bud mulvaney
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
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.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Is Dylan Mulvaney the Trans Andy Kaufmann?
Watching the Dylan Mulvaney spectacle play out has left me with an odd feeling that I’ve struggled to quite put a finger on, with Mulvaney causing me to have something like an uncanny valley reaction to his transition and demeanor. I don’t mean this to say that Mulvaney looks almost female, but not quite, I mean that Mulvaney gives me the impression of someone that isn’t sincere about transitioning, but has put enough effort into it that I’m not exactly sure what’s going on and what to make of this person. In light of the recent Bud Light debacle I’ve finally settled on an explanation that makes more sense to me - Mulvaney is a modern Andy Kaufman, playing the part of a trans person well enough to convince some people, while others are in on the joke, and all of them contribute to Mulvaney’s accrual of fame and cash.
Who was Andy Kaufman? I think the Wiki summary is better than anything I’ll write up:
During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and theaters in a series of unique performance art/comedy shows, sometimes appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. He was also a frequent guest on sketch comedy and late-night talk shows, particularly Late Night with David Letterman.[6] In 1982, Kaufman brought his professional wrestling villain act to Letterman's show by way of a staged encounter with Jerry "The King" Lawler of the Continental Wrestling Association. The fact that the altercation was planned was not publicly disclosed for over a decade.
Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35.[7] As pranks and elaborate ruses were major elements of his career, persistent rumors have circulated that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax.[6][8] He continues to be respected for the variety of his characters, his uniquely counterintuitive approach to comedy, and his willingness to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences.[6][9]
Comedian Richard Lewis in A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman said of him: "No one has ever done what Andy did, and did it as well, and no one will ever. Because he did it first. So did Buster Keaton, so did Andy."[96] Carl Reiner recalled his distinction in the comedy world:
Did Andy influence comedy? No. Because nobody's doing what he did. Jim Carrey was influenced—not to do what Andy did, but to follow his own drummer. I think Andy did that for a lot of people. Follow your own drumbeat. You didn't have to go up there and say 'take my wife, please.'[97] You could do anything that struck you as entertaining. It gave people freedom to be themselves.[98]
Reiner also said of Kaufman: "Nobody can see past the edges, where the character begins and he ends."[99]
Kaufman made people laugh, get angry with him, and even physically attack him by playacting at different roles so successfully than people couldn’t tell where the sincere Kaufman stopped and the characters began. When I watch Dylan Mulvaney advertise native-scented deodorant, I don’t see someone that’s genuinely trying to be a woman. I see someone that’s clowning the concept, mocking women, mocking trans people, and exploiting the clicks for fun and profit.
I wasn’t around for Kaufman, so this comparison is likely imperfect. Nonetheless, watching people react to what sure looks to me like a running joke as though it’s perfectly sincere has been entirely surreal. I see people on the pro-trans side treating Mulvaney as sincere. If I’m right and this is a running joke, Joe Biden sure didn’t get the word. My inclination has been to chalk this up to people becoming sufficiently accustomed to never question claims from trans people that playing along with Dylan Mulvaney is no different than the rest of it, and even if they have doubts, they’re surely not going to look at Dylan and saying, “oh, come the fuck on”. So even though this was weird, it wasn’t until the Bud Light thing that it began to really seem hyperreal to me.
Here, watch this 35 second reaction video from Kid Rock. What’s going on here? Is Kid Rock sincerely pissed off at Bud Light, so pissed off that the only way to express it is with a burst of automatic weapons fire supplemented by some covering fire from a shotgun-wielding buddy? Is he basically sincere in his reaction, but strongly exaggerating the reaction because it’s funny? Is he ambivalent, but doing it for the clicks and lols? Is he part of the Bud Light advertising campaign, just driving the product into people’s mindspace? Does he agree with me that the whole thing is a big joke and he’s just rolling with his own improv? I don’t know and I don’t even know how I would know.
Vox reports that people have reacted in real life:
Don, a liquor store owner in Arkansas who requested to remain anonymous so he “doesn’t get caught up in the wokeness,” told me he’s seen a 20-25 percent dip in Bud Light sales since the controversy hit, with his admittedly small sample size of shoppers seemingly opting for Miller Lite and Coors Light instead. However, he doesn’t expect the backlash to stick. “A lot of people are talking about it, fired up about it, they’re never drinking Bud Light again, yada yada yada, but they’ll be drinking them in a month, as soon as the news cycle quits,” he said.
