So, as you may have heard, Bud Light’s new brand representative is a trans woman named Dylan Mulvaney. She’s apparently a big deal on TikTok, but I had honestly never heard of her until the conservative temper tantrum over this brand deal. If you’ve heard about this at all, it’s either because you drink Bud Light, or because you heard about people doing stuff like pouring out their beer, or shooting their beer with guns, or running over their beer with pickup trucks. It’s the most I’ve heard about Bud Light in years, which is the whole point.
You can tell conservatives really love capitalism, because every time a corporation makes a bid for free advertising, the wingnuts fall all over themselves in their rush to oblige. That being the case, I think it’s worth posting this old video from Hbomberguy that explains what’s happening, and why. Bud Light doesn’t give a shit about trans people, they just know that most USians aren’t extremist bigots, which means that this will bring in a lot of profit for relatively little advertising investment.
Am I the only one finding it strange that these self-identified manly men would ever drink Bud Light in the first place?
I feel like I’m more macho by accident than they are when they’re actively trying.
The more I think about this, the more I realize there’s really no other way to get more people to drink that piss-water — or even remember it still exists. Bud’s never been presented as anything more than “bland standard American beer,” and they haven’t had an even slightly memorable ad-campaign since the “Bimbleman’s” ads in (IIRC) the ’90s. And since then micro-brews have been all the rage, along with Guinness and other well-known furrin brands. What else can they do but hire a “strange” person and make a few heads explode?
One thing I’ve heard in the past is that “manly” beers are those that can be easily chugged, while actual beer – especially the strong stuff – is for effete libs.
There was a letter a few years back from a Coors PR person responding to a complaints about their new black cans causing the beer to warm up after about 5-10 minutes in the sun. The response was that if the ideal drinking experience was within a couple minutes of opening a can, and if they wanted a “sissy sipping beer”, they could check with Sam Adams.
Dunno if that was real, but it captures the vibe. Nobody’s gonna shotgun a Russian imperial stout, and USian manliness is all about performance.
Anheuser-Busch stock is up 6 points. Maybe they can get noted “influencer” Ted Nugent to weigh in. And a week later cap it off with Beyonce slamming a Bud because it’s “woke”
Marketing is disgusting.
By British standards, seppos drink like children.
The main upside I see from this trend in marketing is that it works because most USians aren’t that bigoted, to the point where they’ll buy a product to PROVE they aren’t that bigoted. That’s not a total win, but it does seem to be a good thing overall.
In the google ‘news feed’ that appends to the search box on my phone they included an article about how A-B stocks lost a massive amount of value. They have lost around four juuust recently, but they’ve gone up six since March so it is a net of two, depending on your time frame. The Mulvaney publicity stunt happened on 1 April.