Bubbles just keep on bursting for woke beer
Advertising is a challenging caper, what with all the focus group analysis, key demographic identification, investment return estimates and cocaine. Even without any eastern suburbs happy powder, advertising can be complicated and confusing.
But for Australian ad agencies there has always been one quick, almost foolproof way to make everything just so much easier.
Simply take an advertising campaign from overseas and rework it for local consumption.
Readers of a certain age may recall, for example, stirringly patriotic television ads from the mid-1970s that depicted various Holden models interspersed with Australian images, activities and scenery.
The accompanying jingle still resides deep in the brain stems of every local TV viewer now aged 50 and older. Why, some of you are possibly singing it right now: “We love football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.”
The most expensive element of those obviously cheap ads was likely the well-deserved fees for champion voice-over man Ken Sparkes, but Holden’s pro-Australian campaign sure did deliver.
Boosted by pastry-and-gravy nationalism, the brand’s soaring ’70s sales continued. Too bad the ad was originally from America, where it promoted Chevrolet – Holden’s sister General Motors brand. In the US, the jingle celebrated “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet”.
That campaign worked in the home market, too. Of course, this all happened back in a time when advertising was a kind of cross between a trade and an art.
But times have changed. Any modern Australian ad agency tempted to duplicate recent US advertising examples would be wise to follow a different path.
The US isn’t giving the ad industry any more meat pies and kangaroos.
Instead, the US ad industry is evidently hell-bent on destroying brands and ruining hard-won market reputations – all in the name of wokeness. For decade upon decade, Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser Light beer outsold all others within the US.
Wrecking that brand would take some serious effort. But Budweiser did it. It went on a marketing mission to increase diversity and ended up in a beery bath of destruction.
Like those old Holden ads, Bud Light’s campaign of doom was extremely cheap to launch.
All it cost was whatever fee Dylan Mulvaney commanded. Can’t have been all that much, in the overall scheme of things. This, believe it or not, was Budweiser’s plan.
It genuinely thought associating blue-collar Bud Light with Mulvaney, a gay man who wears dresses in TikTok clips and carries on about his “girlhood”, would somehow boost sales.
Bud Light sales took a hard initial hit, as most expected, but sales have declined further, as many did not.
“According to data cited by the beverage industry trade publication Beer Business Daily, sales volumes of Bud Light for the week ending May 13 sank 28.4 per cent, extending a downward trend from the 27.7 per cent decline seen the week before,” the US NBC network reported.
Budweiser’s attempt to repair its self-inflicted damage is hilarious. It’s gone from woke all the way back to “football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars” – or the US equivalents.
The first post-Mulvaney Budweiser ad showed true-blue Americans shaking hands, raising flags and drinking Bud Light on country porches with their pals.
It didn’t work. So Budweiser last week rolled out the big one – the marketing ploy that would fix everything. Bud Light is now sold in cans bearing the masculine, hetero logo of … motorcycle company Harley-Davidson.
They should have used Holden. We Aussies might have bought it.