June 24, 2023

STEVE GREEN ON BUD LIGHT’S NEW AD: ‘Please Drink Our Beer Again, You Oafish Hicks.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg7iiVKJ2CU

You see, when you’re trying to get back in your customers’ good graces, a charming way to do that is to make gentle fun of yourselves. Instead, Bud Light chose to make gentle fun of their customers.

The new ad might have worked in some other context. But when customers have been given the impression that Belgium-based AB-InBev already sees their customers as hapless hicks, this is not the time to portray their customers as hapless hicks.

Bud Light stepped in it so deep that they might be in a black hole of marketing, where no matter what they do — even remaining silent — will be read negatively. But it didn’t have to be that way, and today’s new ad won’t make anything, anywhere “easy to enjoy” for the brand’s hapless management.

They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing — it was making fun of their customers that got them in the hole they’re in, and they’re still digging. As Ed Morrissey wrote last month:

[T]he problem here isn’t so much Mulvaney as it is Alissa Heinerscheid and the execs at Bud and A-B. If not for her derogatory comments about Bud Light’s consumer base, the one-off can for Mulvaney may have passed with only a mild and short-lived impact. Other brands have gone farther in choosing trans endorsers; David wrote yesterday about Smirnoff and its massive parent Diageo, for instance, and Nike actually paid Mulvaney to endorse its line of sports bras with a ridiculous video that all but mocked the athleticism and skills of legitimate female athletes. Why didn’t those brands take the same kind of damage, at least thus far?

Because their execs didn’t go out of their way to insult the people who buy their product. This one-minute clip will likely get at least five lectures in the Death of Bud Light Harvard Business case study. In sixty-four seconds, Heinerscheid demolishes her career at A-B as well as any impression that the beermaker knows or cares anything about the people who buy its industrial-level lagers:

It’s a terrible ad, and it’s earned an impressive ratio on Twitter:

Unless the goal was to do something so spectacularly bad, social media would be talking about the latest ad, instead of their outreach to Dylan Mulvaney. But in any case, this ad doesn’t look like it’s going to shift much beer.

Related: found via Ace of Spades:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Maybe they need to bring in some 50 year old white guys on this.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll