bud mulvaney
07mk
1yr ago
I too doubt any sort of boycott would have any measurable negative impact, much less a meaningful one, to these companies, but I also wonder how well this sort of marketing will work out for Anheuser-Busch. The types of people that I know who would be attracted to a brand by Mulvaney's endorsement are also the types of people who wouldn't be caught dead drinking Bud Light (though something by a brewery owned by Anheuser-Busch is another question), and I can't imagine this allowing them to overcome that distaste. But the people I know are obviously not representative of such a population, so maybe there are a lot of people who would be converted to drinking Bud Light that Anheuser-Busch's marketing identified. The effects of marketing is well known to be illegible even by marketers, so perhaps it's just a more general latching-onto-the-bandwagon thing. Actually, now that I think about it, it could also be an investment in the future: as current preteens and teenagers - a population I believe is more skewed than the rest of the population towards being positively influenced by Mulvaney's endorsement - age up into drinking age, their mental association between Mulvaney and Bud Light, now reinforced for multiple of their most impressionable years - could push them more towards that beer.
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.
SanDiegoJuryDuty
1yr ago
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
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?"
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.
07mk
1yr ago
I 1st saw him in this clip of the guy on Price is Right a couple weeks ago, on Twitter by, I think Sarah Haider (president of Ex-Muslims of North America) who was commenting on the person clearly being someone with an unhealthy need for attention. Even despite the fact that Haider isn't the type to shitpost, I genuinely wasn't sure if this wasn't some SNL-style parody of someone. After seeing the clip, I just moved on but kept seeing his name come up here and there on Twitter, but it was only when this Bud Light thing happened that it just seemed to be everywhere. But never through running into actual primary sources; it was only through culture war discussions on Twitter or Reddit. From everything I've seen, it does seem like Mulvaney either has a great talent for grabbing attention or an unhealthy compulsion for it, and perhaps we're playing exactly into his hands here. There's definitely something about him that makes it hard to look away when I do encounter him, but I don't feel the desire to seek him out and do wish I ran into him less often.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I think you hit the nail on the head but not in so many words about the bud light controversy.
Bud light is, well, not a beer that any reasonable person would associate with the sort of people who get into woke stuff. The advertising campaign featuring a z-list celebrity weirdo in a dress(and lets be real, that’s what Dylan mulvaney is- even by MTF standards he’s pretty deeply odd and he’s pure culture war fodder because he’s so weird and annoying) wasn’t served to me(beer ads seem to think of me as a right wing Hispanic beer snob) but it did uniquely offend me because, well, who did they think it was going to appeal to? I mean gay pride cans in June are obviously for sale to gay bars but does any bud light drinker have much sympathy for trans? And I’m so enthusiastic about not drinking any Budweiser product(of which there are many, and of which some are drinkable) because this feels like my demographic(blue collar males) exercising cultural power. This is the one time we get to hit back, and it feels good. Honestly that last bit probably makes all the difference in the world.
Anyways I’ll be drinking shiner after yard work.
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.
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.
DTulpa
1yr ago
When Bud Lite gives somebody a commemorative can to celebrate their personal milestone of fake womahood, I would say they've sailed past bland ol' marketing and are deliberately pandering. And while I have a degree of tolerance for pandering, I have grown incredibly tired of the relentless affirmation of falshehoods and poor understandings woven throughout the trans phenomenon.
You want to put a rainbow flag over a six-pack? I think that's cringe, but I'm fine with it because I understand that symbol to be vague and open enough for people to read what they want from it. You want to personally celebrate a weirdo with their farcical, unconvincing transition into womanhood? Well... why? Could you imagine Bud giving commemorative cans to Dolezal for her inspiring journey into 'blackness'? And what would the reaction from the hoi polloi be? Sure, it wouldn't affect me personally. But it would be such an opportunity loss to not criticize it as abjectly stupid, or to question what the hell Bud was even thinking when they greenlit this stunt, and to also point out this pattern in marketing is increasingly ubiquitous from all major brands.
