Posted on 04/10/2023 8:49:22 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Bud Light, the popular beer that has for years used silly ads and sometimes frat-boyish humor to stand apart from the (six)pack, is getting ready to grow up.
When the Super Bowl perennial enters the ad roster of Super Bowl LVII on February 12, it will do so with a new degree of sophistication and — shudder! — a female as one of the central characters of its commercial. In a new 30-second ad, Miles and Keleigh Teller turn the frustrating experience of being stuck on hold into a small dance party while cracking open a Bud Light.
“We are ushering in a new era for this brand,’ says Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, in a recent interview. She vows to “strip away all the loudness and the distractions.”
If any brand’s voice has boomed in advertising, it is Bud Light’s. Over the decades, this is the beer that brought consumers party dog Spuds McKenzie; quirky odes to “Real Men of Genius”; a Super Bowl ad featuring young men praying to a “magic fridge” full of the brew; Cedric the Entertainer; and the Bud Knight. Marketers behind the beverage have launched so many characters to help sell it that in 2021, Bud Light ran a Super Bowl commercial celebrating all of them.
Yet advertising — and beer drinking — is in flux. It’s no secret that even heady brands like Bud Light are competing for sipping share with hard seltzers, spirits and craft beers. And the younger consumers Heinerscheid wants to bring to Bud Light are looking for something different from the outreach it makes to them.
“Consumers young and old want a brand to stand for something,” she says, and to hear about “a unique benefit.”
She and her team took a trip to Anheuser-Busch’s St. Louis archives to discover what that might be. While looking through the beer’s history, they found that one of its original sales points after it was introduced in 1982 was its easy-to-drink nature. The marketing executive felt that simple positioning would be more meaningful to modern consumers than some of the beer’s recent antics.
And she intends to drive the message home. Anheuser-Busch will increase its marketing investment behind Bud Light by five times, she says, with outreach in markets across the rest of the year. The ads will follow the formula exemplified in the Super Bowl. They will open with an example of some easy-to-recognize frustration, which “you could let ruin your day, or you could flip the script, open a couple of Bud Lights and have some fun,” she says.
Heinerscheid is in her first year as Bud Light’s top marketer, and is replacing Andy Goeler, a longtime brand ambassador who developed many of the aforementioned conceits. She enters the Super Bowl fray at a delicate time. After maintaining a sponsorship deal that made it the exclusive malt-based liquor sponsor of the Super Bowl, it had ceded those rights — so other beers can now get in the game. Rival Molson Coors has already started an early campaign in a bid to have one of its top brews gain some share of recognition from the Anheuser-Busch offerings
The new Bud Light positioning represents a bid to speak to a broader and younger crowd. “We have to bring in new drinkers. That is the name of the game,” says Heinerscheid, who is also the first female executive to oversee Bud Light’s marketing efforts. Offering a twist on traditional beer marketing might just be the way to do it. In an effort to increase the ease of drinking Bud Light, Anheuser-Busch intends to send enough fo the beer to the home cityh of the team that wins the Big Game next week. .
“The Super Bowl can often be a race of shout the loudest, going in the biggest, going in real flashy. That’s some peoples’ formula,” she says. “What has worked for us, it’s about zigging when they are zagging,” weaning the brand off the easy jokes and finding something that is more resonant and meaningful. The new ads “are telling a story you want to watch again and again, and that might be the key to standing out.”
So I had this super clear mandate. Like, we need to evolve and elevate, this incredibly iconic brand. And...my...what I brought to that, was a belief in...ok, what does "evolve and elevate" mean? It's means INCLUSIVTY. 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.
...a pattern emerges of trashing tradition for a wokey future.
When it comes to Light, Transweiser needs to come down on the side of incandescent bulbs for those who choose.
Freedom, otherwise we all buy craft IPAs.
QED.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Unless you’re a woke biotch (affirmative action hire?) who would rather be woke then successful. I think I read here ? that 2022 was their best revenue year ever.
I guess I am not a typical consumer since I’m not influenced by most advertising. I’m solely interested in product quality and price. Put that in an ad and you might get my interest, but first I would have to be already looking for a similar product to meet a need.
As for Bud Light’s product quality, it’s piss water. I don’t need to know the price. No advertising is going to change my mind.
I used to do line illustrations for retail ads. I’m starting to get a picture of how this whole mess came about. If she is VP of marketing, she probably assigned several people or groups to submit ad ideas. Somebody brought up using the Trans celebrity.
