Former Anheuser-Busch President of Operations Anson Frericks breaks down the role DEI and ESG played in companies, the toll that the Dylan Mulvaney controversy took on Bud Light and whether companies should avoid political issues.
Bud Light’s Super Bowl ad featuring comedian Shane Gillis, singer Post Malone and football great Peyton Manning has garnered the company praise from beer industry insiders and observers, with one expert saying the company is doing “all the right things” after the distiller’s Dylan Mulvaney disaster.
The ad had Gillis and Malone playing the “Big Men of the Cul-de-sac,” two middle-aged suburban homeowners who are called upon to save a neighbor’s “boring party” by launching cans of Bud Light, which serve as invitations, at their neighbors’ doorsteps via leaf blower. The neighbors then flock to “the end of the cul-de-sac” for a raucous party that draws the former Colts quarterback, who admires how many Bud Lights Gillis and Malone’s custom cooler can fit.
Col. John Saputo, an Anheuser Bush/InBev beer distributor with operations in Ohio and Florida, told Fox News Digital that Bud Light’s ad shows that the company is getting “back to our roots.”
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Bud Light is doing all the right things in its latest ad campaign, industry insiders say. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)
“This ad is one of the best I have seen in my 40-year career,” Saputo said. “This ad opens up the Bud Light brand to all consumers and invites Bud Light into every home in America as an approachable and accepted American Lager.”
Bud Light has faced extreme backlash after partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023. Customers, who felt betrayed by the once all-American brand injecting far left politics into their advertising, revolted, causing sales to plummet.
Beer Business Daily Publisher Harry Schuhmacher told Fox News Digital that Bud Light bringing Gillis, Post Malone and Manning on was the “right thing to do to reengage with their natural audience.”
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Bud Light has faced intense backlash from longtime customers over an ad campaign with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney. (Instagram/Fox News / Fox News)
“Bud Light has always been associated with humorous ads lighthearted, funny buddy ads, and they’re getting back to that,” he said.
Audiences appear to be responding well to the ad, it was voted the seventh top Super Bowl commercial on USA Today’s Ad Meter. Overall, Anheuser-Busch had four ads in the meter’s top ten.
Schuhmacher said that partners like Gillis and Manning were a much better fit for Bud Light’s brand than Mulvaney, and that reversing course could help the ailing brand staunch the bleeding from its ongoing sales plunge.
“Bud Light has always been associated with a blue-collar working class. You know relaxation, barbecuing, those you know country music those type of deal situations and occasion so yeah, it makes much more natural sense. They’ve done all the right things,” he said.
The commercial featured Peyton Manning. (Bud Light)
Bud Light year-over-year sales were down nearly 30% for the week ending January 20, according to numbers provided to FOX Business by Bump Williams Consulting. Schuhmacher conceded that there many customers who will “never return” to Bud Light, but feels that the company can make inroads with a new pool of consumers who just turned 21. Col. Saputo was also optimistic about Bud Light’s future prospects.
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Ultimately, Schuhmacher believes that Bud Light’s changes go deeper than just the level of marketing, and reflect a broader change in the company’s corporate mentality to better align with the views of their natural customers.
“No other brand in all of consumer goods has learned their lesson and more than Bud Light has, I mean that Bud Light really became the face of DEI and woke,” he said.