No, this doesn't affect the taste or quality of the product. But the cultural assumptions and messaging being baked into media and ads - now coming from your 'classic degenerate US beer company' - are absolutely obnoxious and demanding a pushback. What specificially is Bud celebrating here? What values are they displaying when they treat Dylan's transition as some legitimate thing that isn't to be questioned? Does the average employee even believe it? Or are they just going to continue ramrodding this shit, and once cornered default to "Hey guys! We just want to be nice and inclusive, no big deal! Choo choo", as if there isn't
a festering sociopolitical rat's nest of unexamined assumptions and contradictions roiling underneath?
"I just consume what I like and pay no attention to the marketing" is very much where I'd like to be, and probably where I still would be if this was the era of non-political Budweiser Frogs. Unfortunately, I have learned that I 'live in a society', and wokeness is intent on appropriating and weaponizing everything it can get its hands on; 'forcing' consensus through pop culture while skipping over every serious deliberation that could undercut it.
The Mulvaney cans are one of the biggest flexes I've seen, in many ways because of Bud Lite's preexisting image of a low-class red tribe beer. As if to say "even this territory can be conquered and made fabulous and gay, and boy aren't you the dysfunctional non-nice weirdo if disagree with any of this". One wonders why this whole performance - separate from the beer itself - might piss people off.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
This website is named for the motte and bailey fallacy, right? I believe that's relevant to this discussion, where you started by expressing anger that a beer company picked a trans woman for one commercial and expressing glee at the violent and angry responses from conservatives, and now are asking me to find a way for a political pundit to express gay and trans hatred at a pride parade to prove... something.
My original point stands. The bud light ad with Dylan Mulvaney and the response to it demonstrate to gay and trans people that conservatives require to be allowed to exclude them, with violence if possible. It's a smart way to demonstrate that conservatives don't care about women and children as much as they just hate gender nonconforming men and women. They have gone from seeking out gay and trans people to victimize, to creating silos in which they feel justified in victimizing any gay or trans people who dare to enter, but the urge to react to gay and trans people with violence is unchanged.
Conservatives were making headway with their concern for trans children and women's sports, but they took the bait and started shooting cases of beer because a trans woman drank a bud light.
the violent and angry responses from conservatives
....? They're not buying beer. One guy shot a case of Bud Light and posted it on social media. It was not a case with Mulvaney on it, just a blue box.
now are asking me to find a way for a political pundit to express gay and trans hatred at a pride parade to prove... something.
Your core argument is that your side is morally superior because conservatives are welcome in gay spaces if they're not "political", but gay people are not welcome in conservative spaces, regardless. This is not some pedantic nit I'm picking. Please demonstrate that a legible conservative can enter a gay pride space and not get a hostile reception. I've tried to demonstrate it's possible for legibly gay people to enter a conservative space in the same way.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
Identity is the perceived membership of particular in-groups and out-groups. It's a factor of human psycho-social dynamics, not biology. As we have seen here, conservatives seem to view their political alignment as an identity. They also seem to be eager to ascribe other people's political alignments as an identity, as you and the other two people replying to me have all eventually accused me of being on the side of liberals and making assumptions about my political affiliation. Liberals engage in that to a lesser degree, which is why there are so many different liberal factions that spend almost as much time fighting each other as they do conservatives. They couldn't even successfully elect Hillary Clinton because of ideological differences, which is an extreme weakness of the liberal movement.
Justin Trudeau wore brownface once as a high schooler. It is well within the ability of most liberals to understand the idea of doing something stupid and ignorant when in high school. Conservatives try to use that to weaken his political influence, and liberal don't let it work. It's too weak of a transgression, and he's too strong of a political force for liberalism otherwise.
There are obviously going to be counterexamples of these tendencies on both sides, but I'm talking about general trends and the behavior of the plurality, if not the majority. In a democratic system like ours, the tendencies of the plurality determine who is elected to political power.
