On Sunday, February 4, about ten months after Bud Light’s big troubles first began, former President Donald Trump reignited the anti-Bud Light campaign by posting about the situation on Truth Social. Particularly, he added that the ad would go down in history as one of the worst ads ever, if not the worst, because of how it evaporated billions of dollars from Bud Light’s market cap.
As background, the anti-Bud Light campaign began in April of 2023 after Bud Light launched an abortive ad campaign with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The campaign was meant to boost interest in the beer heading into the March Madness playoffs. Conservatives, particularly the blue-collar individuals who tend to drink Bud Light, reacted with fury to the campaign, and many beer drinkers participated in a boycott of the brewer’s products.
That boycott, in turn, led to a huge drop in sales of Bud Light, sometimes by around 30% year over year when 2023 was compared with 2022, and led to a stock price plummet for the beer brewer’s parent company, Anheuser Busch. Initially, Anheuser Busch defended the campaign and its partnership with Mulvaney, but it eventually fired the executives and marketing firm behind the campaign and moved to supporting conservative-coded businesses, such as Dana White’s UFC.
In any case, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to comment on the Bud Light situation, saying, “The Bud Light ad will go down as the WORST AD in history. In a matter of minutes, 30 Billion Dollars worth of Market Cap simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Will they ever get it back? Who knows, but what a mess!!!“
Trump’s somewhat out-of-the-blue comment on the matter may have been sparked by the news that Bud Light is planning to run an ad on the Las Vegas sphere before the 2024 Super Bowl, which will take place in Las Vegas.
Trump previously waited until May of 2023, well into the boycott, to comment on the Bud Light situation. He did so on Truth Social, highlighting a book by conservative personality Wayne Allyn Root about what products to boycott. He said, “It’s time to beat the Radical Left at their own game. Money does talk—Anheuser-Busch now understands that. Great new Book by Wayne Allyn Root. Buy your copy today!”
Later, in November of 2023, Kid Rock, who helped spark the boycott, said that he and former President Trump had confronted Bud Light CEO Brendan Whitworth over the Mulvaney ad. “So [Trump and I] go over, and we actually had a great conversation [with Whitworth]. I told him, ‘You signaled to a lot of people like myself … by sending that can to the trans kid, you kind of signaled to us that you support that lifestyle, and more importantly, men being in women’s sports or in my granddaughter’s locker room. Most of us draw a hard line right there,’” Rock said.
Rock added that he blasted Whitworth for inserting the brand into politics. He said, “I said eff you. What are you doing, injecting yourself into this conversation, these polarizing social issues? You could be doing so much more positive stuff just making us laugh and drink beer.”
Watch Rock talk about that here:
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