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I've been on the record in the past stating that most Right Wing consumer boycotts will not be effective, either due to lack of follow through on the part of conservative consumers or because many corporations lack a conservatively oriented base of talent to run their businesses. I was under the impression that the recent Bud Light trans kerfuffle would be similar. As one tweet put it, "Kid Rock makes music for people who know how to steal catalytic converters;" and the ad itself was so obscure that I never would have heard of it without the internet megaphone around it. (Despite being exposed to an unfortunate degree of Bud Light content through sports broadcasts etc) If the boycott ever got off the ground, no way it would have stamina. A couple suits would be fired, but six months from now people will still drink Bud Light.
Well so far, it looks like I was wrong, The WSJ reports. {Link may be paywalled, I read it in print, I can send you a scan of it if you need it} Major points:
-- Bud light's weekly sales have dropped 21% compared to last year since April 1, on a steady downward trajectory. Coors and Miller's light offerings have gained 20% during that time. This near perfect replacement (IDK how much other light beer brands matter here) indicates that one of the early criticisms of a potential boycott, that drinkers would replace bud light with another AB INbev corporate product, was wrong. Miller-Coors is a different company, even if it is another giant corporate brewer and not my preferred local choice of Yuengling. Other AB products are dropping sales as well, even those with very separate marketing like Michelob and Busch Light. 20% sales drop for Bud Light has a huge effect on the US beer market. Bud light accounted for as much as 17% of total unit sales of beer in America. If the "Right wing boycott" can bring down Bud Light, damn, these guys are loaded for bear. That is a pop culture, business, and media juggernaut, that is the best selling product of the biggest brewer. If touching trans issues in a mild way can bring sales down 20% in one go, for any brand, that will change the game.
-- What I thought was a weakness of the Bud Light Boycott (that essentially no one was going to see the ad organically), has turned out to be its strength. Similar dynamic to how very clearly bad police shootings cause less controversy than police shootings that really weren't that bad. The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it. Right wing influencers successfully made this into a much bigger deal than it was.
-- A major force pushing Bud to change course was the middlemen. Wholesalers and distributors are a key part of Bud Light sales, they move the beer from the brewery to grocery stores and bars etc. Because they are independent of AB Inbev, and often small family owned businesses, probably small c conservative local business owners, they aren't beholden to corporate woke hierarchies and need to protect their own businesses not their future corporate careers. Without those businesses Bud Light cannot function as a brand, and their anger forced corporate to do something. That gets back to the point I made in my prior post: Conservative here have found an industry that isn't beholden to woke talent the way media is, isn't beholden to woke capital the way public companies are, and targeted it. Good work.
-- AB Inbev is apparently promising distributors, in addition to various little trinkets like a free case of Bud Light for every distributor employee, that it will spend "multiples" of its original planned marketing budget on Bud Light. AB thinks they need to come out in force to push back, they clearly think their business in general is threatened. Lose Bud Light and the whole company will shrink.
-- I was wrong about this one. I thought this was a tempest in a teapot, it could have legs. It would be literally impossible for me to reduce my consumption of AB Inbev products, I don't know the last time I drank a Bud heavy or light. My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke. Go buy a case of Yuengling instead, their family ownership supported Trump and got shit for it. Bud Light Delenda Est.
I’m loosely with @Tarnstellung: this response is disproportionate. That’s becayse it’s not about the actual offense. It’s about
ethics in games journalismthe ingroup successfully flexing in the culture war. You said it best yourself—the “usual suspects” had to fan the flames, or it never would have gotten off Insta.In the spirit of the thread…isn’t this kind of bad?
Compare the usual examples of cancel culture. An entertainer gets banished to the sixth circle of hell for a comment made in 1995. A guest speaker gets his gigs canceled because he was too charitable to the outgroup. Judging the exact deserts takes a distant back seat to defending the narrative.
Here the narrative is “Budweiser is a puppet of the woke.” The evidence for: a personalized can and cringey social media video. Oh, and a general sense that big corporations are the enemy. Which one of those points is doing all the work?
I don’t see much reason to be proud of people hitting all five of our “examples of waging the Culture War.” Of course, they weren’t really interested in convincing me. The fact that I don’t already parrot their lines means that I’m on the wrong team.
N.B.: I don’t exactly have skin in this game. Yuengling is the best of its bunch, but I’m more a Modelo guy. Please consider my sentiments on the subject to be as lukewarm as the average Bud.
Do people forget that mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped, the Culture War issue du jour was a Trans shooter killing kids at a Christian School?
Tempers were already burning extremely high on the Trans issue when Bud Light waltzed in. The response was not merely driven by Mulvaney, but by the rage felt over the incident in which the entire Cathedral functionally sided with the shooter.
Is this one of those "two screens" things? I don't recall seeing coverage siding with the shooter. Even in the more trans-centric spaces I visit, the most positive thing anyone had to say was nothing.
I predicted that it would be non-toxoplasma specifically because it was obviously awful and no one wants to back up a loser.
