Bud Light smartly tapped Shane Gillis for ads — the latest brand doing post-DEI damage control
After a disastrous partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney that reportedly cost the brand over $1 billion in lost sales last year, Bud Light has returned to its roots.
The inch toward redemption started with a 2024 Super Bowl commercial featuring Peyton Manning and Post Malone. This week, Bud Light released a new ad starring comedian Shane Gillis — and it’s a full-on embrace of the brand’s fratty, frivolous ethos that, for decades, turned its ads into pop culture touchstones.
And Dilly Dilly to that.
If 2023 was peak woke, 2024 will be known as the year that DEI died — with corporations finally admitting it’s all a shakedown by lefty activists.
Recently, companies like Harley-Davidson, Ford, John Deere and Lowe’s have all reversed course on DEI, thanks in large part to the work of people like Robby Starbuck calling them out.
And now we get “The Dean’s Office,” in which Gillis plays a college football coach standing behind a dean, who is trying to extract an admission of plagiarism from a star player. In exchange for the stud athlete’s confession, the dean presents him with a bucket of ice-cold Bud Lights. Instead, the coaxing works on Coach Gillis (his jacket reads Coach Herb), a professor and the dean himself, who start singing like canaries.
Alcoholic canaries.
It’s hardly the superb “Real Men of Genius” franchise of the late ’90s and early aughts, but it’s fun and nostalgic. The spot is a throwback to a time when not everything was dissected through the lens of the most annoying progressive person you know.
It’s also an admission that Bud Light was wrong — dead wrong about shedding brand DNA and disavowing its core customer to jump on the diversity, equity and inclusion bandwagon.
Specifically, in partnering with insufferable Mulvaney back in the spring of 2023 — a costly move that turned the once-beloved American brand into a barroom pariah and sent sales into a free fall.
At the time, Mulvaney, who has nearly 10 million TikTok followers, was working with seemingly every company under the sun: Kate Spade, Ulta, Nike. When the influencer posted a video in the bath with a personalized Bud Light can, it led to a fierce backlash. A boycott ensued. Bars canceled orders. Kid Rock blasted a case with a gun.
Upon further investigation, this ill-advised pivot wasn’t a blip or an oversight. It was the strategy of Alissa Heinerscheid, a marketing VP who touted herself as the “first woman to lead the biggest beer brand in the world.”
In a March 2023 interview with the “Make Yourself At Home” podcast, she said she wanted to move on from the brand’s “fratty” and “out of touch” humor to “evolve” and “elevate.”
“What does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity … It means shifting the tone,” she said. “It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different. And appeals to women and to men. And representation is sort of the heart of revolution.”
This from the woman who proudly presided over the most forgettable Super Bowl ad in Bud Light history, starring Miles Teller and his wife dancing.
“Consumers young and old want a brand to stand for something,” Heinerscheid said at the time.
Out-of-touch executives like Heinerscheid — following in the grand tradition of Gillette razors calling out “toxic masculinity” — broke their messaging so they could fix it. But it was never broken to begin with.
They tried to say that beer ads were misogynistic, but most make men look like simple creatures and the butt of the jokes. And yes, in some commercials, women wear bikinis. Turns out, people love boobs too. (See Sydney Sweeney.)
In the aftermath of the Mulvaney debacle, an ad for Miller Lite starring Ilana Glazer surfaced — apologizing for sexist old beer ads and exalting women brewers. Oh, the pandering!
Americans want beer commercials to entertain us, not preach empty progressive virtues. I look fondly on the golden age with Bob Uecker or John Madden. Barroom fights over whether Miller Lite tastes great or is less filling. We loved seeing Spuds MacKenzie be the life of the party.
It’s also poignant that Gillis would be the one to repair the damage brought by this unforced error. After being run over by the PC patrol in 2019, when he was hired and quickly fired by “Saturday Night Live” for having previously using an Asian slur and “homophobic” language, he never complained. He went harder in his stand-up and, surprise, became more popular. So big that “SNL” could no longer ignore him: He came back as a celebrity host this past February.
Through Gillis’ ascendance, we saw the disconnect between cultural overlords and real American consumers and appetites. The so-called silent majority.
Last week, BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, said it had cut support for shareholder proposals linked to environmental and social issues to a new low of 4.1% in its most recent annual general meeting season.
Corporations that once feared ESG and being judged by investors on how many “inclusive” initiatives they had — scored by the far, far left Human Rights Campaign — now fear association with these discriminatory and divisive practices.
Expect to see more throw in the towel. And to that, I say, this Bud’s for them.
