What can we learn from The Great Bud Light Marketing Massacre? After partnering with transgender icon Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, lost SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS in market cap. The intensity of the backlash turned it into the worst marketing disaster since New Coke. Was the Rubicon crossed, or is this just another speed bump on the road to perdition?
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30 replies on “We’ve Had Enough”
Did nobody but me notice that this ad campaign came out at the start of NASCAR season? Does anybody think NASCAR fans like Mulvaney on their bear can? I don’t think so!
A guy sent a sample of Bud-dumber to the lab for analysis. The report came back: “We regret to inform you that your horse has diabetes.”
When you say that they have lost 7 billion of market capital that is just the drop in their stock price because of the commercial. That does not count the losses in sales that will be piling up for quite some time.. That will make it hurt even more. And good for that.
Bill, I think you guys missed something that was different about this than the other woke companies. Dylan is specifically targeting kids, and very open about it. He even says his goal is to have private conversations with kids away from their parents. That’s the thing that was different, all the other woke companies up to this point have not targeted people specifically going after kids. Conservatives, unfortunately, will put up with a lot of stuff, but if you target their kids….
Excellent point. Leave the kids alone.
Well, there’s Disney…..
Disney is so hard. On one hand you want to boycott them and not watch anything they produce. On the other hand, they made some of the best stuff. The only saving grace about it is a bunch of the old stuff is still up on Disney+. And also great, they see the metrics of what is being watched.
I would like to cancel it, but my girls are both at the princess stage, so I’m stuck between a rock and a stupid castle.
Just wanted to point out that the exec vp woman who took credit for the Super Bowl ad and the Mulvany disaster has NOT been fired, or at least we don’t know she was based on anyone’s direct testimony. The site that reported that the ad team was fired is a satire site.
Of course, she SHOULD be fired!
Using the Clydesdales to recoup Budweiser’s image is a must, but not that ridiculous crap they rushed out a couple of days ago. Here is the strategy that InBev needs to employ: First, hire Kid Rock and pay him however much you have to to make a new spot. In the spot, he’s shooting at cases of Bud Light with his automatic weapon, when a team of Budweiser Clydesdales rounds the corner, hitched to a beautifully polished beer wagon. The lead horse in the team sees Kid Rock shooting up ahead, and rears up on his hind legs, eyes wide open and raises his forelegs high over his head. Subtitles read “HOOVES UP, DON’T SHOOT!” Pay whatever is needed to CGI the thing, if you have to. Kid Rock stares at the majestic animals for a few seconds in silence, realizes that he’s scaring the crap out of them. We see his gun clatter to the ground as Kid Rock rushes to the horses, and nuzzles with them and feeds them carrots as the wagon driver hands him a can of Bud. No words are spoken, except the four word subtitle.
That would be a nice apology to Budweiser and Bud Light drinkers, IMO
Maybe not. That whole “hand up, don’t shoot” thing was totally based on a lie and doing an ad like this would only perpetuate it.
First of all, this is a win and a big one. Take the win and be glad of it. This is a major marketing disaster for a nationally recognized name brand. That’s no small kettle of fish and it’s a mistake not to capitalize on it while it’s fresh news. There’s this thing about “striking while the iron is hot” that you should not ignore.
Secondly, I have to question the objectiveness of Zo (wearing his minister persona) when it comes to discussions relating to alcoholic beverages. Because… As a bourbon drinking cigar smoker that tea Zo recommended sounds pretty dang gay to me.
I realize people need something to talk about in these videos but once in a while would it really kill you guys to just enjoy the win for a while before poking holes in how Conservatives are handling it?
We can all always do better, this is a fact and I know you’re just trying to point out how we can improve on this nominal victory but … People get tired of hearing how ‘we’re doing it wrong’ all the time too.
I don’t know about crossing any Rubicon, because if the left has demonstrated anything, it’s that they believe in limits,,, only on “others”. What may have been the real driver behind the backlash is that this one was so blatantly an attack. This was not people fighting for a place at the table, this was a small portion of the alphabet community announcing with trumpets that they WILL go after icons, for the sake of doing it. The people forwarding this campaign aren’t bud light drinkers and they don’t want to be; but they do want bud light drinkers FORCED to accept and celebrate people like mulvaney, because they can.
It seems people don’t like being attacked. Imagine that.
PS: The only person I ever saw looking as unauthentic as mulvaney, when ‘having a beer’, was pocahontas.
Bring back the Clydesdales! At least they know what sex they are!!
There was an interviewer who got an ‘expert’ to say that it was rude to assume a chicken’s gender… so don’t be so sure.
And now, DJT Junior has joined the fray by telling people to back off on the boycotts and vilification.
Apparently, the CEO of A-B is some huge conservative, and GOP mega-donor, so we should be nice to his company.
Well, if he’s such a conservative, how did he allow this travesty to green-light in the first place, and what’s with the doubling down once challenged?
I say let ’em burn. Actions have consequences.
I don’t really care what DJT has to say in this matter. His opinions are his own. DJT having an opinion counter to my own is irrelevant, it neither raises no lowers what I think of him. I hate it when Conservatives collect scalps from the heads they’ve chopped off of those who don’t always agree with them. However …
IF the CEO of AHB is really some huge conservative mega donor then he needs to learn his lesson about letting this kind of horse crap make it through the corporate offices and out the door.