Well, what are those people thinking? Are they genuinely pissed, but not so pissed as to permanently give up a product that seems completely fungible with other light beers? How about Ben Shapiro:
The post started to pick up steam in conservative circles relatively quickly. Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro decried the collaboration on his show, saying, “Well, folks, our culture has now decided men are women and women are men and you must be forced to consume products that say so.” Shapiro appears not to be much of a Bud Light fan himself, so he probably doesn’t have much to boycott. “I understand Bud Light is piss water masquerading as beer,” he said, “so I guess that, you know, it’s sort of trans beer.”
Well, I’m glad he at least kept the on-brand smugness. In fact, no one seems to be missing out on their normal branding, which lends itself to the hyperreal experience. In keeping with that, I will smugly note that I don’t drink that shit anyway and I’ll be cracking an IPA from a real industry underdog - Lagunitas(tm), a tiny subsidiary of a little-known international parent company. Thank God that I’m not getting taken in by all this hyperreal marketing.
zeke5123
11mo ago
Culture war refresh. Many people are familiar with the Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney controversy. About a week afterwards people on this website noted there wasn’t a large impact on the stock price of InBev, Bud’s parent company,
Well, InBev is now down about 10% from when the whole Bud Light - Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship. Bud light revenue is still down materially. At the same time, other major alcohol companies appear flat or up materially. Therefore, it seems the boycott has had real negative impact on InBev.
Does this mark the start of the right finding it’s muscle or is this a dead cat bounce?
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
John Carter: The Bud Light Military
(Or, to use the better title from the comments: "Achilles Shrugged")
I'm not familiar with the author, who seems to be yet another online right substackker. He asserts that America's military capabilities are being stretched increasingly thin (Ukraine, possibly Israel, potentially Taiwan) while the armed forces are missing their recruiting targets. This is the background to his main claim: that the core demographics of America's fighting force ("the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks") have become so sick of the sneering racist abuse that they aren't signing up to fight any more, and while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers. Carter compares a previous ad for the US Army ("Emma", the girl with two moms who operates Patriot missile defense systems, roundly mocked at the time by comparisons to a Russian recruiting ad) to the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube). Carter parallels it with the attempt at brand rehabilitation like the one Bud Light tried after the Dylan Mulvaney boycott, and if the comment sections of Twitter, YouTube, and his article are anything to go by, it's not going to work either.
Bud Light update: VP of Marketing ~fired ("leave of absence")
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Wait a second, is this whole thing about a couple of videos on Dylan Mulvaney's personal Instagram account? I was assuming there was a tv commercial or Google ad or official Bud Light™ account post or something. I can't possibly imagine you follow Dylan on Instagram given your reaction. Did the Bud Light aisle at your local supermarket get stocked with Dylan Mulvaney commemorative cans? I could understand the anger if AB InBev decided to assault your senses while watching a basketball game, but you would have to go looking to find any of the objectionable content. Who gives a fuck?
Unlike most Allied marketing, this feels like it was meant to hurt.
I've seen those "if you don't agree with us, fuck you," ad campaigns. I don't really get that feeling from this one. I don't think it was ever meant to be seen outside of a targeted demographic. God, I can't believe I'm defending Bud Light here.
I do want to note this particular line from the article:
“I’m a businesswoman, I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light,’” Heinerscheid said.
I can't believe we're in the kind of bizzaro timeline where alcohol executives defend themselves by saying, "We were just trying to sell alcohol to minors young people. Why is everyone so mad?"
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.
firmamenti
6mo ago
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
SSCReader
1yr ago
But does an ad targeted to a diffetent demographic do that, if said demo is already different?.
The people who would buy Bud light after seeing promoted by Mulvaney are presumably onboard with transness already no?
Society is not based on reason in the first place so I don't care what beliefs Bud light are exploiting or if they are true or not. Like i don't care if America truly is the greatest nation on earth in every third beer commercial or whatever. The truth doesn't matter. Its aimed at people who already believe it.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
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.
Did they really "give in" to wokeism? Given that:
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.
