them of these great trips they took.”

Pacifico slowly grew into a top import brand in Southern California and then spread to nearby Arizona and Colorado. The brand now sells more than 5 million cases a year in that region.

Now that Pacifico wants to reach a national market, the company plans to spend about $15 million on marketing this year, almost double its 2007 marketing budget. “So the question became how to freshen that approach and evolve it, knowing that we’re going to invest more in this brand and take it national,” Verdu says. “We wanted to make more people aware of this connection to Mexican travel, knowing that most of the people we’d be reaching won’t have those memories of past trips.”

Seattle-based agency Creature had worked with Pacifico on past campaigns and knew that the brand was taking aim at explorer-types. So they came up with the concept of offering an online mini-road trip down south of the border.

“We had to create an adventure and take people on it,” says Jim Haven, Creature’s co-founder and creative director.

On the Web site, authentic wins out over the standard beer-ad glamour shots of foamy heads and beaded bottles, because Pacifico’s target consumer tends to value discovering something new. “Few beer brands would be comfortable showing a beetle crawling over one of their cans, or a dead puffer fish,” Haven says. “But Pacifico was, because that’s the kind of thing you see when you’re down there.”

The “hidden” quality extends to a prime surfing spot depicted on the site. It’s guarded with purposely vague directions, so that online visitors get the sense they’re in on a secret only a handful of people know. At that page on the Web site, they can also listen to little-known bands such as Bishop Allen and Pacha Massive on a coconut radio or download the songs from iTunes.

The site is also being promoted online in places that appeal to those consumer-explorers, with ads on Web sites such as Backpacker.com, iExplore.com and Nationalgeographic.com. Mexicoviapacifico.com is also linking from online music locator site Pandora, where members go primarily to find music they’ve not heard before.

Not all of Pacifico’s national push will take place online. The company will take live presentations to 19 selected markets this season, many of them out of its traditional southwest region. Verdu says Pacifico has rigged out a fleet of ‘60s vintage Volkswagen buses with hand-painted Pacifico branding and will tour them around beaches in Boston, New York, Delaware and Chicago and at local events in Atlanta, Austin TX and other cities. Some of those events will include appearances with the bands heard on the Web site.

And true to the branding, the Pacifico vans will be authentic. “They’re not retrofits but original equipment,” he says. “The most we’ve done is to throw in a new sound system to provide some good tunes.”