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