The Hail Mary pass. It’s a desperate, last-ditch attempt by a football team to score a touchdown in the waning seconds of the game. The pass usually comes from near midfield, well outside of the typical scoring zone, and, as the name implies, often requires a form of divine intervention to be successful. It rarely works, but when all else seems lost, why not try it?
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With the NFL’s big game scheduled to take place in a few short days, the attention of football fans everywhere will be focused on two things: the game and the commercials. According to Ad Age magazine, this year a 30-second ad will cost approximately $7 million. One advertiser will be airing a full 60-second ad in what amounts to its Hail Mary attempt to reach and bring back an annoyed and still fuming consumer base. That brand is Bud Light.
Early in 2023, Bud Light marketing executives decided that the best way to communicate the attributes of their product to a target audience of mostly young, blue-collar males was to promote a sponsorship with self-identified transgender influencer and activist Dylan Mulvaney. As a result, Bud Light was hit with a consumer boycott that knocked the brand off the top spot in the light beer market with no rebound in sight. By disregarding its target consumer and following the well-worn path of woke corporate social activism, Bud Light placed activist priorities ahead of sound business decisions.
Since the Mulvaney controversy, the Bud Light brand has tried multiple different approaches to its advertising strategy, hoping to stem steeply declining sales and bring members of its target audience back into the fold.
Bud Light ads edged back toward a degree of the type of light-hearted comedy once a mainstay of the brand. The summer of 2023 featured an ad depicting beer drinkers at a summer picnic burning their bare feet on hot pavement and unsuccessfully wrestling with a hammock. The brand also used advertising during the NFL season that showed fans carrying out quirky, humorous game-day traditions. Neither ad approach was able to turn the brand around. Even Bud Light’s most recent ad, featuring America’s favorite pitchman, Peyton Manning, has failed to provide a bump in sales. That leaves one last, desperate play to call. A Hail Mary Super Bowl ad.
Bud Light will be running a 60-second ad during this year’s Super Bowl, one that will cost nearly $14 million. Anheuser-Busch promises a “humorous” commercial that, the company says, “introduce[s] a new character to the Bud Light universe” and is designed to bring the brand back to its lighthearted roots. A short snippet of the ad has already been released online. The question remains, however, is whether this Hail Mary will be too little too late for Bud Light.
Companies like Target and brands like Bud Light committed one of the cardinal sins of marketing: failing to keep their consumers at the heart of business decisions. Each disregarded its target audience in order to advance a woke corporate activist agenda, and both suffered the consequences. If only the executives at Bud Light had admitted their mistake and apologized at the outset of the Mulvaney controversy, the brand might have avoided the turmoil and sales decline of the last nine months. Businesses exist to serve their customers, not a woke social agenda; it really is that simple. Time is running out, and the only thing left to do is make one last desperate attempt at rescuing the Bud Light brand.
It’s Bud Light’s Super Bowl Hail Mary, and if it doesn’t land, the game is over.
It seems that advertisers are racing to get “woke”points. Most are ignored but that one hit a nerve. What is considered outrageous will be acceptable in 24 or 36 months. It is the symptom of a creeping cancer in our society. Only more reactions like this will slow the degradation.
Sacrificing business success to a moral value is commendable. Making market success an ultimate goal, without moral considerations, is despicable. The question here is about the moral–or immoral–support of transgenderism, not market strategy. Shame on you for taking the position that market success is, or should be, the bottom line. It is not. Moral integrity is.
Rich Kocur! So excited to see you on the byline here. Didn’t know you teach at GCC, very cool! I appreciate the article, and was shaking my head through this stupidity of the Mulvaney sponsorship. But I’d have to disagree on the Hail Mary theme – spending $13M on an ad is the start (or the continuation of the start) of the campaign to bring back the brand. I actually think you’re going to see a good old-fashioned promotional and pricing campaign out of AB for Bud Light. From what I’ve seen they will lean on their in place promotions (they are sold at PNC Park and many other venues sometimes exclusively), myriad of in store promos, and relentless exposure of spokesmen and women as midwestern as can be (Peyton Manning).
It may not work, but I don’t think they’ll stop promoting Bud Light. And their sheer size and budget may pull it through.
I’d really like to know if they thought they were throwing aside their main market, or thinking they could cutely extend into a new market (young, hip, urban). Either way, it was a mistake because of social media and the transperency of web media in general.
The other big factor is demographics. Modelo isn’t #1 just because of Bud Light’s woke Mulvaney fiasco. The demographics are against AB if they want to serve the traditional blue collar working man.
Anyway, great to see your name and bio page on the GCC site. Look me up on Linkedin or send me a note sometime! All the best, SLEckert
Well stated, the social activists may believe they are woke, but they are asleep to what matters.