Twitterverse Roasts Bud Light Over New Ad Mocking Its Own Customers

Like an imbecile in an old slapstick show who goes from banging his head to stepping on a rake, Bud Light on Thursday broke two months of post-Dylan Mulvaney silence on Twitter...with an ad mocking its core customers. 

The latest display of self-destructive marketing comes on the heels of the brand posting the worst weekly sales drop since Harvard-educated Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid thought it would be a great idea to use clownish, male-to-female trans TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador for what's long been seen as a manly beer for hard-working, blue-collar people. In the week ending June 10, sales were off 26.8% off the previous year's pace.  

Last week, CEO Brendan Whitworth of Bud Light's parent -- Anheuser-Busch InBev North America -- issued a statement acknowledging that "over the last two months, the discussion surrounding our company and Bud Light has moved away from beer and this has impacted our consumers, our business partners, and our employees." 

Whitworth implicitly assured the shrinking universe of Bud Light drinkers that the company had learned a lesson from the positively disastrous aftermath of its mind-boggling embrace of woke culture:

To all our valued consumers, we hear you. Our summer advertising launches next week and you can look forward to Bud Light reinforcing what you've always loved about our brand – that it's easy to drink and easy to enjoy.

Bud Light's Twitter account went radio-silent on April 14, as the full scope of the backlash -- against Heinerscheid's attempt to move the brand away from what she called "fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor...shifting the tone" to one that's "truly inclusive" -- became horrifyingly apparent to company executives.

The brand dared to return to Twitter on Thursday with the promised summer advertising...and was instantly on the receiving end of a social media flamethrower. Users roasted the company for its Dylan Mulvaney move and the new campaign too.  

With Chic's 1979 song "Good Times" playing the background, the ad shows a series of everyday Bud Light drinkers trying to enjoy themselves in searing summer heat. However, even with Heinerscheid put on leave weeks ago, the surviving marketers and senior executives determined the brand relaunch should center on making Bud Light drinkers look moronic.  

In just a one-minute ad, Bud Light drinkers are shown being too stupid to put on shoes before walking across hot pavement, too dumb to put on shoes before carrying a full keg across rocks, trying to slam shut an obviously overfilled refrigerator, sun-burning the outline of a cell phone on their stomach, ineptly trying to balance on a paddle board, walking through a closed screen door and dropping a tray of snacks, clumsily flipping out of a hammock and failing to tap a keg and getting sprayed with foam. 

Don't think for a moment that Bud Light's marketing team is now controlled by normal but simply inept people. Beyond its contempt for everyday Americans, there's something about the ad that clearly signals that Bud Light's marketing team is still infected by the woke virus: Consistent with a trend observable across all manner of brands, none of the people who are made to look foolish are black.  

The phenomenon is robust enough to provide a steady stream of material for a Twitter account called "White Men Are Stupid In Commercials" (@StupidWhiteAds), which naturally jumped on the Bud Light ad: 

Out of dozens of people, the Bud Light ad prominently features only one black person, a cool dude whose beer can is hit by some kind of errant projectile. Though the klutz is off-screen, we can absolutely assure you he wasn't black.  

The gold standard for a poorly-received tweet is when it gets "ratioed." That term refers to a tweet that has far more replies than likes. At the moment, Bud Light's tweet has a whopping 19,000 replies versus just 1,300 likes, as people heap ridicule and insults on the brand for the Dylan Mulvaney disaster and the pathetically incompetent attempts to recover from it.  

Enjoy this sampler, starting with one featuring the Harvard-educated Heinerscheid, the ousted marketing VP responsible for signing Mulvaney and thrusting Bud Light into the abyss: