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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27690 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Bud Light/Anheuser-Busch just penned a large advertising partnership deal with the UFC. The unconfirmed reports I've read are suggesting the 7-year deal totals about $100 million or so.

Dana White, President of the UFC, suggests its 'not determined by the money' and while this is an eyeroll-worthy statement, in a sense it must be correct, because the obvious benefit to Bud Light is that partnering with one of the few remaining bastions of 'toxic' masculinity left to Western Culture offers a promising route to rehabilitate their image and customer base after the Dylan Mulvaney Kerfuffle tarnished their red-blooded, blue-collared reputation.

Which of course means it is still about the money, since Bud Light sales remain in the tank and thus regaining customers would mean a return to their former glory and profitability.

Will it work? I'm personally skeptical. The move is actually a pretty good, and costly, way to show that they're returning to their roots as a beer for the hard-working and rough-handed everyman, since the UFC is honestly synonymous with uncouth, politically incorrect athletes beating the snot out of each other, and features sexy ring girls at every fight with the Machisimo levels simply off the charts. Trump himself is known to attend events and get standing ovations. Tying themselves to THAT brand is actually likely to hurt their 'cred' (such as it exists) with any liberals who might have been swayed by their moves towards increased inclusion. I'm honestly looking forward to the next Sean Strickland (the current UFC middleweight champion) fight, just to see how he might mouth off in a way that will lead to controversy against Bud Light pushing in the other direction. EDIT: It has already begun LMAO

That said, it's not like anyone expects the "beefy men beating each other to death" league to try to conform with polite norms anyway.

Still. It isn't anything resembling an acknowledgement of the mistake, and even if the logo is plastered all over the Octagon and fighter's shorts, all that has to happen for this to backfire is for people to just... not buy the beer. The UFC pockets the money and the needle doesn't budge otherwise. It sure didn't work for Crypto.com or Vechain, both of whom forked over a ton of money for UFC sponsorship.

There's also the insidious take that this is an attempt to try to bring the UFC itself to heel, by exerting enough influence over it to cause it to clamp down on its athletes and 'clean up' its image (read: bring in line with progressive values) rather than allow it to exist as a potential rogue cultural element resisting the leftward swim of Cthulhu.

Given that I hold the position that martial arts/combat sports are probably the last remaining healthy outlet for positive masculinity, if THAT is the goal I'd be extremely alarmed. Not saying it is, but when that much money is getting thrown around, you expect strings to be attached.

I had 'jokingly' suggested to friends a while back that the single best way to bring male customers back to Bud Light was to simply hire a cadre of busty women who would stand in the beer aisle at the grocery store wearing an American Flag bikini and offering to fellate anyone who bought a case. Boom. Apology accepted.

And considering how many buxom ladies with relatively lax morals you could afford to hire for $100 million, I am wondering if that might have been a better plan overall.

I actually bought a bunch of InBev and think they will be fine. They own so many brands that they can just spin stuff off and have Based Bud and Woke Bud. Your average conservative isn't going to realize Based Bud is owned by InBev in 10 years.

Sure, but the goal isn't to destroy InBev, just to change their behaviour.

Agree modulo the cost of starting a new brand from scratch.

How much would it cost to rebuild the new Based Bud brand? 1 billion? 10 billion? Spuds Mackenzie doesn't work for free.

simply hire a cadre of busty women who would stand in the beer aisle at the grocery store wearing an American Flag bikini and offering to fellate anyone who bought a case. Boom. Apology accepted.

We need to get prostitution legalized and in the constitution. Because frankly, we DESERVE to have our dicks fellated at the mart.

Speak plainly and with effort, please.

Oh come on, they were just kidding.

We can be the place where high effort discussion happens or we can be the place where we talk about how we deserve blowjobs. I've never seen an Internet community capable of accommodating both.

I remember some very high effort (though low quality) discussion on the Pointless Waste of Time/Cracked boards by "Government Gets Girlfriends", a user who argued that men deserve state subsidisation and regulation in favour of blowjobs. However, that's not the greatest precedent, though the user was more (unintentionally) hilarious than anything on those comedy sites.

Looking on from afar, it seems to me you just have to wander into the Walmart parking lot to get that done, but if anything deserves a constitutional amendment, this is it

I had 'jokingly' suggested to friends a while back that the single best way to bring male customers back to Bud Light was to simply hire a cadre of busty women who would stand in the beer aisle at the grocery store wearing an American Flag bikini and offering to fellate anyone who bought a case. Boom. Apology accepted.