"The right exploits Nashville shooting to escalate anti-trans rhetoric"
(Try to imagine a headline that said "The Left exploits Nashville shooting to escalate anti-gun rhetoric" and whether that would make sense as a story lead.)
"Trans people already fighting for rights in Tennessee have a new fear in the wake of a tragedy"
Does it make sense, after a Trans shooter targets a Christian school, to emphasize that trans people should be more afraid?
Advocates fear an escalation of hate toward trans community after Nashville shooting
"Trans people face rhetoric, disinformation after shooting"
THAT one's a real interesting one for using the passive voice in such a creative manner.
"A Trans Day Of Vengeance Protest Was Canceled After Organizers Received A Threat Of Gun Violence Fueled By Right-Wing Anti-Trans Rhetoric"
I picked a cross-section of completely mainstream sources, I didn't even dig into the twitter content that was flying around at the time.
This was the media environment in the days after the shooting. You tell me, what screen were you watching?
Tell me, if you were only exposed to the aforementioned headlines, NONE of which tell you any information about the shooter's identity...
What group would you guess was victimized in the actual event?
Would it surprise you that the deaths of bunch of Christian children would result in an outpouring of support for the Trans community?
And here's the view from the other side:
"CBS News reportedly barring staff from using term 'transgender' to reference Nashville shooter"
"Transgender pastor compares treatment of 'marginalized' Nashville shooter to Jesus being crucified".
Thanks. I stand corrected. These headlines look like the ones from the Pulse shooting.
I will note that the Fox article has a link to exactly that:
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The response is switching between fundamentally interchangeable products. While people will claim that they love the taste or freshness or how cold it is the reality is that the American light adjunct lager sector of beer is a bunch of entirely fungible products differentiated primarily by branding. If a brand elects to move in the direction of being the brand that isn't for frat boys or is for trans people, I think it's proportionate and reasonable for some of their current redneck customer base to say, "I guess I'll have a Miller Lite then". The Kid Rock style "FUCK BUD LIGHT" response seems disproportionate to me, someone stating that they'll never have another Bud product seems disproportionate to me, but simply electing to grab the case of PBR instead of Bud doesn't really seem like some wild overreaction.
More broadly, I'd love for the norm to be "just make your beer and shut the fuck up about politics". I don't want my favored beverage makers to tell me how they support my 2A rights, or abortion, or back the blue, or that black lives matter, I just want them to ferment some grains, hop them appropriately, and put them in kegs and cans for me to enjoy.
See, this I can get on board with. Switching products for politics is a low, low bar. Grillpilling is a perfectly fine reason.
The performative outrage, the part where "people assumed it was so much bigger," that's what feels like a failure.
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I guess I see it the way certain people see riots: it's not a good use of time and a total waste of legitimate grievance, but there's a reason it's gotten to this point.
The boycott is the language of the "not unheard but definitely feel like certain people want them to be".
Yes, it's waging the culture war. And people do bad things in war. Usually because losing is considered so much worse.
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I must confess that I am baffled by the sentiment I see being expressed by yourself @Tarnstellung @Folamh3 and others that the response is somehow "disproportionate".
The Bud Light's VP of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid had previously described Budweiser as "a brand in decline" and had stated that she wanted to distance the brand from its perceived "frat-boy" and "older working class white male" customer base to pursue a younger, hipper, "more inclusive" audience. From the looks of things her efforts were massively successful so why is she being placed on administrative leave instead of receiving a well-deserved round of high-fives, and a 6-figure bonus?
To my eyes answer seems simple, as much as upper-class urban professional types like to talk about elite theory, shareholder capitalism, and how culture is downstream of politics, the bottom-line is one of those things you can ignore right up to the moment you can't, and you can't piss off your core customer base without effecting your bottom line. The beer business is not like the banking business or the venture capital business the cost of switching from the perspective of individual customers is low and the industry itself is heavily dependent on local bottlers/distributors, if even a small fraction of them decide to cut ties or raise rates in responses this can have a significant downstream effect on a brand's profitability.
This is not Anheuser Busch making "a mistake", or conservatives pouncing on some naive interns' minor screw-up/faux pas, this is a senior executive executing a stupid self-destructive plan with competence, elan, and complete success, only to be surprised to discover that shooting yourself in the foot results in a bloody mess. Even if you're broadly sympathetic to the LBGTQ+ cause this is absolutely 100% the sort of fuck up that an executive should get fired for.
The part that raises it to true malfeasance was that they chose to do it mere days after a Trans mass shooter had killed a bunch of kids at a Christian school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
Basically, most companies know way, way better than to come anywhere near a controversial matter in the wake of a serious tragedy. In almost any other case, this ad campaign would have been shelved for a month or more to avoid a politically contentious blowback. Or possibly cancelled altogether as it might seem to be bad taste.
But nope, they decided to poke the wound while it was fresh.
I'm going to join the (small) chorus saying that I genuinely don't think the Nashville shooting was on anyone's mind when Mulvaneygate started, the Bud Light controversy was definitely its own vein of outrage and wasn't tapping that prior thing. Maybe for some, it was indeed another straw on the herniated camel's back, but I will say that it definitely feels like its own thing.
