According to a report from the Daily Caller, the two marketing executives behind Bud Light’s disastrously bad Dylan Mulvaney advertisement are out of the company for good. Those two marketing executives, Group Vice President for Marketing Daniel Blake and Bud Light Marketing Vice President Alissa Heinerscheid, were originally placed on leave as the Mulvaney controversy escalated.
Now, however, the Daily Caller reports that text messages it obtained from an anonymous source who is a regional head of marketing for the company showed that both Heinerscheid and Blake are now “gone gone.”
In one of those revealed text messages, the source said, “To my understanding if we publicly announced the word ‘fire’ it opens up the potential for them to sue us. Thats why we said leave of absence.” But then the source also added, the Daily Caller reports, “The wholesalers would have had an absolute HAY DAY with leadership if they didn’t remove her.”
Continuing, the source added that Blake’s only fault was hiring Heinerscheid, but that appears to be a big fault given her Mulvaney initiative. “To be fair- Daniel Blake was actually awesome. I think he was just caught in cross fire. But also he did hire her… so that’s a fault,” the source said.
The source then added that the wholesalers for Bud Light were told that the two marketing executives who caused so much pain for the company and its wholesalers are “gone for good” from the company. As he put it: “Wholesalers were told they are both gone for good by leadership during in person conversations. They already shifted all their direct reports to new people and the head of marketing.”
Heinerscheid is the executive who said that her goal was to make Bud Light less “fratty” in a video that resurfaced as the Dylan Mulvaney controversy heated up. In that now-infamous video, Heinerscheid said that her goal was to make the brand more appealing to younger drinkers, saying, “I’m a businesswoman. I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light and it was, this brand is in decline. It’s been in decline for a really long time. And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light.”
She then said that, to effect that change, she wanted to start “shifting the tone” of Bud Light away from men, particularly “fratty” men and toward women and other groups. In her words: “So I had this super clear mandate, like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand and my what I brought to that was a belief in okay, what is what are we what does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity it means shifting the tone. 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 it sort of the heart of evolution, you got to see people who reflect you in the work and we have a hangover. I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty. Kind of out of touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
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Watch her here:
Meet Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s VP of Marketing. She explains her strategy of using “inclusive” marketing to promote the brand to young people. pic.twitter.com/hFpe8YnbBc
— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) April 9, 2023
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video