And considering how many buxom ladies with relatively lax morals you could afford to hire for $100 million, I am wondering if that might have been a better plan overall.

That might be possible, but they would have to be a shitload more sophisticated, and if people ever caught wind of this it would be a hell of a scandal. Might be worth it if they were going bankrupt, assuming they could hide it behind layers of plausible deniability.

Also it's unnecessary - instead of offering to fellate anyone, all they have to do is imply they'd consider fellating a guy who buys beer from them. No actual sex work is required.

I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere is it 100 million/year or 100 million over 7 years?

The former is a legitimately large bribe but the latter $15 million a year sounds like the UFC being a cheap hooker. 15 a year is that the costs of like 3-30 second Super Bowl ads now or roughly the same yearly namely rights to the Cowboys stadium (20 years/400 million.

This feels like the UFC just taking market rates. Actually feels a little cheap to me but I’m not expert on what these things costs.

like the UFC being a cheap hooker.

I love the UFC and it's come far, but I don't know that it's ever been seen as a premium brand. The much maligned Reebok deal (that made it impossible for the fighters to have their own advertising) was apparently $70 million over a similar period. They may legitimately be getting a significant bump.

I have a theory that this Bud Light backlash isn't just because Dylan Mulvaney is trans, it's because he's hideous. If Bud Light had partnered with Blair White (https://instagram.com/p/CpIx5-lJFCX/) for instance, would the backlash have been the same? Somehow I doubt it.

I mean seriously look at this: https://tiktok.com/@dylanmulvaney/video/7102974306036010282?lang=en

Or this: https://tiktok.com/@dylanmulvaney/video/7285860156548795694?lang=en

Meanwhile I continue to be bemused by liberals' apparent inability/unwillingness to believe that publicly insulting your core customers might be bad for business.

As others and I keep pointing out. The issue was never Mulvaney per se, it was what came next. If InBev had released some boiler-plate statement about "People being free to be whatever they want because 'Murica" or simply kept their corporate yaps shut, I think the controversy would've blown over in a week and Bud Light would still be comfortably in the top slot instead of having to fight it out with Modelo.

What they did instead was have their head of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, go on national TV to talk about how they didn't want the brand to be associated with frat-boys and truckers anymore. Turns out the frat-boys and truckers were listening.

Personal opinion is I think you are wrong on this. It’s not just frat boys and looking down on your consumers.

It’s promoting something I view as a known evil. I don’t see much of a difference between promoting Mulvaney and well being literally Hitler. I mean Hitler at a minimum wanted more land for Germans to grow their civilization. The Mulvaney message is cut off your dick and commit suicide of your people.

Would a WW2 vet in 1953 look at the Mulvaney message and see one as worse than the other? Convincing your kids to permenently castrate themselves? If you told them a lot of the major corporations were mass marketing castration to society? I don’t think my Catholic faith would see much of a difference.

But I’ve been canceling brands long before Bud.

The way out for Bud is to fire the entire executive staff. Promote that hard in the media . Then run national tv ads denouncing LGBT.

Of course my plan would also get Bud banned from every sporting event because a lot of their tv contracts have people who buy into this stuff.

Bud can’t run ads denouncing LGBT, they’re a publicly traded company vulnerable to activist investing and legally required to prioritize a profit for their stockholders. In practice it only swings one way, but they can be sued by stockholders for picking political controversies over money.

legally required to prioritize a profit for their stockholders.

This is a fairy tale. Corporations don't act like profit matters. If they did, they'd pull an Elon and light a blowtorch to the useless mouths that they employ.

Corporations are run for the benefit of the executives. Sometimes, this might align with shareholder profits. Most often, it aligns with virtue signalling and bloated executive pay packages.

Consider, for example, that a company's stock almost always trades lower when it announces an acquisition. Furthermore, evidence has show that acquisitions tend to reduce the long-term returns of a stock. So why do companies acquire other companies? Not for shareholder profit. Instead, it's for the personal glorification and empire building of executives.

"Maximizing shareholder value" is a lie.

legally required to prioritize a profit for their stockholders.