Perhaps the other groups were hesitant to pour cold water on this approach, lest they be accused of Transphobia and put their own jobs at risk, so the idea was allowed to grow legs and gather more approval, resulting in this present situation. It probably was not even her own idea or goal in the beginning of the search for a new ad campaign.
I hear poor Spuds MacKenzie is a pacing his kennel and obsessively licking himself ever since a recent gown fitting
Bring back the Clydesdale ads & stop the posturing to all the freaks.
It is Blackrock, Vanguard and one other company that is driving all this because they control the stock price.
Ummm, "he" is a girl. From Wikipedia:
The dog was portrayed by a female bull terrier named Honey Tree Evil Eye...The Tran is strong with this one.
Pathetic and desperate, to think how many marketing dollars in salaries and advertising went into this totally futile attempt to be “relevant” and virtue signal over this idiot strategy of stoking up sales by aiming at the miniscule trans population. I think they’re already regretting the move and seeing that their bottom line is “suffering” , but they’ll find a way to save face w/0 admitting that’s why they’re shelving their trans commercials. Everybody has been calling Budweiser “piss” for years and years. In a world of more and more great beers, available a bit more expensively, Budweiser is on the way out. I think they almost redeemed themselves when they marketed a Clamato flavored brew, which is just what this piss needed. I’d buy it, now it’s hard to find.
The wokies are never going to buy Bud Light especially in any volume to replace the lost sales from their core customer base. They just nuked their own brand in some ill thought out attempt to boost their ESG score.
I want a brand to stand for consistent quality, of a product I need or enjoy, superior to that of its competitors; and to be socially and politically neutral at least, and silent at best.
7 April: NY Post: Inside the CEI system pushing brands to endorse celebs like Dylan Mulvaney
By Dana Kennedy
At stake is their Corporate Equality Index — or CEI — score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world.
HRC, which has received millions from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation among others, issues report cards for America’s biggest corporations via the CEI: awarding or subtracting points for how well companies adhere to what HRC calls its “rating criteria.”...
The CEI is a lesser-known part of the burgeoning ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) “ethical investing” movement increasingly pushed by the country’s top three investment firms. ESG funds invest in companies that oppose fossil fuels, push for unionization, and stress racial and gender equity over merit in hiring and board selection.
As a result, some American CEOs are more concerned about pleasing BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Bank — who are among the top shareholders of most American publicly-traded corporations (including Nike, Anheuser-Busch and Kate Spade) — than they are about irritating conservatives, numerous sources told The Post...
The HRC, which was formed in 1980 and started the CEI in 2002, is led by ***Kelley Robinson who was named as president in 2022 and worked as a political organizer for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign...
In 2018, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who oversees assets worth $8.6 trillion and has been called the “face of ESG,” wrote a now-infamous letter to CEOs titled “A Sense of Purpose” that pushed a “new model of governance” in line with ESG values...
Fink has denied that ESG is political, but key staff managing his ESG operations worked in the Obama administration and donate to Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders...
https://nypost.com/2023/04/07/inside-the-woke-scoring-system-guiding-american-companies/
Wikipedia: Kelley Robinson
***Kelley Robinson (born 1985/1986 is an African American community organizer who is the current president of the Human Rights Campaign. She was formerly the executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund...
In 2019, she became the executive director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and vice president of organizing and advocacy. In this role, Robinson helped direct efforts to flip the U.S. Senate in the 2020 elections. While at Planned Parenthood, the number of supporters increased from 6.5 million to 18 million...
Robinson is now the current president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). She is the first queer Black woman to lead the organization...
In the month of December of the year 2022, Robinson testified before Congress on the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ extremism and violence...
Robinson married her wife, Becky George (a senior adviser for movement building at Everytown for Gun Safety) in 2020; they have one child together...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelley_Robinson
Obamas run things.
So to stand for something is a man dressed as a women and claiming to be one. Bye Bye Bud
“It is Blackrock, Vanguard and one other company that is driving all this because they control the stock price.”
Have you taken a peak at the Anheuser-Busch InBev stock prices over the past 5 years? If you bought stock in 2018, I don’t think you will ever break even, let alone make a profit.
InBev is majority owned by two families. About 6% of the stock is owned by institutions, none of which are Blackrock.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BUD/holders
This woman is delusional. Bud Lite became her cause. Nobody else is that invested in it, or wants to be.
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