Bud Light’s woke rebranding as the beer for pantomime women like Dylan Mulvaney and their allies will probably work, no matter how many times sane people like to tell ourselves, “Get woke, go broke.”
Look at late-night TV for an example of just that. We’re decades removed from Johnny Carson’s universal appeal and total dominance of television’s wee small hours. Sure, Carson made political jokes. But he poked fun at both sides and never really revealed his own political preferences. Carson made fun of politicians’ human foibles — now that’s a target-rich environment — and his own.
Here’s Johnny starting with a joke about Ronald Reagan’s age and affinity for the camera — but quickly sliding into making fun of himself and his show.
What Carson didn’t do was take sides on policy, or indulge in a nightly Two Minutes Hate thinly disguised as comedy.
There’s a reason progressive schlockmeisters like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel now dominate late-night TV: there’s a lot less to dominate. Carson would draw an average of 9 million viewers each night. Colbert and Kimmel are lucky to draw 2 million each — and that’s out of a much larger population.
But there’s money to be made in screeching to the choir. Late-night TV might not draw the numbers it once did, but it does draw a predictable audience of people who know what they want to see — and cynical hosts willing to deliver it. There’s almost nothing so woke as late-night TV, but it isn’t going broke.
That brings us back to Bud Light.
Alissa Heinerscheid was brought in as Bud Light’s VP of marketing last year with a “super clear mandate,” in her own words, to “evolve and elevate” the brand with “a campaign that’s truly inclusive.” You and I might quibble with the word “inclusive,” since hiring a spokesman like Mulvaney is actually divisive, as seen by spontaneous and widespread boycotts of Bud Light.
Nevertheless, Bud Light is “a brand in decline,” as she put it, and has “been in decline for a really long time.”
“If we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand,” she concluded in an online video interview, “there will be no future for Bud Light.”
The danger to Heinerscheid is that her higher-ups at AB InBev might hit the panic button and hire someone who will return Bud Light branding to its traditional Frat Boy/Sorority Girl audience. As someone who hates the Gleichschaltung attitude of corporate America, I’d applaud that move. Corporate HQ might be thinking of doing just that, if the recent silence from the company’s social media accounts is an indicator.
Much as I hate to admit it, Heinerscheid probably knows what she’s doing, even if she seems to have backtracked some on hiring Mulvaney. (She was quick to note that his “commemorative can was a gift to celebrate a personal milestone and is not for sale to the general public.”)
But she’s right that Bud Light’s branding can’t go on as before, even if she can’t publicly say why. The fact is that Bud Light will never be the powerhouse that it once was, for two simple reasons: It isn’t good beer, and Americans’ tastes have shifted away from mass-produced blandness to locally-made beers that often have more personality and higher quality. Thanks to microbrewing, the beer market has splintered into thousands of fragments that mass brewers like Anheuser-Busch can’t dominate the way they once did — just like cable TV splintered television audiences in the ’80s and ’90s.
Heinerscheid’s job isn’t to restore the brand to its former glory because, like the bygone age when one man could dominate late-night TV, Bud Light’s glory days are over and done with. Her distasteful job is, like Colbert and Kimmel’s, to find that woke niche and cater hard to it.
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