Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Michel Doukeris accused conservative boycotters of spreading “misinformation” about their relationship with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney on an earnings call with investors on Thursday. This came just days after Anheuser-Busch executives held a closed-door damage control meeting with distributors about the Mulvaney partnership disaster.
It is not clear if Anheuser-Busch management is aware that his use of the term “misinformation” is likely to enrage conservatives and worsen the boycott, as it would remind them of being censored for years on social media at the direction of the federal government for “sharing misinformation“.
“We need to clarify the facts that this was one can, one influencer, one post and not a campaign,” Doukeris said. This statement is, in fact, misinformation. Mulvaney made two posts on Instagram with the hashtag “#budlightpartner”, which appears to be the hallmark of paid posts by Bud Light influencers, who are mostly very young women. Whether the company chooses to internally describe this relationship as a “partnership”, “endorsement” or “campaign”, the distinction is academic to the rest of the world.
Doukeris also echoed the non-apology that Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth made on April 14, saying, “We will continue to learn, meet the moment in time, all be stronger and we work tirelessly to do what we do best: Bring people together over a beer and creating a future of more cheers,” Doukeris told Fox Business. To date, no AB InBev executive has directly apologized or even expressed regret about the fiasco. Ironically, the statement which took no responsibility for insulting their customers also emphasized “the importance of accountability”.
The controversy began on April 1, when trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney – who once promoted sex changes for children, also known as “gender-affirming care”, directly to President Joe Biden – unveiled a Bud Light can bearing the trans star’s face commemorating “365 days of girlhood”. In the video, Mulvaney explained that the partnership was done in honor of March Madness, which “has something do to with sports”.
The latest sales figures show a catastrophic drop in sales for Bud Light nationwide since the brand first partnered with Dylan Mulvaney, according to a report in the New York Post. Industry data hub Beer Board reported that sales to bars and restaurants had dropped 34.7% in the first two weeks, providing a rough indication of terror from bar owners about peer pressure among customers to avoid ordering Bud Light. The most recent industry data, ending the week of 4/22, shows a 21% drop in total sales. Even worse, beer volumes – number of cases sold for the retail market – dropped an astonishing 26% last week.
“Larger packages of Bud Light are not being purchased — the 30-pack suitcases, the 20-packs, the 18-packs, the 12-packs — they’re all being impacted,” beverage expert Bump Williams told The Post. “It’s going to be very, very hard to reverse the decline.”
This indicates that over a quarter of core retail customers by volume – those who buy packs and cases of Bud Light to keep in their fridges at home – are abandoning the brand. If Budweiser cannot recover from those losses, or if sales decline even further, this would be an even more expensive failure than Coca-Cola’s attempt to replace their original formula with New Coke in 1985, the commonly-accepted worst marketing disaster in American history.
Elizabeth Gmaz / Flickr
Bud Light remains the best-selling beer in America, which means continuing losses on this scale could cause tens of billions of dollars in damage to the value of the company, on top of the over $4 billion lost in the first week of April. According to Williams, there is a very real chance that Bud Light will lose its #1 spot by the end of the year.
With that in mind, it is surprising that Doukeris assured investors that the scandal would likely have no further financial impact, saying, “We believe we have the experience, the resources and the partners to manage this. And our four-year growth outlook is unchanged.” Material misrepresentations to investors could be interpreted as securities fraud, which would expose the company to lawsuit liability and charges from the SEC.
Doukeris’ assurance to investors was backed by a claim that the boycott had only impacted 1% of total global sales for the first 21 days of April, a figure which covers sales of over 500 AB InBev brands worldwide.
Doukeris expressed confidence that a tripling of their advertising budget over the summer would rebuild the brand and repair the damage. However, the brand’s first two “countrified” ad campaigns launched since the crisis have been met with mockery and anger from boycotters, who promised that the apparent attempt at pandering would only harden their resolve.
The first ad, released on April 14 alongside Whitworth’s non-apology tweet, features a horse cantering, trotting and then galloping through various rustic American vistas while an moderately Western-accented voiceover gives a vague monologue about how Budweiser embodies “the American spirit”. The tweet was promptly ratioed.
"Hey you guys 'member the horses? Non-gay horses?"
— Bennett's Phylactery (@extradeadjcb) April 15, 2023
The second ad features an ethnically-diverse cast of country music fans – apparently one Asian, one Hispanic, one black and one white – drinking Bud Light in the rain while Zac Brown Band’s breakout hit “Chicken Fried” plays in the background. Zac Brown once described “Chicken Fried” to Country Weekly as a list of “things that are very southern or characteristic of the South”, which includes listening to the radio, eating chicken-fried food, drinking cold beer and wearing jeans. To date, the video has 528 likes and an estimated 26,000 dislikes on YouTube. Comments were also quickly turned off.
Doukeris also boasted of providing “providing direct financial support” to everyone in the supply chain affected by the crisis, including delivery drivers, sales reps, distributors, bar owners and servers. According to the Wall Street Journal, this support also included giving Bud Light away for free to their distributors.
Anheuser-Busch put two top marketing executives on leave in the past two weeks, VP of US Value Brands Daniel Blake and Bud Light VP of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid. The company insists that the leave is temporary and voluntary, but reports say it was involuntary. This action had no discernible impact on the boycott.
What did appear to arrest the free-fall of Budweiser’s stock price was the reaction of Republican leaders attempting to stop the boycott, citing the significant donations to Republicans from Budweiser executives. Budweiser executives also donate nearly the same amount to Democrats. Donald Trump Jr. publicly campaigned to end the boycott, to the mockery of many conservatives online, and the National Republican Congressional Committee frantically deleted a fundraising post mocking Bud Light.
Bud Light didn’t need to put out it’s non-apology, and people would’ve forgotten about it and continued to drink the brand. But they did, and conservatives like Trump Jr. accepted the non-apology, so their stock price went up.
Rule of thumb: go woke, get rich.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 16, 2023
The Daily Mail reported on Wednesday that documents they obtained show AB InBev hired lobbying firm Origin Advocacy helmed by ex-GOP Senate staffers to manage their response on April 1, the day the boycott began. The fact that they hired lobbyists instead of a public relations crisis management firm seems to indicate that they believed they could solve the problem through backroom political pressure alone. This appears to have had no impact on the boycott, even if it did mollify investors.
From March 31 to date, Budweiser’s stock has dropped 4.69%. This represents $6.2 billion in losses of market capitalization.
Valiant News reached out to AB InBev with a series of detailed questions but did not receive any response by time of publication.