This isn't about good or bad, or mean and virtuous, and I didn't use any of those words. Those are value statements you read into my opinions because apparently that's where you center your discourse. I might say the liberal tendency to eat their own is very bad, because it resulted in failing to elect Hillary Clinton. I might say the conservative ability to support each other in an identity based way is good because it enabled them to achieve political goals liberals thought were impossible, like repealing Roe v. Wade. Liberals frequently use ideological purity tests to be cruel to each other, and that probably leads to higher levels of anxiety in liberals. Conservatives will extend each other a great deal of kindness and community, which can lead to more prosocial behavior in conservative circles.
Generally though, I'd rather be a conservative at a pride parade than a trans woman in a men's locker room. Liberals are generally more tolerant of dissent and while a few might become aggressive, you have a distinct possibility of others defending the conservative's right to free speech. If one man in a locker room decides to be aggressive towards another for being gay or trans, the other men will not intervene, even if they disagree, because they will immediately be targeted as well.
Straight men absolutely do harass each other far more than any gay man harasses straight me. Straight men say crude and sexually demeaning things to each other all the time, especially in male only contexts. It is not reasonable to assume gay men are more likely to sexually harass straight men than that straight men are likely to sexually harass each other. I actually think the real disruption that gay men create in straight male dynamics is that straight men cannot safely sexually harass them, or just generally engage aggressively with them, the same way they feel safe engaging with other straight men. The same sexual jokes they can make with other straight men suddenly are recontextualized, and that makes them uncomfortable and uneasy. Gay men don't have a lot of choice but to learn to live with straight men to at least some degree, but many straight men, however, have trouble with the threat that a gay man can pose to the social dynamics of a straight male dominated context. If a straight man is too nice to the gay man, will the other men call him gay? If he's too mean, will the other men call him gay? If he imagines the gay man having sex with other men, does that mean he's gay? Straight men who exist in cultures with hostility towards gay men aren't worried about being harassed by gay men, and the idea that they are is laughable. They are worried about being harassed by other straight men regarding the way they choose to interact with the gay men. They don't know the rules.
You can see this right now with Bud Light. According to them, a gay man, Dylan Mulvaney, is drinking Bud Light, and has entered their social context. No one is worried about Dylan Mulvaney's harassment or reaction to them choosing to continue drinking Bud Light or not. All of these conservative men are performing for each other, lest they be harassed themselves for an improper reaction to this gay male encroachment on their beer. Some feel the need to make a video shooting bud light. Some make videos of themselves throwing away bud light. I'd bet a lot of conservative men don't care about it, but are worried about buying bud light in front of their friends in case their friends use that to harass them.
Straight men are not afraid of gay men, they are afraid of other straight men.
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.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
What would refusing to acknowledge that “trans women are women” entail? If you use a trans person’s preferred pronouns, don’t treat them differently than you would a cis person of the same gender, and support their right to the healthcare they need, it’s just a fight over definitions about what a woman is, which is largely fruitless - see many LessWrong and SSC posts i.e. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
Speaking for myself: you have, like many decent folks on the trans activist side, buried a lot of very salient details in reasonable-sounding language.
If you use a trans person’s preferred pronouns
As a general rule, yes, I will use someone's preferred pronouns. But what if I earnestly believe someone is a fraud, a bad actor, someone whose "transition" is at best highly suspect, and at worst, a cynical grift? Someone like Jessica Yaniv, or Dylan Mulvaney, or a convicted rapist who discovered during his trial that he is actually a woman? I would like to reserve the right to say "No, I don't think you are claiming a trans identity in good faith and I refuse to respect it." A lot of trans activists would tell me that I need to use whatever pronouns someone tells me to, period.
and support their right to the healthcare they need
"Need" is a bit of a question mark, though. But again, if you are an adult of sound mind, sure, do whatever you want to your body, I guess. But trans inmates who demand that the prison system foot the bill for their transition, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars from an already overstretched prison budget that barely accommodates the very real medical needs of other prisoners? To say nothing of minors who say they "need" to make permanent alterations to their body at the age of 14? Phrasing it as "the right to the healthcare they need" sounds like opponents want to deny them medical treatment in general, and ignores the actual issues.
