Musings on Budweiser

I assume you have multiple decades of drinking Bud, do you remember it being more flavorful years ago, or have the incremental changes happened slowly enough that it’s not noticeable?

 

I guess I misunderstood. You said the quote that offended you came from an interview. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to this Bud Light issue, on account of I think it’s all manufactured outrage designed to divide people based on identity politics, and I haven’t tasted Bud Light in probably almost 40 years, if ever—but usually if a person is interviewed the organization doing the interview does not then have to get corporate approval to publish the remarks of the interviewee. Again I don’t know the details of what happened and as far as you are concerned it doesn’t matter anyway because you are happy with your Hamm’s. But something doesn’t seem to add up here, and to me it sounds like this former marketing exec or whatever might have just clumsily tried to explain something and didn’t do a very good job at it. Which might be a sign she wasn’t very good at her job to begin with.

 

So, to clarify, you weren’t put off by 40+ years of massive, carpet-bombingesque ad campaigns approved by marketing execs who clearly thought of Bud drinkers as frat boys (ie, Spuds McKenzie, Whazzup, Real Men of Genius, etc)? You were put off by the marketing exec who described those past campaigns as “fratty”?

 

Which statements? Three pages on, and you seem to repeat your initial post. It's nice to hear about your history, and familiarity with the product. A lot of the fighting for equal space at the table which was heavily discussed, and also had police action and blood let over back then is still just trying to achieve those goals and become boring American consumers who can be advertised towards with slightly buffoon like bears performing outdoors tasks with choral verses about the woods life.

 

I'll be real....when I think of Budweiser. I think of your beeradvocate account. You posted about Bud so many times that @Squire, so far as I'm concerned, is synonymous with Bud. If they put your beeradvocate avatar on the bottle I'd walk by it in the store and not think anything of it.

In other words, you consumed and enjoyed their product so much that complete strangers on an internet message board associate the product with your humanity. You completely quit that product because of a comment made by one of their employees.

This suggests you're being emotional about beer.

And there's no shame in it, it's normal. Hell, I'd wager most purchasing decisions, for most people, reflect some kind emotional state. Just my $0.02.

 

With all due respect, unless you can produce a link to this video interview, you might want to consider the possibility that you are misremembering or misinterpreting what was said. Aside from this altering your feelings about the brand, since you are also repeating this narrative publicly, I think you owe it to people to be certain and accurate. The video interview that grabbed media attention (which might be different from what you saw) had the comment: "Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty kind of out of touch humor." To some, that comment might equate to the company calling their customers "frat boys," but those two concepts/comments are not the same thing. I'm not saying that you have distorted things, but you should consider the possibility that you unintentionally might have... or that you repeated information from people who did. Out of personal curiosity, I would love to see the interview you are referring to. I don't know if there are multiple videos circulating, relevant info only seen in unedited videos, or if there is some Mandela effect at work. I'd appreciate any help you can provide.

 

I love my fratty, out of touch humor!

 

I enjoy many of Bud’s “fratty” campaigns, too. Being “out of touch,” not so much.

My deep suspicion is that a lot of Bud Light boycotters aren’t so upset that an AB/InBev executive admitted that the company’s past ad campaigns had “fratty” vibe, but rather feel rejected by the company (and the world’s) growing embrace of trans folks.

 

Perhaps. I just wish that they would bring the old ads back.

Particularly the “Dilly Dilly” ones. Sure they were a little juvenile, but there were so many funny characters. The Bud Knight, King John Barley IV, etc.

 

My deep suspicion is that if BL as a company had any intention of embracing so-called "trans folks," they would have told the boycotters to GFT and continued with their ill-conceived ad campaign instead of throwing everybody associated with it under the bus. So far, not one single person has managed to explain just what the hell they were trying to do in the first place. Further, my deep suspicion is that this so-called "boycott" was a much more organic response than people realize. I don't believe they'll ever recover from it (an opinion that may admittedly be colored by my hatred of all things AB-InBev). Either way, nothing these asswipes do is going to affect my life in the least.
Edit: ...except for taking up precious shelf space that could be used for much better beer.

 

Really? They were trying to get positive brand recognition with Dylan Mulvaney's fan base, which is primarily young (probably mostly too young to legally drink) and queer. Like any company they engage people like influencers in an effort to connect with their followers. Considering the stats about gen z beer consumption its not really surprising that a brewer would look to someone with a large following of young people.

 

I agree that AB/InBev’s commitment to LGBTQ rights is weak as hell.

As for how organic the boycott was, Fox News had stories platforming virulent transphobes implying Bid Light’s campaign was an attack on children less than 24 hours after the campaign started. I’m skeptical any of us would have heard about (let alone misquoted) the Bud Light marketing exec’s podcast interview if not for the media’s manufactured controversy.

 

I don't drink it because I don't care for it. I'd prefer Miller Lite or High Life. Albeit a few more bucks for a case. With that said, despite the advertising, if I'm in someone's garage and they offer me a cold Bud, I'll suck it down as quick as you can say "transgender influencer".

 

Speculation. AFAIK no one from the company actually came out and said this.

The "media" didn't manufacture this controversy. Bud Light's marketing genius(es) did.

If there was a podcast interview that supposedly explained any of this after the fact, my take is that it was a "cover your ass" move. The whole thing made no sense from the get-go. But, like I said, they're not impacting my life in the least. I'll just continue enjoying my while watching them implode.

 

my favorite thing about beeradvocate is when one member or a group of members makes or make assumptions about another member's motives and then proceed to go atomic.

in almost every case the mob reveals more about their own character deficiencies than anything else.

awesome.

 

Is it typical for companies to come out and reiterate the basic premise of advertising?

They didn't do anything remotely creative, it was a sponsored post with a social media personality who is popular with a key demographic. I get that working with that particular polarizing figure was poorly thought out, but it wasn't a particularly innovative marketing move

 

Where I live I get ABC & NBC over 'mercas public airwaves (I watch the news), no cable TV, I stream Netflix, Amazon and Hulu and pay Xtra not to have commercials. I don't want to see what I read about....