With Bud Light sales down 26.1% from 2022 levels, Anheuser-Busch executives are finally starting to realize that the controversy over their making the fake female man of the hour, Dylan Mulvaney, the face of the alleged beer brand is not going to blow over quickly or easily. And so only now, over a month after the news first broke that Mulvaney was now the front man for the Drag Queen of Beers, the beer giant has sent a letter to wholesalers in which it addresses the issue directly for the very first time. Will this make the trouble go away and restore Bud Light to its former preeminence? Unlikely.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday that Anheuser-Busch’s letter “was forwarded to retailers, bars, and restaurants by Grey Eagle, a Fenton-based company that distributes Anheuser-Busch products to a 14-county region around St. Louis.” Anheuser-Busch didn’t apologize for bringing Mulvaney on or for siding with the Left in the culture war and fueling the demand that we all accept that men can become women. It did, however, do all it could to downplay the whole affair, stating: “This was one single can given to one social media influencer. It was not made for production or sale to the general public. This can is not a formal campaign or advertisement.”
This was a reference to a can of Bud Light featuring Mulvaney’s cheesy mug, photos of which circulated widely on social media. To dismiss this as “one single can” was disingenuous, as images of the can went around the world and gave Bud Light a level of attention that would have had Anheuser-Busch executives popping open the champagne in any other context. If they had sent Mulvaney the can privately and told him not to publish the image, that would have been bad enough as an affirmation of delusion and insanity, but this image went everywhere. But he did publish it, as Anheuser-Busch had every reason to believe that he would. If it was “one single can,” it got more attention than any other single beer can in the history of beer.
And of course, it wasn’t one single can. In a video, Mulvaney showed himself sitting in a bubble bath sipping a Bud Light, with numerous other cans of the putative beer behind him. Did he make this video out of the kindness of his heart and his enthusiasm for Bud Light? Come on, man! The details of their deal have not been made public, but clearly, Anheuser-Busch brought Mulvaney on to be the pitchman for Bud Light on a far more extensive basis than “one single can.”
Now, however, you’d think they never even met the guy. “Anheuser-Busch did not intend to create controversy or make a political statement,” said the letter. It claimed that the whole thing had been done by outsiders: “In reality, the Bud Light can posted by a social media influencer that sparked all the conversation was provided by an outside agency without Anheuser-Busch management awareness or approval. Since that time, the lack of oversight and control over marketing decisions has been addressed and a new VP of Bud Light marketing has been announced.” Yeah, pull my other leg.
Does Anheuser-Busch really expect anyone to believe for one second that the Mulvaney campaign did not have the approval of senior management and that the company honchos didn’t even know about it? I’ll believe that when Matt Walsh becomes the face of Bud Light. Bud Light Vice President Alissa Heinerscheid said on March 30, “I had this super clear mandate. It’s like, we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. And my, what I brought to that, was a belief in, okay, what does, what does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity.” And “inclusivity” means woke idiocy. Even Anheuser-Busch’s earlier statement trying to make all this go away said that they were attempting to “authentically connect with audiences across various demographics and passion points.” “Various demographics” means Leftists. No hint of having been blindsided by outsiders.
While trying to do damage control, the company is also insisting that there was no significant damage. The Post-Dispatch reported Thursday that “Anheuser-Busch Chief Executive Officer Michel Doukeris said the steep drop in sales of Bud Light beer in April represented just 1% of the international corporation’s global volume of beer for that period.” He added that “the company’s net revenue was up 11% on increased sales, by volume, of 0.1%.” Oh well, then! No harm done!
In light of the latest dishonest message from Anheuser-Busch, all this just means that the boycott must continue.
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