It was certainly on people's minds, it had had been the single biggest news story of that week until Trump's indictment was handed down.
So I'm suggesting there's a connection even if it spun off to become its own thing.
Likewise, the three expelled legislators and their plight became it's own thing, although it also spun off the event.
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The Budweiser campaign came from the marketing department. They acted as though because it wasn't aimed at a particular audience it was private and separate from the things the company said to other audiences, but that's not actually true. And to the extent the campaign succeeded, it succeeded because people who were otherwise their customers refused to purchase their product.
In other words, it isn't cancellation for exactly the same reason that the Dixie Chicks wasn't cancellation. I doubt that your guest speaker got his gigs cancelled because offended audience members refused to pay to attend his speech.
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Replying to both you and @Tarnstellung here.
I'm not particularly anti-trans, but I am very anti-Bud Light, and very pro people exercising their power.
Bud Light is a piss-colored metaphor for the kind of corporate slop culture that I hate in all its forms. I hate that they put flags on the cans and advertise as America's beer while being owned by the Belgians. I hate the "out of touch bro" advertising themes they used for my childhood the way they glorify a male ideal of lazy stupidity, I hate the obligatory lukewarm "current thing" woke fakery even more. I hate the beer itself, it factually isn't very good, Yuengling and Lion's Head are both better, or very cheap, Lion's Head is modestly cheaper at my local beer distributor and has games under the bottle cap, its best attribute is that it is available. I hate the corporation slicing and dicing consumer groups to create market segments to convince that their piss-beer is a necessary accoutrement to their newly invented lifestyle. I hate that anyone cares enough about Bud fucking Light that they feel that their marketing is "claiming territory" in their identity.
I think the world would be a better place if people, rather than choking down the slop that ubiquitous and milquetoast corporations like AB Inbev serves, choose to actually try to get things they want. If the local brewery a mile from my house did pro LGBTQERTY_>?+} cans because the owner has a trans friend, I'd probably buy them if they made a porter. That's a real person expressing a real feeling. Bud Light marketing to trans fans is trying to redefine a lifestyle segment of the marketplace on a spreadsheet. Fuck em. I'd rather see the people stick it to the corporation.
In general, I don't think "Cancel Culture" as a concept can be applied unless you already had a legitimate claim on fame. Influencers, for example, have no claim on being canceled because they have no talent beyond people liking them. If your talent is people liking you, and people stop liking you, well sounds like you're shit out of luck, like a baseball player with the yips. Cancel Culture is more about someone like Woody Allen, where people will often say they love his work but hate him. Or people who want Kaepernick run out of the NFL, or people who want Deshaun Watson run out of the NFL. Being canceled means having talent and being banned from exercising that talent, not merely being disliked.
Bud Light has no legitimate claim on the being the best selling beer in the country. Its dominance is based purely on marketing and branding. Well, fuck up your marketing, fuck up your branding, fuck em. A world where Bud Light's customers do at least a little critical examination of what they consume will probably improve the world.
Bud Light Delenda Est.
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No. What you advocate would be tantamount to sitting back and letting your enemy seize your territories because fighting back makes you just as bad.
Bud Light and its customers were a Red Tribe icon, and then a defaced rainbow flag was planted in that to take it away from the Red Tribe. If a neighbouring country just stuck a flag in your province and crowed about how it was theirs now, would you not fight back? What about when they did it again in a different province? And again? And again? What sort of incentives would you be creating by refusing to react?
Add in the context of the even that happened mere days before the Bud Light ad dropped, which also targeted conservatives and ALSO stoked the trans issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
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Awhile back, Scott expressed cautious optimism that, were cancellation (although he didn't use that term) to become a bipartisan, symmetric weapon, it might lead to a sort of stalemate, wherein both sides agree to lay down their arms for the sake of a bit of peace and quiet.
That was in 2015. Hindsight is 20/20 so there's no sense in pointing out that his optimism was misplaced.
Nonetheless, whenever the right succeeds in pushing back against woke nonsense (even when the reaction is totally disproportionate to the perceived offense, as it probably is here), I can't help but feel a little glimmer of hope. Not because I want the right to win handily, but because I want Scott's prediction to come belatedly true. If the right can demonstrate that they are just as capable of overreacting to perceived slights as the woke left are, maybe that will result in a lowering of temperature across the board. But they have to actually demonstrate it: they have to put their money where their mouths are, it can't just be empty talk.
Or maybe this boycott will be a one-off, next quarter every McDonald's Happy Meal will include a copy of The Anti-Racist Unicorn, Tucker Carlson will grumble about it from his den, but McDonald's stock index won't budge. Who knows.
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Charitably, one could see the disproportionate response as a reaction to woke encroachment into every facet of life. Making it costly for corporations to push their politics down their consumers throats might deter some of the worst excesses. In this sense, it is not about proportionality. That it's disproportionate is the point. Pour encourager les autres.
Realistically, I have absolutely no illusions that the right absolutely does want to do what the progs are doing. Their objections to cancel culture are mainly that they're not the ones doing the cancelling.
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