Is there no safe beer for conservatives in America to drink right now?!
First, Bud Light sent a few beers to a transgender influencer in early April. Then, Miller Lite ran an ad celebrating female brewers and offering up a lighthearted mea culpa over all the beer ads over the years featuring women in bikinis. Actually, the Miller Lite thing happened before the Bud Light thing, back in March for Women’s History Month, but most people didn’t see the Miller Lite thing before now. So now some on the right are mad about both of these major beer brands over what they see as selling out and taking progressive positions in supporting trans people and women.
It’s not like beers are totally progressive now though, either. The customers these campaigns were aimed at might be upset to notice that Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev hasn’t exactly stuck to its guns on Dylan Mulvaney, the trans influencer in question, and neither company’s political donations are super aligned with left-leaning causes.
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In May, apparently in search of another target, conservatives decided that Miller Lite was bad, too, and overly woke. People dug up an ad from March and are now mad about that. In said ad, actress and comedian Ilana Glazer talks about an initiative at the company — titled “Bad $#!T to Good $#!T” — to create fertilizer from old, sexist beer advertising (read: featuring scantily clad women). The fertilizer was supposed to be used to grow hops for female brewers.
It’s not entirely clear why the right has seized on this just now, as Miller Brewing Company, which is owned by Molson Coors, put out the ad and a press release announcing the fertilizer campaign more than two months ago. But the conservative bear has been poked. Right-leaning commentators and outlets have lamented that this is another piece of evidence that the beer companies are “broken,” complaining that another brand has jumped into a “woke beer game” and is headed for the “boycott treatment too.”
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This is emblematic of the broader controversy — a lot of people have lost the plot on what exactly happened with Bud Light, to the extent they ever knew it. Some consumers incorrectly believe the company undertook a broad-based marketing campaign with Mulvaney, that beer cans featuring her image are for sale to the public, or that AB InBev is marketing cans with pronouns on them in the US. None of those things are true. Anheuser-Busch CEO Michel Doukeris got at the issue in the company’s most recent earnings call, pointing out that “misinformation and confusion” still exists around what even happened. “We will need to continue to clarify the fact that this was one can, one influencer, one post, and not a campaign, and repeat this message for some time,” he said.
Some of the pushback to Bud Light’s Mulvaney partnership was supposedly that it was offensive to women. In her post, Mulvaney said she didn’t know what March Madness was, which some people claimed played into outdated stereotypes. In response to Vox’s original Bud Light explainer, one reader lamented, “We have come a long way in this country as women. Women before us have fought hard to get the respect we deserve. Do you want to go back to a time where women needed to act dumb and look pretty?” On a larger scale, some anti-trans sentiment proclaims to be about protecting women. It certainly seems that the reaction to the Miller Lite ad, which is coming from many of the same people, would undercut this whole pro-women thing.
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For now, Miller Lite appears to be taking the fuss in stride. “This video was about two things: worm poop and saying women shouldn’t be forced to mud wrestle in order to sell beer,” a spokesperson for Molson Coors said in an emailed statement to Vox. “Neither of these things should be remotely controversial and we hope beer drinkers can appreciate the humor (and ridiculousness) of this video from back in March.”
Approved – Obey
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Article URL : https://www.vox.com/money/2023/5/16/23725262/miller-lite-woke-ad-shit-ilana-glazer-bud-light-boycott