After a disastrous partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney that reportedly cost the brand over $1 billion in lost sales last year, Bud Light has returned to its roots.
Inches toward redemption began with a 2024 Super Bowl ad featuring Peyton Manning and Post Malone. This week, Bud Light released a new ad featuring comedian Shane Gillis — and it’s a full-on embrace of the brand’s fragile, frivolous ethos that, past decades, turned their ads into touchstones of pop culture.
And Dilly Dilly for that.
If 2023 was the smart peak, 2024 will be known as the year DEI died – with corporations finally admitting it was all a left-wing campaign.
Recently, companies like Harley-Davidson, Ford, John Deere, and Lowe’s have changed the course of DEI, largely thanks to the work of people like Robby Starbuck who call them out..
And now we have “The Dean’s Office,” in which Gillis plays a college football coach behind a dean trying to get a plagiarism admission out of a star player. In exchange for the athlete’s confession, the dean presents him with a bucket of ice-cold Bud Light. Instead, the solace works with Coach Gillis (his jacket reads Coach Herb), a professor and the dean himself, who start singing like canaries.
Alcoholic canaries.
It’s hardly the great Real Men of Genius franchise of the late 90s and early 90s, but it’s fun and nostalgic. The site is a throwback to a time when not everything was shared through the lens of the most annoying progressive person you know.
It’s also an admission that Bud Light was wrong — wrong about throwing away the brand’s DNA and denying its core customer to jump on the diversity, equality and inclusion bandwagon.
Specifically, in partnership with the insufferable Mulvaney in the spring of 2023: a costly move that turned the once beloved American brand into a barroom pariah and sent sales into freefall.
At the time, Mulvaney, who has nearly 10 million TikTok followers, was working with seemingly every company under the sun: Kate Spade, Ulta, Nike. When the influencer posted a bathroom video with a personalized Bud Light can, it led to backlash. A boycott followed. Bars canceled orders. Kid Rock made a case.
Upon further investigation, this ill-advised pivot was not a mistake or an oversight. It was the strategy of Alissa Heinerscheid, a VP of marketing who billed herself as “the first woman to run the world’s largest beer brand.”
In a March 2023 interview with the Make Yourself At Home podcast, she said she wanted to move on from the brand’s “brittle” and “out of touch” humor and “evolve” and “elevate”.
“What does evolution and ascension mean? It means inclusiveness… It means a change of tone,” she said. “It means having a campaign that’s really inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different. And it appeals to women and men. And representation is kind of the heart of the revolution.”
This from the woman who proudly fronted the most forgettable Super Bowl ad in Bud Light history, starring Miles Teller and his dancing wife.
“Consumers young and old want a brand to stand for something,” Heinerscheid said at the time.
Extraordinary leaders like Heinerscheid—following in the grand tradition of Gillette razors calling out “toxic masculinity”—break down their messages so they can fix it. But it never broke at first.
They tried to say that beer ads were misogynistic, but most make men look like mere creatures and the end of jokes. And yes, in some ads, women wear bikinis. Turns out, people love breasts too. See Sydney Sweeney.
After Mulvaney’s debacle, a Miller Lite commercial appeared starring Ilana Glazer — apologizing for the beer’s old sexist commercials and glorifying women brewers. Oh, the teasing!
Americans want beer commercials to entertain us, not preach empty progressive virtues. I look back fondly on the golden era with Bob Uecker or John Madden. The barroom fights over whether Miller Lite tastes great or is less packed. We loved Spuds MacKenzie being the life of the party.
It’s also poignant that Gillis would be the one to repair the damage caused by this unforced error. After being hit by the PC patrol in 2019 when he was hired and quickly fired from Saturday Night Live after previously using an Asian slur and “homophobic” language, he never complained. He went harder in stand-up and, surprisingly, became more popular. So big that “SNL” couldn’t ignore it any longer: He returned as a celebrity presenter last February.
Through Gillis’ ascension, we saw the disconnect between the owners of culture and the consumers and true American appetites. The so-called silent majority.
Last week, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said it had reduced support for shareholder proposals related to environmental and social issues to a new low of 4.1% at the latest annual general meeting season.
Corporations that once feared ESG and were judged by investors on how many “inclusive” initiatives they had—marked by the far-left Human Rights Campaign—now fear association with these discriminatory and divisive practices.
Expect to see more. And to that, I say, this Bud is for them.
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Image Source : nypost.com