Bud Light is planning a major marketing blitz after its sales got slammed by an ill-fated partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney — and the company is promising beer distributors there won’t be another screwup, The Post has learned.
At a closed-door meeting this week in Washington, DC, Anheuser-Busch executives told US beer distributors they will “spend heavily on the brand after spending fell off a cliff last year,” Benj Steinman, editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights, told The Post.
Bud execs said at the Monday meeting that the fresh marketing push will begin this week, Steinman said, as the beer giant scrambles to reverse the damage from the controversial Mulvaney campaign, which sent sales of Bud Light plunging 17% during the week ended April 15.
Anheuser-Busch “did promise to spend lotsa dough on Bud Light [marketing] this spring and summer, starting with big push this week for the NFL draft,” Steinman wrote in a report to clients on Wednesday that was obtained by The Post.
The company has been largely tight-lipped since April 1, when the 26-year-old Mulvaney released videos on social media of herself swigging Bud Light in a bubble bath and showing off a commemorative Bud Light can with her image on it to celebrate her first year as a woman.
But in a series of private Zoom meetings with US beer distributors this month, Bud has promised “there will be an improved screening process before any marketing hits the public,” a Northeast-based distributor told The Post.
“Executives will have to go through a more rigorous screening process,” said the distributor, who cited briefings from Bud execs during Zoom meetings this month.
That’s after Anheuser-Busch revealed earlier this week that two marketing executives overseeing Bud Light — the brand’s vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid and her boss, Daniel Blake — have been put on leave as the brand scrambles to clean up the mess.
On Tuesday, Anheuser-Busch gave the wholesalers a letter filled with talking points that were meant to be shared with their retail customers to dispel the “confusion” and “misinformation” that surrounds the Mulvaney controversy, according to Beer Business Daily.
“This was one single can given to one social media influencer,” Anheuser-Busch said in the letter, adding, “This can was not made for production or sale to the general public” nor was it “a formal campaign or advertisement.”
“Bud Light’s official campaign is ‘Easy to Drink, Easy to Enjoy,'” the letter said.
“You may have seen our ad during the Super Bowl.”
“Our new Vice President of Bud Light [Todd Allen] and all of us at Anheuser-Busch are committed to reminding all of our consumers why they love Bud Light and why they’ve made it the #1 beer in America,” the letter added.
Bud Light, the biggest beer brand in the US, has been losing market share for years as Anheuser-Busch has slashed spending on the brand, according to industry experts.
Last year, the company spent just $10 million marketing Bud Light from January through July, compared with $183 million in 2018.
Bud Light spending was $125 million in 2019, then dropped to $76 million and $57 million in 2020 and 2021, respectively, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights, which cited data from Kantar.
Aside from a pledge to reverse the drops in spending, however, Bud provided scant details on its plans at Monday’s meeting in Washington, according to sources.
That’s despite a backlash that has included barroom squabbles, bomb threats to brewing facilities and cancellations of events featuring Bud’s iconic Clydesdale horses.
The meeting “wasn’t that productive and the distributors were hoping for more concrete plans” on how to stop the backlash against Bud Light, Steinman said. “They want to put this behind them.”
Indeed, many of Anheuser-Busch’s 400 distributors left the meeting frustrated that Anheuser-Busch never apologized for “what they’ve gone through and the lost business they’ve had to deal with,” according to a report by another industry newsletter, Beer Business Daily.
“Wholesalers have long felt that Anheuser-Busch was too focused on innovation and not enough on their bread-and-butter brands,” according to Steinmann.
Some Bud Light drinkers were likewise enraged over what they felt was a non-apology from Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Brendan Whitworth, who said in an April 14 statement, “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people …
“We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
That’s after Heinerscheid had previously called Bud Light “a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor” that needed a revamp to appeal to a new generation of “young drinkers.”
“I’m hoping that the message, no matter how they convey it, gets to the retailer and the consumer, because we are starting to feel the impact,” said the Northeast-based distributor, who asked not to be identified.
