Bud Light just ended two months of social media silence with a new online ad designed to win back boycotting customers by portraying them as “bumbling fools,” according to one Twitter critic, and as “buffoon-ish whites,” according to another.
The beer brand’s sales have plummeted almost 30% since a brief social media campaign featuring he-who-shall-not-be-named, followed by ham-fisted reversals.
The latest attempt to win back boycotters is more ham-fisted than an entire Thanos fist made entirely out of Spam.
Here’s the spot that debuted on Twitter on Thursday:
Crack a cold one: we've got an epic summer ahead. Sock tans included. pic.twitter.com/CGRCvkHC60
— Bud Light (@budlight) June 22, 2023
I see what Bud Light was trying to do here with the “easy to enjoy” slogan and the silly summer pitfalls and pratfalls. It’s hot out, nobody wants to work that hard — not even at enjoying a beer. So one guy walks through a screen door, a woman won’t let a windstorm interrupt her watermelon, another woman gets a silly tan line on her tummy from her smartphone, etc. Life is easy-breezy, nothing matters too much, pop open a beer. Given the modern rural setting, the decision to go with Chic’s 1979 disco anthem, “Good Times,” is curious, and so is the Twitter tagline: “Crack a cold one: we’ve got an epic summer ahead. Sock tans included.”
Drinking Bud Light = nerdy sock tans? Is that the message?
Overall, the ad is cute enough, I suppose.
The problem is that this is the wrong message at the wrong time.
Bud Light is on a mission to sort of surreptitiously apologize to customers they offended — by some accounts, purposely — with the brand’s “inclusive” new messaging that badly put off their core buyers.
That can be done.
In fact, I asked my Right Angle colleague, friend, and boss Bill Whittle about that on a Bud Light segment we recorded back in April. Bill said he’d run an ad showing a drunk beer marketing executive, his desk littered with empty cans of Miller Lite (!!!), being given his walking papers. With one last Miller Lite in one hand and his sad little box of personal possessions in the other, he’d stumble out of Anheuser-Busch headquarters and into the street.
No words. Just the visuals. Maybe a silly tagline at the end, giving a knowing wink to their own error.
You see, when you’re trying to get back in your customers’ good graces, a charming way to do that is to make gentle fun of yourselves. Instead, Bud Light chose to make gentle fun of their customers.
The new ad might have worked in some other context. But when customers have been given the impression that Belgium-based AB-InBev already sees their customers as hapless hicks, this is not the time to portray their customers as hapless hicks.
Bud Light stepped in it so deep that they might be in a black hole of marketing, where anything they do — even remaining silent — will be read negatively. But it didn’t have to be that way, and today’s new ad won’t make anything, anywhere “easy to enjoy” for the brand’s hapless management.
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