He can start by instituting a “no woke hiring” policy so he doesn’t end up with snakes nesting in his breweries again.
Ru Paul and others have been PLAYING at this for years, decades, doing it for laughs. They know they’re doing it for laughs, we know they’re doing it for laughs.
The current crop of confusion for real and is a mental aberration, an insult to humanity, along with all the gay/les/trans/fur/etc bull stuff.
The difference is, Ru Paul never expected people to call him a woman, or act as if they thought he was one. Flamboyantly male-dressing-as-female? Absolutely. Trying to get the law to force people to call him female? No.
First of all, Dylan is not a transgender. He’s a transvestite. He’s never had any genital-changing surgeries nor taken any hormones – hence, the use of ‘woman-face’.
I’m not a beer drinker so I can’t provide that perspective, but I think what has riled people up on this one is that the promotion was released just a few days after 3 children and 3 adults were killed by a trans at the Christian school.
Add to that, it’s just been piling up and folks have reached their limit. There’s only so much crap you can shove down everyone’s throat before they start to violently regurgitate.
That said, I don’t think this is the end of it all. They may hit the pause button for a bit, but it will be picked up again. They’ve linked DEI to company ESG scores. Marketing is no longer about the consumer.
People don’t react well to being mocked or insulted. Dylan’s act manages to do both to men and women. Perhaps the board of A-B has become another insular liberal echo chamber where this is considered funny.
Even if A-B wanted to improve its CEI score, it has several lesser iconic brands to risk in such a potentially suicidal gamble. I think they mistakenly allowed an outsider who had no understanding of their brand to make a major decision. And she completely misread the room.
The big difference between Rue Paul, all drag queens, actually, and Dylan is character vs caricature. Drag queens are a specific form of ADULT entertainment with a truthfully, limited audience. Barry Humphries made a whole career out of being somewhat cartoonish with his portrayal of Dame Edna. Or Flip Wilson’s Geraldine. Dylan, on the other hand is a caricature of a teenage girl insisting we join his delusion that he’s a real girl. I wonder sometimes though if this guy, and that swimmer, Leah Thomas aren’t just some sort of “theatre of the absurd” performance artists like Andy Kaufman, or Sasha Baron Cohen.
You summed it up with one word, “delusion”. All the rest is speculative fluff, which describes something that is far from entertaining. When the masses stop “buying into”” and promoting their insanity, one of two things will happen:
Regardless, I have little time to waste on such nonsense as these deluded persons.
I don’t care, and I doubt most people do, whether or not someone wants to be a caricature of a woman. When it becomes a problem is when law, or policy, is used to force me to act as if I don’t just care, but believe the delusion. (are we sure they actually ‘believe’ this, or are they just enjoying their 15 minutes and laughing all the way to the bank?)
I am more interested in what it’s going to take before women stop cheering and applauding and calling it ‘stunning and brave’; when men push them off one platform after another.
I have been saying ever since I saw the Price is Right video that this is performance art. No different from what Joaquin Phoenix did for a year way back starting with an appearance on Letterman.
Ru Paul is a gay man who dresses in drag for his performances. He plays a character on stage (or screen) but it is a character. He doesn’t live his life as a woman.
Dylan is playing the character of a little girl on social media. He has had no “transitioning” procedures that have been made public. So this is either fetishism (he gets off dressing like a little girl) or performance. Who knows how Dylan lives when the cameras are off.
The beer incident is just another in a long line of destructive operations to take the USA, and those like us, out of the picture. The Dylan twit is a blunt instrument, just like The Fossil is, just like the “story time” in front of kids is, with the intention to remove Western Civilization from the picture so that something else, whatever it turns out to be defined as, can move in and take the top spot. Just like Sauron is a poisoner and all these so-called Judges who always pull left, and these manufactured DAs, they’re all minions of the programmers whose objective is to rule a totally debased society. We’ve all seen these things happening and there is no longer any doubt about what’s happening. We can refuse to buy the “beer” out of general, hairy-chested outrage, but it remains to be seen how much of the over-all affront we will take — seems to be quite a lot. I sincerely hope that we will not all bend knee and accept the new paradigm in which we become genderless, gutless NPC characters with no individuality and those elitist morons take to their thrones atop their own digital Mt. Olympus construct. Bad for everybody.
Thanks for your videos. I’ve already e-mailed you a long time ago, but your website is so slow. it takes me about ten seconds until it appears. i almost never bother to check here because the load times drive me nuts.
Yeah the host is definitely lacking bandwidth; however, good things often come to those who wait.
I am curious why Bill Whittle has two Rumble channels? One with 867 followers and one with 9k+ ??? This video is only appearing on the smaller Rumble channel???
Perhaps one of the things that makes Anheuser-Busch more hateful than Gillette is sympathy. People can make excuses and sympathize with a dad loving his brainwashed daughter unconditionally. That doesn’t work when you put a self indulgent, narcissistic little turd front and center. Anheuser-Busch put a red dot on the problem.
This is worse than New Coke because it is about the ghastliness of the marketing mistake, not the abandonment of a favorite taste. It is also a market – beer – with nearly unlimited options with most of them tastier that Bud Light. I can see a lot of their market finding better beer long term.
This is one of the better “Go woke, Get broke” examples.