The knuckleheads who own Budweiser really know how to blow up a brand. First they subjected their loyal customers to social-media commercials featuring flamboyant trans activist Dylan Mulvaney sipping Bud Light while half-naked in a bubble bath.
You know how that turned out.
Now they’re partnering in maybe the most jarring sport in modern history, a contest of grown men taking turns slapping each other in the face until one is so beaten and bruised, he can’t continue.
The sport is known as Power Slap. It’s part of Anheuser-Busch’s six-year, $100 million-plus branding partnership with Dana White, the CEO of UFC and the champion of this new sport. If you know anything about White, you know he’s a brilliant businessman, well versed in the art of the deal. Based on everything we know about Anheuser-Busch, it’s fair to see this as among the biggest branding overreaches ever imagined, a desperate Hail Mary from the lunkhead executives who thought Mulvaney was a smart marketing move.
Anheuser-Busch — which owns Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob and other beer brands — is somewhat superficially run by a man named Brendan Whitworth. The former Marine and CIA agent holds the title of CEO of the iconic beer company from St. Louis that created Budweiser around 150 years ago.
Sounds pretty American — until you dig a bit deeper into the company’s more recent history.
Anheuser-Busch is no longer independent; it was acquired in 2008 by a beer conglomerate named InBev, renamed AB InBev. Whitworth answers to a bunch of guys out of Brazil, and a few from Belgium, often described as unimaginative globalist financial types with hedge-fund backgrounds.
They get off on cost-cutting to make their numbers work, and for years they’ve embraced corporate wokeism in the form of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), ESG (environmental, social and governance) and other progressive C-suite fads that shouldn’t be anywhere near a great American institution.
They may trot out Whitworth when they need him but make no mistake, the guys calling the shots are the woke boys from Brazil and Belgium, and AB InBev CEO Michel Doukeris, who appears to know less about the typical beer drinker than anyone alive.
Recall: Budweiser and Bud Light became the most popular beers in the country (until recently) because they were decent products but also a brand that stood for something: All-American (see those Clydesdale ads), blue collar and men who like biological women (Spuds MacKenzie picking up hotties in bikinis).
Decidedly unwoke.
The Boys from Brazil and Belgium, schooled in corporate wokeism, thought it was smart to diversify Bud’s demographic. Based on the reporting for my upcoming book on corporate wokeism, “Go Woke, Go Broke,” if you want to know how Budweiser’s marketing team settled on someone as off-brand as Mulvaney, you can trace it to the DEI mandates instituted by their corporate masters who began demanding a more diverse influencer team.
Turns out that diverse demo didn’t exist and there are a lot of blue-collar workers who didn’t like being associated with Mulvaney’s antics. The fallout has been intense, of course. AB InBev’s stock has never recovered since the time Mulvaney’s social-media spots went viral in April of this year; sales of Bud Light continue to crater. It was once the nation’s top-selling beer. No longer.
Bid to turn the tide
The company, meanwhile, is grappling with ways to turn the tide. It barely addresses the Mulvaney fiasco except in some carefully scripted corporate utterances, like people are really going to forget one of the oddest moments in marketing history. Execs are meeting selectively with members of the media (me excluded for obvious reasons) to pitch how little Mulvaney means to its massive global parent.
Their latest “solution” is to start going unwoke with an association with UFC, the inimitable Dana White, and his latest creation, Power Slap. (A spokeswoman for White confirmed the partnership first reported in Sports Business Journal; an AB InBev rep would not deny any details of this column.)
Full disclosure: I’m a huge Dana White fan, an admirer of how he took a backwater sport of mixed martial arts and mainstreamed it to the point that it’s more popular than boxing.
I can’t say I know much about Power Slap, other than what I observed on its website and the Internet, though from what I’ve seen, it’s not for the faint of heart, which is why it’s popular with a certain subsection of the male demographic.
But I can totally understand why Anheuser-Busch wants to be associated with White because he appeals to the demo these bozos shafted. Bud Light will be featured at UFC events in 2024. The Power Slap part will begin with smaller Anheuser-Busch brands and progress from there, I am told. And yet here’s why I suspect Doukeris, Whitworth, etc., will never be able to Power Slap their way back to the good graces of its core audience of straight dudes who miss real women in bathing suits. The contrast from Mulvaney to tough guys slapping the crap out of each other is so stark, you’re immediately reminded of Mulvaney when you ask yourself why Anheuser-Busch is going there.
We are nearly nine months from the time Mulvaney became an unlikely spokeswoman for Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light, and neither Whitworth nor Doukeris has apologized for the massive error in judgment. Far from it. When asked on those rare occasions they let themselves be asked, they offer platitudes about how their company serves all communities, and spit out their idiotic corporate slogan that they’re looking just to “create a future with more cheers.”
Sorry, guys, you can’t slap your way out of this mess.
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