A Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light Super Bowl Ad? The Nightmare Won't End for Anheuser-Busch
Bud Light looks wedded to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for the foreseeable future following its multibillion-dollar advertising fiasco in the spring.
Though Anheuser-Busch is mum on the subject, Mulvaney envisions a day when he will be promoting beer on the biggest stage.
“Maybe it’d be epic … if in like 10 years I got to do a beer commercial for a Super Bowl,” he said in an interview with The Cut.
Anheuser-Busch can’t seem to break away from its mistake.
In March, according to The Cut, Bud Light approached Mulvaney about promoting its product.
It put Mulvaney’s face on a beer can to celebrate the influencer’s 365th day of “girlhood,” which he proudly displayed in an April 1 Instagram video.
A Bud Light boycott swiftly followed.
Perhaps the most memorable reaction was Kid Rock shooting up cases of the beer with a semi-automatic rifle and then pronouncing, “F*** Bud Light and f*** Anheuser-Busch.”
The singer has since been seen drinking Bud Light and still sells it at his Nashville bar.
Nonetheless, Anheuser-Busch InBev has taken a huge hit from the multi-month boycott, losing nearly $37 billion in market value.
The company’s stock sold for just over $66 per share in April and dropped to $53.40 by June. It had slightly recovered to $56.29 as of Wednesday.
Bud Light also lost its coveted spot as America’s most popular beer to Mexican lager Modelo.
Mulvaney blames the controversy on “transphobia.”
“I think hopefully years from now we’ll look back on this time period and be like, What the f*** was that?” he told The Cut.
“I don’t think I’ve actually f***ed up majorly. I think that the world is f***ed up.”
In June, Mulvaney criticized Anheuser-Busch for not standing by him during the boycott.
”I was waiting for the brand to reach out to me, but they never did,” he said then. “For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse, in my opinion, than not hiring a trans person at all.”
Mulvaney probably has a point: Anheuser-Busch was like a deer in headlights.
The company’s latest ad push features Americans enjoying Bud Light as they watch NFL football — straight down the middle, right to its customer base.
Sundays are getting even easier to enjoy. This season, we’re giving away $1 million in NFL Sunday Ticket packages from YouTube and YouTubeTV
Click the link to enter: https://t.co/ZbNG1d4f51 pic.twitter.com/gXsxpyvPau
— Bud Light (@budlight) August 28, 2023
Is a Super Bowl beer commercial featuring Mulvaney possible 10 years down the road?
Anything is possible, but something tells me the lesson Anheuser-Busch and its competitors learned this time around will stick in their memory for a long time.
CORRECTION, Sept. 14, 2023: While the Modelo beer brand is owned globally by Anheuser-Busch InBev, in the U.S. it is controlled by Constellation Brands under a 2013 antitrust settlement. An earlier version of this article inaccurately described the brand’s corporate structure.
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