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?
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.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Sure, everything is political, because everything can be framed in terms of power. But some things are more political, because they exert more power, and some things are less. Dylan Mulvaney making a beer ad is less political than the reaction to it, which is more political. It's not "the most politicized speech it is possibly to make". It's a man, or a woman, in a dress, or a bubble bath, drinking a Bud Light. There are many many things far more political. The essence of politics is the control of the state and its exclusive claim to legitimate violence in the enforcement of the law and its sovereignty. Miss Mulvaney's bubble bath is not near to any of those things.
I'm kind of surprised at people who think Bud Light is some sort of exclusively Republican domain. It's Bud Light, not the NRA.
You're forgetting important context, friend.
On March 27th, A transgender shooter killed children and teachers at a Christian School, with direct political motivations.
On April 1st, LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, the Bud Light-Mulvaney partnership drops.
In effect all of the powers that be ignored the victims of the shooting, provided some cover to the shooter, and essentially turned the entire thing into an opportunity to advance transgender issues.
It was an EXTREME "insult to injury" moment. AB was inadvertently(???) sending the message "We do not give a shit that you, our main customer demographic, was just targeted for a politically motivated attack and we will in fact implicitly celebrate the shooter with this marketing campaign that basically claims your favored beer brand for the blue tribe."
At best, AB was being completely tone-deaf in the timing. At worst, this was a flex. "Not only do we not care that you got attacked, we can kick you when you're down without fearing retaliation."
So people were PISSED off to start, got increasingly riled up by the coverage of the aftermath and the shooter, and THEN Bud Light waltzed in with a marketing campaign that poked them right in the still-fresh wound. So the rest unfolded in a fairly logical fashion.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
On March 27th, A transgender shooter killed children and teachers at a Christian School, with direct political motivations.
What evidence do you have that the shooting was politically motivated? One article says:
Authorities have yet to release what was written publicly. But TBI director David Rausch did talk candidly about the contents of the manifesto at a Tennessee Sheriffs' Association meeting. Rausch said what police found isn't so much a manifesto spelling out a target but a series of rambling writings indicating no clear motive.
Investigators searched the Nashville home of the Covenant School shooter leaving with among other things — a number or handwritten journals, some videos and computer hard drives. Rausch told sheriffs that the review so far of the material finds that the killer did not write about specific political, religious or social issues. In fact, a primary focus in the journals is on idolizing those who committed prior school shootings.
She appears to have followed their lead planning for months and acted alone.
And you can tell this media outlet isn't particularly dedicated to pushing the trans agenda by the fact that they're not using the shooter's preferred pronouns. The obvious explanation is that this particular school was targeted because the shooter once attended it.
On April 1st, LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, the Bud Light-Mulvaney partnership drops. (...) It was an EXTREME "insult to injury" moment. AB was inadvertently(???) sending the message "We do not give a shit that you, our main customer demographic, was just targeted for a politically motivated attack and we will in fact implicitly celebrate the shooter with this marketing campaign that basically claims your favored beer brand for the blue tribe."
Are trans people collectively guilty for a shooting committed by one trans person? And if they are, how long do they have to wait after the shooting before they can go out in public again without this being a provocation? How long does everyone else have to wait before it becomes acceptable to associate with trans people again?
In effect all of the powers that be ignored the victims of the shooting, provided some cover to the shooter, and essentially turned the entire thing into an opportunity to advance transgender issues.