it’s just a fight over definitions about what a woman is, which is largely fruitless
Again, if it was just trans women saying "I'm a woman, please call me a woman," I think most people would accept that, with varying degrees of grudgingness. One of the thiings that's made it such a flashpoint, though, is trans people demanding that references to "women" (when talking about, e.g,, pregnancy, menstruation, etc.) be changed to awkward if not offensive circumlocutions like "pregnant people" or "uterus-havers." There are many examples of even more egregious howlers. These are things being pushed by the same folks who say they just want us to accept their "reasonable," flexible, and constantly changing definition of "woman."
It is unfortunate that so much of the debate is driven by bad actors, and not by reasonable people like (I assume) yourself who just want to live your lives and be left in peace. But the fact that even the reasonable people will generally refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of bad actors means that when you get the "trans woman" who makes a point of strutting around a women's locker room naked, waving "her" erect penis at a captive audience, it discredits all the other trans women who say "No, really, I just to want to use the locker room and change in peace."
Bud Light update: VP of Marketing ~fired ("leave of absence")
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.
No, I actually think this is right on the money for how a boycott should go.
Bud Light tries a marketing tactic and immediately sees its sales crater: even if the sales are going to its other Anheuser-Busch brands there are real costs in having to drop large amounts of production on one brand and move it to another.
Plenty of people work for Bud Light but not AB, and if they have to cut, say, a quarter of production those people are at least having their lives disrupted and possibly being laid off and replaced. Even if AB's sales stay completely level, that will be a significant event.
Meanwhile, they paid for that privilege: that was a marketing campaign that was intended to raise sales. And the people at the top of AB who are at least going to casually glance at new marketing campaigns are the same ones who had to reorganize after this Bud Light stuff. If AB goes under the company that replaces it is determined by market demands plus luck, with no guarantee they won't be more ideologically opposed to our Bud Light boycotters.
Instead, AB sticks around and learns the lesson "don't waste money on the trans stuff" which is what the boycotters wanted in the first place. Not only is it the most direct goal, it's much more attainable than trying to take out the largest brewery in the US.
In addition to this, cancel culture is an ethereal and poorly defined thing, but this all feels a lot more pure to me than it could be. Brand does advertising, consumers change their purchasing behavior of the brand as a result. No major agitating for collateral damage, not even really that much of a push to get people fired*, just "we're not going to buy this anymore because of what you did with it, you figure out what happens next".
*I'm sure people on Twitter were loudly calling for both, but it seems like the impact on a consumer level was much bigger. I would ideally just have people change their purchasing behavior and make a relatively-quiet confirmation of "yes this is about the Mulvaney thing", and this feels like a step in that direction if not in any way perfect.
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.
07mk
1yr ago
As stark as 20% drop within a month is, I don't think you can declare a loss in your prediction yet; we've still got a long ways to go before the 6-month mark. I admit, I predicted similarly to you, and I too am surprised, and I could see the boycott having legs for 6 months and beyond, if regular consumers switch over to Coors Lite or Miller Lite or whatever and make it their habit. 6 months is more than enough time to develop a new habit that one sticks with. I personally don't drink much light beer at all, so I can't say if these products are sufficiently interchangeable that Bud Lite drinkers could stick with the change long-term; the beer snob in me would say obviously they're fungible, but that's obviously not accurate. So maybe the people who are angry/hyped enough to switch over for a month could only handle forcing down Coors Lite for so long before they have to switch back to their favored Bud Lite.
On the boycott itself, though, has any organization come out and called for people to boycott Bud Lite/ABI? I feel like I've seen a lot of people talking about not buying them in reaction to the Mulvaney marketing, but I haven't seen any widespread calls for solidarity coming from big names/organizations. Then again, I'm not much in the target audience for something like that, and I also don't remember much of that during the recent boycott against Hogwarts Legacy, so maybe I shouldn't expect to see something like that.