I don't think this is correct. Forbidden from fraud and malfeasance, yes, but with disclosure they can pursue whatever ends the board approves. Many public companies never turn a profit, plowing everything into corporate growth. Others explicitly pursue goals other than profits, e.g. the whole ESG movement.

When has Disney been sued for the same? And wouldn’t you need to make the argument that the position was against their profits? Seeing their volume has collapsed it’s an argument can.

Admittedly easier to sell to a pe firm first.

Meanwhile I continue to be bemused by liberals' apparent inability/unwillingness to believe that publicly insulting your core customers might be bad for business.

It's simpler than that. They don't want those people as their customers. In fact, hey don't want them as anyone's customer. They wanted to replace the Bud Light customer base; problem is they drove off of the old customer base before coming up with a way to get a new one.

Well, no, they didn’t expect their red tribe base to know about the mulvaney ad, it just unexpectedly went viral. They were trying to appeal to the underaged drinking market without getting in trouble for it, and it backfired hard.

Obviously they should have thought it through(if there’s one thing you can count on Dylan mulvaney for, it’s to draw more attention than is warranted), but ‘eh, people who already drink us aren’t on TikTok anyway’ is at least some logic.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I think there is a principal-agent problem here where the board and shareholders just want to sell beer and get fat divies every quarter, but the marketing department is probably full of wokes who feel exactly like you say.

It can be even worse than that because companies like BlackRock manage the shares and exercise the voting power even though it's not their money. So you have a situation where government pension funds are managed by BlackRock that then votes for the board that hires employees. The people who have skin in the game are so many levels away from the actual decision making that they have no hope of having their interests represented.

Hanlon's razor begs to differ. It seems much more likely to me that they didn't even realize they were publicly insulting their core customers until it was too late.

Hanlon's razor doesn't apply when you've got the receipts

Those receipts still point to lack of understanding the old customer base rather than deliberately insulting them in my eyes. It seems more likely that she thought everyone, including the old customer base, saw their brand the same way she did--"fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor"--and didn't recognize that the old customer base actually appreciated that kind of humor.

While I totally agree that it was the response, I believe the interview where she talked about being “fratty” came before the Dylan thing.

If they actually wanted to increase trans acceptance, they would've gone with someone like Blair White. She's attractive and already has a lot of 'conservative opinions' (like progun, etc.).

It would've shown that being trans isn't a political ideology... I think that's precisely why they didn't use someone like her.

They weren't trying to increase trans acceptance, they were trying to sell beer to LGBT people and Blair White is not popular with LGBT people.

My guess is that the CEO and the board wanted to sell beer to LGBT people, while the marketers tasked with the project wanted to increase trans acceptance.

Is Dylan mulvaney popular with LGBT people?

I think they were actually chasing young women who use TikTok.

I think so too- specifically, young women who are too young to legally advertise to in another way, and they didn’t expect anyone else to notice it.

Well this is the thing, if they partnered with a trans woman who passed persuasively, no one would notice and it would be a useless signal of how progressive and inclusive the company is. The only way to loudly signal their progressive bona fides is to partner with a trans woman who's very obviously trans i.e. one who doesn't pass convincingly (or in Mulvaney's case, barely seems to be trying).

Okay I'm seeing a compromise position emerging here. Buxom ladies in American flag bikinis offering blowjobs, but 1 out of 10 of them are smoking hot trans women so you can't be completely sure which one you're encountering.

There's a joke here about Schroedinger and a synonym for "cat".

"Box"?

You magnificent bastard, you beat me to it.

Tying themselves to THAT brand is actually likely to hurt their 'cred' (such as it exists) with any liberals who might have been swayed by their moves towards increased inclusion

They never cared. The whole idea that Bud Light was the victim of fence sitting was simply cope to avoid admitting that conservatives got a rare (ultimately meaningless) cultural victory.

If they actually wanted to save Bud Light there would have been some sort of effort (before it allegedly betrayed them). They just wanted to laugh at conservatives futilely burning Keurigs again and then they wanted to not be laughed for being wrong at so they tried to spin the narrative.

Bud Light never got that audience and it's debatable if it was ever close (or a potential replacement for the one they lost) and not just the sorts of things people like the hapless marketing executive are just trained to say and think is good because of their milieu.

Most of the time I think what happens is conservatives just grit their teeth and keep watching/buying, the media praises the company and bequeaths it free advertising and the company gets to take a victory lap at how successful "inclusion" is. But Bud Light isn't Disney, it's relatively easy to swap. So here we are.