The Wikipedia article on the shooting says:
In response to the shooting, U.S. President Joe Biden said, "We have to do more to stop gun violence. It's ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation, ripping at the very soul of the nation... we have to do more to protect our schools, so they aren't turned into prisons."[7] He ordered flags on all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff.[21][57] Tennessee state representative Bob Freeman, a Democrat from Nashville, called for gun reforms in the wake of the shooting.[58]
On March 30, thousands of protestors gathered at the Tennessee State Capitol to call for stricter gun control laws.[59][60] Some children held signs saying "I'm nine" in reference to the age of the children shot.[61] Within the chamber of the capitol, three state representatives, Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson led the public gallery in chants of "no more silence", "we have to do better", and "gun reform now", demanding that lawmakers strengthen gun laws. This protest delayed a hearing on a bill which would expand gun access.[62][58] The next day the state legislature passed a law allowing private schools to hire school resource officers from police departments to help prevent shootings, effective immediately.[63]
The president ordering that flags on all federal buildings be flown at half-staff is certainly not ignoring the victims. It seems that they reacted the same way they react to other school shootings. Every remotely notable left-wing figure that publicly reacted to the shooting condemned it and called for more gun control. No one decided that guns and school shootings are fine now because sometimes a member of the ingroup will be shooting at the outgroup.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
But it’s something they’ve sort of deliberately created for themselves. Conservatives have known for a long time that success in PMC and white colar work means being rather closeted about things coded conservative. It actually somewhat starts in college where expressing even mild disagreement with the ideas of modern progressive ideology is going to get you shunned and if you’re dumb enough to turn in a paper that expresses a conservative opinion you get worse grades. In the workplace, almost any such expression will be seen as negative and possibly get you reported to HR. As such, modern conservatives in the modern workplace, or at least the modern, urban respectable workplace are as closeted as gays were in the 1990s. You thought long and hard before telling people in your social circle and probably didn’t tell people in your professional circle because even though it’s officially tolerated, it would be risky.
As such, even though there are probably people in their social circles who are conservative, those people have learned to clam up. They were in the room when the “right” — pro-abortion— move was made. They just didn’t want the blowback from being the conservative in the room. I guarantee (especially given that the Budweiser part of InBev is in the midwestern largely Catholic city of St. Louis) that someone in that room knew the Mulvaney cans were a terrible idea that would cause backlash. They said nothing because being anti-trans is dangerous to their career.
FarNearEverywhere
11mo ago
Budweiser really shot themselves in the foot, and it looks like it was mostly down to the stupid decision by the marketing VP. On the one hand, I can see where she's coming from: the brand is slowly declining, even if it's still the number one, and they need to pivot to a new audience. So if that means appealing to the woke young college kids (never mind what she said about "fratty" associations), so be it.
The problem was twofold, though. Maybe even threefold, gimme a moment to count on my fingers.
(1) The interview with the podcast where she went on about the "fratty" image. Girleen, who do you think drinks your cheap light beer? People who want to be able to drink a lot over a long period of time without getting wasted too fast, and people who want to drink a lot on the cheap. So cheap boozing is college students, like it or lump it
(2) Dylan Mulvaney. Yes, I know all about the cans and that it wasn't a partnership etc. Great, you want to get Dylan's 10 million TikTokkers and the 2 million Instagram followers, and for "who is the hot new name right this minute?", Mulvaney probably comes up. Except.
What is the age range/age group of Mulvaney's followers? Are they legal drinking age in the US?
Mulvaney's other endorsements seem to be for cosmetics, fashion, etc. Do you really think a bunch of young women tuning in to see the latest lipstick shade are all going to decide to start swigging Bud Light?
Just because Mulvaney is Internet famous does not mean they are a good match for your brand; it's like asking the Chief Rabbi to endorse your line of 100% organic pork sausages and bacon. There's ways to appeal to the more liberal, younger set, but this was a bad idea.
(3) Why is the brand declining? Is it because younger people are not drinking beer, but rather spirits and seltzers? And if they are drinking beer, more likely to be the craft beers and micro-breweries? Or indeed, not drinking at all? Was there any research done, because it sure doesn't look like it.
They (or she) tried a marketing stunt and it went viral - in all the wrong ways. If your core demographic for your brand are older, more conservative, more redneck types, then coming out with an interview that basically says "we don't want your custom any more" and this sort of influencer is pretty much telling them "we think you're smelly and icky and we don't want you around anymore".
So then people said "Okay, if you don't want us, we're going" and switched to other cheap, low-quality beer. That was easily done, it's all on the shelves beside your brand, so there was no more effort needed than move three inches to the side and grab that 15-pack instead.
Oops.
And to rub salt into the wound, there wasn't an influx of new young drinkers or LGBT bars stepping up and buying Bud in support. On the contrary.
InBev/Anheuser Busch can rush out all the hokey country music ads and wrap themselves in the flag all they like now, but this is too blatant pandering for even rednecks and hicks to swallow, because they've seen the messaging: we want the rainbow dollar. It's not sincere, and they're not falling for it.
