AB-InBev’s Super Bowl gaffe: accidental or deliberate?
Ahmegawd, a Budweiser ad caused such an uproar during Super Bowl that it got the beard-and-sandal brigade running into verbose overdrive on social media during the week that followed.
What had AB-InBev’s marketing guys done? Well, they had poked fun at craft beer and craft beer drinkers. No more, no less. The outcry in the U.S. was, well deafening.
Relayed over a pulse quickening, drum-heavy hard-rock soundtrack, the messages in the 60 seconds ad read: “Budweiser proudly a macro beer.” “It’s not brewed to be fussed over. It is brewed for drinking not dissecting.” The punch line, which probably made hipsters cough up on their craft beers, said: “Brewed the hard way. Let them sip their Pumpkin Peach Ale.”
Need I say more? The ad can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=siHU_9ec94c
It was as if Budweiser’s ad had hit all the right buttons with the wrong people. Craft beer aficionados shrieked “murder most foul”, but in more words than that. They felt that Budweiser had purposefully rubbished craft beer and portrayed it as an elite club of snobbish consumers.
I, for one, cannot understand what the fuss is all about. After years of near-coma inducing Super Bowl beer ads (last year’s Bud ads starring the ageing Terminator star Arnold Schwarzenegger were the ultimate in tedium), AB-InBev finally gave us a really funny ad, a thigh-slapping satirical one to boot, that people will talk about in years to come.
Well, come on guys, don’t be such soreheads. Can’t you take a joke? By the way, craft beer drinkers were not the intended target of the ad. It was aimed squarely and firmly at Budweiser’s core group of consumers – those who have been deserting the brand for longer than most craft beer consumers can probably remember. According to a New York Post article, Budweiser sales have plummeted from its peak of 50 million barrels in 1988 to 16 million barrels in 2014.
Thankfully, one AB-InBev distributor got AB-InBev’s rationale for the ad. He told Beer Business Daily, a dedicated news site, that “it's about time ABI tries to change the craft narrative. If the craft snobs are offended at least they know how traditional (probably old) drinkers have felt when they spout their drivel about their craft being so great.”
If the ad hit all the right buttons with the right people, who may have been intimidated by craft beer’s hype and taken to enjoying their Budweiser only on the sly, Budweiser’s fortunes could be revived and AB-InBev will stand vindicated. Bear in mind: returning to the high side with Budweiser would be by far bigger for AB-InBev than any gains on craft.
As to calling the ad a gaffe – no, I’d say this was a planned humorous attack. AB-InBev runs such a tight ship that its marketers would have only been given the go-ahead after the executive suite had studiously analysed reams of spread-sheets and tons of data, carefully waging the pros and cons.
Mind you, AB-InBev must have spent nearly an arm and a leg on it. Super Bowl’s airtime is excruciatingly expensive. Average cost for a 30 seconds ad was around USD 4.5 million this year, it was reported.
The craft beer community clearly relished the final message of the ad: “Brewed the hard way. Let them sip their Pumpkin Peach Ale.” This they interpreted as an assault on AB-InBev’s latest acquisition target, Elysian Brewery, which also brews a “Pumpkin Peach Ale.”
Since the deal has not been bedded down yet – it is to close by the end of March this year –, the craft beer community hoped that Elysian’s still-owners would now walk away from the deal. Fat chance. They have not.
Elysian Brewing co-founder Dick Cantwell emailed a kind of distressed response to the Super Bowl ad to the Chicago Tribune newspaper that read: “I find it kind of incredible that ABI would be so tone-deaf as to pretty directly (even if unwittingly) call out one of the breweries they have recently acquired, even as that brewery is dealing with the anger of the beer community in reaction to the sale. It doesn't make our job any easier, and it certainly doesn't make me feel any better about a deal I didn't even want to happen. It's made a difficult situation even more painful.”
Consider for a second: Even if the deal did fall through because of the ad, what would happen? Simple. AB-InBev would find another craft brewer to buy. There is currently a rumour going round that AB-InBev is also going after Florida’s Cigar City Brewing Company.
Trust me, in six months’ time no one would have been talking about the aborted transaction. My case in point is last year’s super-merger between the ad giants Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe. Although much publicised, the two called off their USD 35 billion merger at the last minute. Does anyone remember this mega-blooper? QED.
It’s a shame that AB-InBev found it necessary to defend itself in the controversy. “Brewed the Hard Way is Budweiser’s way of celebrating being a MACRO brew: a beer enjoyed by many,” Budweiser Vice President of marketing Brian Perkins said in an email to media on 5 February 2015, a few days after the Super Bowl.
He added: “The prevailing discourse in beer is that small must be good, and big must be bad. We don't accept that. Lager is one of the most difficult styles to brew well, and we have the highest standards of care to get it right. We are owning who we are without apology.”
AB-InBev has a point here. But for once it should have acted like the politicians in Washington: hit and don’t apologize. This is a funny ad, full of irony and satire.
If you ask me what satire may do, I’d reply: everything.
“We should not be so narrow-minded. We, all of us, school teachers and shop owners and professors and editors and musicians and doctors and public officials and women and representatives of the people – we all have our shortcomings and comical sides and foibles great and small. We must not be so quick to protest … when once in a while someone tells a really good joke about us. It might be mean, but it should be honest. There isn’t a proper man or a proper class that cannot stand a fair shove. He might defend himself by the same means, he might strike back – but he should not turn away injured, outraged, offended. A cleaner wind would blow through our public life, would they all not take it badly.”
That was already said in 1919 by the German satirist, pamphleteer and poet Kurt Tucholsky. It still holds true.
