🎧 Listen: In today’s episode of The Journal podcast, maloneyfiles discusses the backlash to Bud Light’s promotion with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney and how it has impacted local businesses across the U.S.
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.Ryan Knutson: On April 1st, the transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, posted a video to her Instagram. It was a sponsored post for Bud Light highlighting a contest the beer brand was running for March Madness.
Ryan Knutson: The post itself was pretty standard, the kind of thing influencers post all the time, but the response to it was unusual. Ryan Knutson: It also raised a question, one that Jennifer says other brands, not just Bud Light, might also have to answer. Ryan Knutson: What you just said makes me think of that ad campaign that Bud Light ran about... Was it Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer that were running on the Bud ticket?Amy Schumer: They say we're a nation divided. They say we disagree on everything.Amy Schumer: That's why we're forming the Bud Light party.
Jennifer Maloney: The company brought in a new vice president for marketing to lead the Bud Light brand, Alissa Heinerscheid. She was the first woman to lead the brand, and she said that her mandate was to be more inclusive and welcome more people in and appeal to a broader and a younger audience. Ryan Knutson: They did that in a few ways. Under Heinerscheid, Bud Light got a new tagline. Easy to drink, easy to enjoy. The brand also spent more on marketing. During this year's Super Bowl, Bud Light unveiled two new ads.
Jennifer Maloney: The backlash began the same day as the post. I mean, it happened like almost instantaneously. There were calls for a boycott of the Bud Light brand. The musician Kid Rock posted a video on Twitter in which he shot cases of Bud Light with a rifle. Jennifer Maloney: People seized on those words and said that she was denigrating Bud Light drinkers. People dug up these old college photos off social media, off her Facebook page, showing her drinking at a Harvard party, and they called her a hypocrite.
Jennifer Maloney: Anheuser-Busch makes beer and then it sells it, like cases of it, pallets of it, to wholesalers, also called distributors. These wholesalers are local businesses across the country who, in many cases, are family-owned businesses that have held the license to distribute Anheuser-Busch products for generations, like a hundred years or more. They have been selling Budweiser and then Bud Light and all the other products that Anheuser-Busch makes. They're on the front lines.
Jennifer Maloney: But in some communities, it was a much, much sharper decline. I also want to point out that the boycott spread to encompass other Anheuser-Busch beer brands. It wasn't just Bud Light's sales that were affected, but even other brands that, until recently, had had strong sales growth. Michelob Ultra and Busch Light also took a hit.
Jennifer Maloney: One thing I asked him was how does he respond to critics who say that the company should have come out and defended Alissa Heinerscheid when she came under vicious personal attack? He said that the safety of the company's people was his number one priority.
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