And this could easily have been avoided with just a little more thought about how to pivot and what way to do it. I don't think it's a "trans backlash", despite how they're trying to spin it. I mean, I find Mulvaney highly irritating, and the beer in the bath video was excruciating to watch. But more subtle appeals to the young and LGBT set? That could have been done. Embrace your 'fratty' college roots, but have it be the activist types (not too activist, though) drinking Bud Light and not the frat boys. But no, they went full-on absolute opposite to their core market, and showed contempt for them, and that's what people are reacting to, more than anything.
Now, however, they can't even give it away for free (as the rebate coupled with the mark-downs to get the stuff off the shelves before it hits the expiry date means it's practically free).
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
It’s also something you order at restaurants and bars where you have a choice and the choice is publicly known. If I’m in a bar in Mississippi and I’m ordering a beer with my buddies, there’s an element of peer pressure. The controversy over Mulvaney means that especially in conservative circles, ordering a Bud Light is going to be something people pay attention to. It’s the tranny beer. You don’t support that do you?
And I think this is why a lot of boycotts fail. If you can privately cross the line, then a lot of people do. All the people who are concerned about Amazon abusing workers still order from them because the social pressure of potentially being seen ordering from Amazon isn’t there.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Talking about getting and spending, we lay waste the world.
Rarely is the chasm between my own thought and mainstream thought so apparent as when conversation turns to advertisers. I loathe these faceless entities working to wrest my thought into the shape of their own designs, prodding and pulling for whichever levers they can pull to make me consume ever more of their products. I block all ads I can block, recoil when one prods through my defenses and demands my attention.
Yes, this latest campaign is miserable, but not because of what’s in it. It’s because I must watch people broadcast their allegiance to consumption, because they pull ads into my consciousness and reveal their passion for the norm of advertising by crying out against deviations from that norm. Yes, Bud Light ads are grotesque, as are Nike and all culture war ads of the day—but when were they not grotesque, these machines spending untold millions to entangle people’s identities and values with the mass-market products they consume?
I do not care about Dylan Mulvaney, do not care about Bud Light. This lack of caring is not apathy, but a deep-felt antipathy towards the machine that pulls them into my sphere of awareness. Every time someone tells me with heated emotion about the latest symbol of consumption for this or that, the Enemy has won. Every time culture warriors line up for and against Product, the centrality of Product to Culture is sacralized.
Yes, you might say: you may not care about these things, but they care about you. That is, in short, the problem: they care about me when I do not wish to care about them, they spend millions hunting me while I work to evade them, and then they tap into the passions of vectors like you and in so doing find me once more, force themselves into my consciousness once more.
Ad culture is grotesque. It has been so long before Mulvaney and will be so long after they are replaced by the next in a flood of spokespeople sacrificing their lives to the Machine. Drink what beer you will, treat it as an expression of your deep-felt values if you must, but in my book this ad campaign should receive just as much attention as every other hostile, shrieking intrusion into our minds: none at all beyond a muted channel and averted eyes.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
The people who would buy Bud light after seeing promoted by Mulvaney are presumably onboard with transness already no?
I don’t think any reasonable person thinks this demographic actually exists outside of like, 10 people.
The real story is probably that bud light is in decline, there isn’t really a way to fix that decline, and the head of marketing knows that and is trying to make it look good on her resume by attributing declining sales to transphobia. I don’t particularly care about that, but I do care that this is the one time my demographic can hit corporates with a boycott that hurts.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
New Coke was legitimately a worse product. No one would have known or cared about Dylan Mulvaney's Bud Light deal if it wasn't for social media outrage. It wouldn't have affected the product at all.
DradisPing
1yr ago
This is basically the equivalent of Starbucks putting Andrew Tate's photo on their pumpkin spice lattes. Worse because Bud Light has been losing market share and isn't well respected by beer drinkers.
Blue collar people see this as "I've been loyal to your mediocre product and you make an effort to insult me".
I see Mulvaney as someone who's addicted to attention, not some multilayered performance artist.
Kid Rock is just having some fun and showing loyalty to his fans.
Conservative commentators are jumping on this because Bud Light is a fun target to mock, and most of the jokes have already been written.
