Transgender social media star Dylan Mulvaney revealed that she pitched a “Western commercial” to Bud Light where a cowboy and a trans person share a beer — but the company “didn’t reach out.”
“I think humor can be very healing, and I think it can appeal to both sides,” Mulvaney said of her “idea of how to fix last year’s situation” during a panel titled “When Beer Goes Viral” at South by Southwest.
Mulvaney’s appearance at the festival in Austin on Sunday was one of the only times she spoke on her ill-fated tie-up with Bud Light, which had the company’s conservative consumers snubbing the brew since April — when ads starring Mulvaney on social media showed her cracking open a can of Bud Light in honor of March Madness and celebrating “365 Days of Girlhood.”
The boycott may have cost Bud Light parent Anheuser-Busch as much as $1.4 billion in sales.
Anheuser-Busch said that its 2023 organic revenues in North America nosedived “primarily due to the volume declined of Bud Light” in its fourth-quarter earnings report.
Mulvaney suggested at SXSW that the outcome could have been different if Bud Light stood up to “bullying.”
“I think of it [Bud Light] kind of like a parent, where the parent doesn’t put a stop to something, then the bullying can continue,” Mulvaney said during the panel discussion earlier reported on by the Daily Mail.
“These brands need to step up,” the 27-year-old social media personality said, noting that “certain brands didn’t even continue speaking with me” after her controversial Bud Light ads.
Mulvaney’s social media posts triggered a swift and fierce backlash against the Bud Light brand and its parent company, which is still the world’s largest brewer that’s also behind Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois.
Bud Light has remained relatively tight-lipped in the year since the fiasco.
Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth offered a dull apology that said the company “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
The brand later fired back at Mulvaney’s claims that she was left high and dry in the aftermath of her social media posts — when she was “being followed and harassed in public,” she said at SXSW.
Though the brewing giant didn’t mention Mulvaney by name, after she posted a lengthy video blasting the company for doing nothing to help her as she faced torment, a spokesperson told the Daily Beast that it is “committed to the programs and partnerships we have forged over decades with organizations across a number of communities, including those in the LGBTQ+ community.”
“For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse than not hiring a trans person at all,” Mulvaney said when breaking her silence on the boycott with a clip posted in June.
The post has since been viewed upwards of 4.1 million times, while Bud Light has moved on and tapped comedian Shane Gillis, who has been known to show off his impressive Donald Trump impression during his sets.
Mulvaney added during Sunday’s panel that the abuse she experienced as a result of the Bud Light campaign was ‘disheartening’.
And now, she adds clauses into her contract about what would happen “in the case of a boycott.”
When asked what projects she was working on at the moment, Mulvaney said she was “working on some things,” and suggested that she might be writing a rom-com that shows “trans joy.”
She also recalled coming out as trans to her mother at four years old during the panel, which was described on SXSW’s website discussion about “the role of brands and media in fighting hate.”
“I then lived my life in the incorrect gender for quite a while,” Mulvaney said, noting that Tuesday marked her “second year of womanhood.”
Representatives for Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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