Anti-vaxxers call for Heineken boycott over new ad
USA | Heineken posted a minute-long commercial on YouTube on 8 July 2021, showing silver birds (aka senior citizens) dancing in a nightclub and running to skinny-dip at a nearby beach. It ended with the message, “The night belongs to the vaccinated. Time to join them.”
The video has received more than 6000 comments on YouTube so far – mostly of the negative sort. Dragging up the usual conspiracy theories (Heineken in bed with Big Pharma and the like), the anti-vaxxer brigade threatened to boycott Heineken. On Twitter, some even uploaded videos of themselves opening bottles of the brewer’s namesake lager and pouring it down their kitchen sinks in protest.
Meaning well, Heineken has joined companies implementing ad campaigns and corporate policies to promote inoculation.
AB-InBev, for its part, has had an ongoing dialogue with President Biden’s administration to promote covid-vaccinations. In February, the Budweiser brewer skipped airing a Super Bowl commercial for the first time in 37 years and instead “reallocated the media investment” to partner with the Ad Council and raise vaccine awareness. In April, the company pledged to give away 10,000 beers to Americans who could show proof of vaccination. And in June, it said it would give every American a free beer if 70 percent of Americans are vaccinated with at least one shot by the 4th of July. Incidentally, the US missed this target by a margin of 3 percent.
How to navigate a political minefield
All brewers have a genuine interest in seeing their customers immunised. They all rely on a safe reopening of the on-premise.
But as far as we can see, AB-InBev’s pledges to give away free beer did not elicit the sort of response Heineken got.
In my view, AB-InBev’s immunisation campaigns were more subtle and less in-your-face than Heineken’s. AB-InBev made an offer to punters which they could take up or disregard. Heineken’s ad, on the other hand, was moralistic – it spelt “you must get vaccinated” – and could be interpreted as patronising by the anti-vaxxers.
All this is to say that firms need to step very carefully around political battlefields.