Anheuser-Busch can't back down because it will hurt their ESG rating. There's a specific LBGTQ rating that may be separate from ESG, I'm not sure how it works.
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.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I guarantee (especially given that the Budweiser part of InBev is in the midwestern largely Catholic city of St. Louis) that someone in that room knew the Mulvaney cans were a terrible idea that would cause backlash. They said nothing because being anti-trans is dangerous to their career.
I'll tell you what they were thinking. They were thinking, "we need to sell beer to children without getting in trouble." The Beer Institute (the beer industry self-regulatory organization) has a rule that beer advertising can only appear in media where 73.6% of the audience is 21 years of age or older. Do you think that Dylan Mulvaney's Instagram following is more or less than 26.4% under 21? They were hoping that they'd be able to get away with it because no organization wants to be seen as transphobic.
faceh
1yr ago
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 journalism the 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.
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.
Unfortunately, I really want to talk about all the Bud Light stuff, and I don't want to make a new throwaway for it. So you will have to deal with this short summary of my jury duty instead of the nice effort post I've been cooking up on dog walks: 1) The pool is almost sarcastically diverse, as though someone had intentionally excluded anyone else resembling my 'peers.' 2) If someone shows up it's because they want to serve on a jury, and they find it strange that someone would intentionally decrease their chances of being selected 3) The entire experience can be a colossal waste of time and energy, 50 otherwise productive people spent all day not working because one illegal immigrant made a sexual innuendo to another illegal's girlfriend/stepdaughter. Why not just deport them?
Onto the Bud Light thing, as discussed earlier here yesterday. The short summary would be that someone (also from San Diego, coincidentally) decided about a year ago that they were a woman, and Bud Light decided to make them a special commemorative can, which apparently they drank in a bathtub as part of a marketing campaign. This has made a lot of people (including me) very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. I'm writing this post now because the company just offered its' first official response and it's perfect gpt fuel-on-the-fire. It's short so I won't give highlights, instead, a summary that suggests it pisses off everyone rather than mollifying anyone. I eagerly invite someone to provide a mirror image of 'their tribes' response but I want to share a few thoughts about mine in a few buckets:
1). For most of my adult life, I drank an incredible amount of Bud Light. Occasionally flirting with the limits of 'functional' alcoholism at ~30 a day, occasionally dipping below my typical 10-12, occasionally taking a month off because I'd been getting fat. This amount of consumption is not unusual in my peer group. Just do some napkin math: (minimally) one beer per half hour of time awake and 'off the clock.' Essentially, Bud Light is not a 6 pack that sits in your fridge for weeks, it's bought in 18 packs by people like me on the way home for the night.
2). We drink Bud Light for exactly the reason you (the proverbial 'you', of course) poke fun at it. It's thin, watery, and doesn't have a lot of alcohol. I can drink 30 a day and never get shithouse drunk the way I will after 3 bourbons on an empty stomach. I can drink more than a tiny sip and enjoy the flavor, unlike a double tangerine ipa. I like to sit around and drink beer, and it's a perfect beer for that.
3). I have my friends that drink Bud Light, and my friends that poke fun at me for drinking Bud Light. I love both, but with the later, we usually don't tool around in the garage while drinking. These days with the later it's usually more like visiting the latest pop-up microbrewery which may or may not have food (or anything drinkable). There's a culture, or if that's a bit grandiose, a vibe around a hot sunny day and a big cold box of weak watery beer.
4). Unlike most potential boycotts, I (and my people) have some purchase with this one ('purchase' for the non-english natives among us here meaning 'agency, power, or leverage'). We get a little say. There is a little verve here. This is not nike, something I already didn't buy, or every insurance company known to man, something I can't really avoid buying, this is weak watery beer!
5). Unlike most Allied marketing, this feels like it was meant to hurt. I'm aware Bud Light has done rainbow pride cans before, and I've probably even bought some without thinking about it. But something feels wrong about buying this beer now that I know they intentionally had a AMAB in a bikini drinking their commemorative can celebrating '365 of womanhood.' Not only can I effectively boycott this, but I can't unfeel the desire to boycott this! This one might have legs.
After the non-apology from the brass, Bud Light may have terminally tarnished their brand. Planting a flag and vitally interested to hear your thoughts
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