If I were in charge of bud light’s marketing, I would sponsor Screenings of What is a woman at rented out theaters which came with a free bud light at admission, and make sure to get fined by the state of California for facilitating underaged drinking or some other alcohol related charge to plug into the conservative persecution complex. Or issue trump cans.

As is, there’s really no way out. The only way they can even hold on to current market share is with massive rebates supported by heavy Spanish-language advertising(Mexicans don’t know about Dylan mulvaney).

I am curious to know if this will work. I haven't been following the fortunes of Bud Light recently, so it could be that the people who switched will stick with the new beer brands and not move back. They already tried a poorly-received 'going back to our roots' ad that only served to have everyone go "how dumb do they think we are?" so this may blow up in their faces the same way. Some opinion also seems to be that the brand tanked just because it's terrible beer that has been doing poorly for years (hence the ill-advised attempt to make it relevant and appeal to young drinkers):

CEO Brendan Whitworth’s June apology was widely panned as insincere. By that month, Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev lost $27 billion in market value. In July, the company announced it would lay off 350 employees. Frustrated, Billy Busch, heir to the Busch Family offered to buy back the Bud Light brand from InBev. By August, Bud Light’s sales had declined 26.8 percent while rival Modelo’s sales grew 15.9 percent. On Oct. 9, Bud Light’s stock closed at its lowest since the April triggering event.

Research shows that advertising only helps brands with above-average quality. Advertising cannot compensate for mediocre or sub-par quality to build customer loyalty, as was the case with Bud Light.

Because of this perception of its quality, Bud Light’s outsized advertising only garnered higher awareness but not necessarily higher customer loyalty. In 2022, more customers were aware of Bud Light than Modelo (88 percent versus 78 percent). Yet, both brands had identical customer loyalty (78 percent) among users.

Bud Light’s management conflated high customer awareness with high customer loyalty. Yet, its below-average product provided no meaningful differentiation from competitors and eroded customer loyalty. Customers switched when Bud Light transgressed.

Because of the mediocre quality, it's easy to switch to another brand, and the lost customers might not be coaxed back:

In the four weeks to September 9, Bud Light sales declined by around 30 percent in both volume and dollar value, compared to the same period a year ago. The statistics were compiled by Bump Williams Consulting.

Speaking to Fox News Digital, Harry Schuhmacher, the Beer Business Daily publisher, said that the latest figures show that the decline in Bud Light sales has become "quasi permanent."

Schuhmacher added: "You see Bud Light still just stubbornly down around 30 percent in volume compared to last year, which is where it's been since May or June.

"That tells me that this is quasi-permanent, meaning those consumers are just lost forever," he said.

Nielson data released in August showed that Bud Light sales fell by 26.5 percent for the week ending August 5, compared to the previous year. This was a higher decline than the 25.9 percent year-on-year fall recorded in the week ending June 17.

I also wonder how poor, poor Dylan is doing; they were so traumatised that they couldn't even step outside their front door (apart from that trip to Peru because they needed to feel safe. So they went to Peru. Yeah, I believe that was the exact reason and not trying to scrape last crumb of publicity out of it). So, so scared to leave the house that they had to fly three thousand miles away and record every step on TikTok. Such is the horror of the transphobic backlash! Such horror that a trip to France immediately afterwards was necessary. And onwards to the UK. And then back to New York for fashion week. And then popping off to London to receive a Woman Of The Year award.

It really is awful how this poor person has been terrorised into being unable to leave the safety of their own home!

One thing they should do is just change the branding. The hideous blue can is now associated with Dylan Mulvaney, and honestly it looks like ugly walmart aesthetics anyway.

Bring back the 1990s era silver can.

I had 'jokingly' suggested to friends a while back that the single best way to bring male customers back to Bud Light was to simply hire a cadre of busty women who would stand in the beer aisle at the grocery store wearing an American Flag bikini and offering to fellate anyone who bought a case. Boom. Apology accepted.

It's a good thought, but runs aground on the rocks that many (ex-)Bud Light drinkers have wives, who would then kill them if they came home with a case of Bud Light.

A beer in one hand, your dick in the other, drive home with your knees and you won't be discovered.

We used to be a country.

A proper country

I was more of a High Life Man myself. That whole series just speaks to me more and more over time.

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