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?
I think they were harmed by the Marketing VP's comments which have a "woke' flavor:
She added further that she had a “super clear” mandate that “to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand.” She said that what she “brought” to the brand was a “belief” that to evolve and elevate means to incorporate “inclusivity, it means shifting the tone, it means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive, and feels lighter and brighter and different, and appeals to women and to men.”
...
“We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach,” she said.
The focus on "inclusivity", the criticism of the old (successful) brand as "fratty" and "out of touch", the claim that anything that caters to the old crowd is out of date and moribund...all of it pattern matches to "woke" (and yes, that includes her being a woman). If you're a conservative you've seen this play out more than a few times so, when they tell you they want to take away what you feel is yours, you believe them
IMO the choice of Mulvaney also screams "woke". Mulvaney is running around claiming to be not just a girl but the most obviously misogynist and appropriative vision of "girlhood" around. If anyone wrote him as a female character it'd rightly be seen as sexist.
It takes a lot of in-group loyalty imo to not see the issue with this guy and to choose to use them , even a bit, as a mascot for your brand aimed at a totally different market, instead of any other conceivable trans figure.
This Mulvaney thing broke out in early April, according to Vox. From what I see, it appears to have not only led to a decline in sales, but has actually led the market to downgrade the value of AB InBev. If I were an stock investor in a given company, I wouldn’t care about company fundamentals like sales, but rather its stock returns.
AB InBev trades on NYSE with the ticker BUD, which may be surprising to those of us who would have thought “BUD” were some sort of marijuana ETF. I looked for beer/alcohol themed ETFs for comparison—but strangely, from my cursory search, there is no large-scale ETF focusing on just beer, or even alcohol (perhaps a business opportunity! TheMotte-managed Booze ETF when?).
However, there are relatively larger related ETFs with somewhat bigger scopes. BAD, which tracks Betting, Alcohol, and Drugs. PBJ, a “dynamic” food and beverage ETF. VICE “invests in the products and services that people find pleasure in regardless of economic conditions." VICE sounds potentially dangerously based as an ETF that invests in young women, but its holdings are merely in "alcohol, tobacco, gaming, food and beverage, restaurant and hospitality" (which actually—come to think of it—sound rather female-coded, sectors where female sexuality is heavily leveraged).
BUD has delivered a 3.5% loss since March month-end—whereas BAD gained 2.6%, PBJ 3.1%, and VICE 3.6%. Obviously, there could be substantial idiosyncratic volatility to individual stocks, but one could argue this transversy erased at least 6% of BUD shareholder value because a Marketing VP thought it’d be cute for BUD to be more “inclusive” and less “fratty.” BAD and VICE contain BUD, so a better comparison using BAD ex-BUD and VICE ex-BUD would only yield a greater difference.
In some ways, I’m mirin that Marketing VP, who is far less good-looking than I had initially imagined. Get that bag and get those woke good-girl points. It's impressive she was able to have such an influence. She'll likely be able to quickly get a new, high-status role elsewhere, as a #BossBabe who was forced out only due to misogynistic, incel transphobes.
I don’t think there’s anything I could realistically do to tank my employer’s valuation by 6+ percent even if I wanted to, that doesn’t involve me intentionally cultivating massive wrong-doings to get myself sent to prison (or the shadow-realm) and then ghost-writing a tattletale “tell-all” autobiography with lawsuits to boot. Like a more corporate, coherent, litigious Tim Donaghy.
“Everything is securities fraud,” Matt Levine loves to remark. It’d be great if this latest kerfuffle inspired greater attention, investor activism, and lawfare toward the principal-agency problem in corporations, where employees use company resources to advance their personal political interests. Yet, I know better than to expect anything.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1yr ago
-- 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.
This is why eyewitness testimonies are so unreliable. People are very bad at keeping track of details of events, and at best have a vague idea. It's a combination of laziness, confirmation bias, and mental heuristics.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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