A picture of the Anheuser-Busch breweries.
Posted on 04/10/2023 8:49:22 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Bud Light, the popular beer that has for years used silly ads and sometimes frat-boyish humor to stand apart from the (six)pack, is getting ready to grow up.
When the Super Bowl perennial enters the ad roster of Super Bowl LVII on February 12, it will do so with a new degree of sophistication and — shudder! — a female as one of the central characters of its commercial. In a new 30-second ad, Miles and Keleigh Teller turn the frustrating experience of being stuck on hold into a small dance party while cracking open a Bud Light.
“We are ushering in a new era for this brand,’ says Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, in a recent interview. She vows to “strip away all the loudness and the distractions.”
If any brand’s voice has boomed in advertising, it is Bud Light’s. Over the decades, this is the beer that brought consumers party dog Spuds McKenzie; quirky odes to “Real Men of Genius”; a Super Bowl ad featuring young men praying to a “magic fridge” full of the brew; Cedric the Entertainer; and the Bud Knight. Marketers behind the beverage have launched so many characters to help sell it that in 2021, Bud Light ran a Super Bowl commercial celebrating all of them.
Yet advertising — and beer drinking — is in flux. It’s no secret that even heady brands like Bud Light are competing for sipping share with hard seltzers, spirits and craft beers. And the younger consumers Heinerscheid wants to bring to Bud Light are looking for something different from the outreach it makes to them.
“Consumers young and old want a brand to stand for something,” she says, and to hear about “a unique benefit.”
She and her team took a trip to Anheuser-Busch’s St. Louis archives to discover what that might be. While looking through the beer’s history, they found that one of its original sales points after it was introduced in 1982 was its easy-to-drink nature. The marketing executive felt that simple positioning would be more meaningful to modern consumers than some of the beer’s recent antics.
And she intends to drive the message home. Anheuser-Busch will increase its marketing investment behind Bud Light by five times, she says, with outreach in markets across the rest of the year. The ads will follow the formula exemplified in the Super Bowl. They will open with an example of some easy-to-recognize frustration, which “you could let ruin your day, or you could flip the script, open a couple of Bud Lights and have some fun,” she says.
Heinerscheid is in her first year as Bud Light’s top marketer, and is replacing Andy Goeler, a longtime brand ambassador who developed many of the aforementioned conceits. She enters the Super Bowl fray at a delicate time. After maintaining a sponsorship deal that made it the exclusive malt-based liquor sponsor of the Super Bowl, it had ceded those rights — so other beers can now get in the game. Rival Molson Coors has already started an early campaign in a bid to have one of its top brews gain some share of recognition from the Anheuser-Busch offerings
The new Bud Light positioning represents a bid to speak to a broader and younger crowd. “We have to bring in new drinkers. That is the name of the game,” says Heinerscheid, who is also the first female executive to oversee Bud Light’s marketing efforts. Offering a twist on traditional beer marketing might just be the way to do it. In an effort to increase the ease of drinking Bud Light, Anheuser-Busch intends to send enough fo the beer to the home cityh of the team that wins the Big Game next week. .
“The Super Bowl can often be a race of shout the loudest, going in the biggest, going in real flashy. That’s some peoples’ formula,” she says. “What has worked for us, it’s about zigging when they are zagging,” weaning the brand off the easy jokes and finding something that is more resonant and meaningful. The new ads “are telling a story you want to watch again and again, and that might be the key to standing out.”
“...used silly ads and sometimes frat-boyish humor...”
Having fun and laughing is definitely a holdover from the evil days of heteronormativity. Now, we must all, if you are white, sit around on an ash pile in sackcloth in a state of deep repentance and regret.
A picture of the Anheuser-Busch breweries.
“Does anyone think marketers, in general, are taking there jobs too seriously?”
That made me laugh, but it is so true. The little mental midgets think their job is to transform society into their sick little image.
I think they take marketing as a mind game - how many times do you see a commercial and find yourself wondering what the Hell the product is?
Bud Lite is a near tasteless, rice based brew about as interesting as spiked seltzer. Given that, it’s really only good for getting a buzz. If this marketing whiz wanted to rebrand something an actual beer might have been a better starting point.
I haven’t had a drink in a long time but AB products were always at the bottom of my list.
Shame we won’t see beer commercials like this one anymore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYkLCYiE3TY
I drink Yuengling { both Lager and Black and Tan } as my regular beers but any dark beer is good by me.
I never drink pilsner and never, ever drink any light beer.
As far as advertising is concerned, the marketing departments of any consumer product, know that older potential customers are not their market {with the exception of drugs}.
Concur. In the mid 70s, Schlitz was the best selling beer. When I was deployed in 1976, if you wanted an American beer in Europe- it was Schlitz. Then Schlitz changed how it made its beer to a "new" process and advertised it very heavily. The whole brand tanked very very fast. Within just a few years, no one was drinking Schlitz.
I now drink Miller Highlife. A few years ago, Miller was going to kill the brand until someone said, "Lets give it one more shot, but to do that we have to make it like we did in 1903 (When we started making it.)." It has done very well since then. I've even got my very high brow brother in law to liking it.
Actually it makes sense. A man pretending to be a woman hawking urine pretending to be beer.
Queer Beer
I had to go to wally world yesterday.
Just for the hell of it, I cruised thru the beer department.
Bud, bud light, busch, busch light, michelob, michelob light and corona were stacked to the ceiling.
All other brands were sold out.
The stacks of crap in the center aisle were to the ceiling with the aforementioned beers.
All others were either sold out or down to the last few cases.
Get woke, go broke
He was great in Band of Brothers.
I’d rather watch Spuds 24 hours a day, than Dylan for 10 seconds.
Seems like a good time for Bush to rename it’s company.
That’s what corporations do when they have come under
fire. “We’ll just change the name of the company. They’ll
never know.
I suggest: Analhauser-Butch
Yuengling Lager Lite isn’t bad at all.
Yuengling is a big Trump supporter.
I tried a case of it a few years ago.
After the first one, the only way I could finish the other 23 bottles was by mixing it, half and half, with Black and Tan.
I just don't like light beer, regardless of the label.
I'll take the extra calories for the flavor {but I had to cut way back on 'Cookies and Cream' ice cream}.
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