Two Republican Senators believe Anheuser-Busch may have violated federal laws against advertising alcohol to minors in its Bud Light sponsorship of male-to-female transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn have issued a joint letter to Anheuser-Busch CEO and Beer Institute chairman Brendan Whitworth, in which Town Hall explains the Senators demand a Code Compliance Review Board to investigate whether the company “violated the Beer Institute’s Advertising/Marketing Code and Buying Guidelines prohibiting marketing to individuals younger than the legal drinking age.”
“The Beer Institute must examine whether your company violated the Beer Institute’s Advertising/Marketing Code and Buying Guidelines prohibiting marketing to individuals younger than the legal drinking age,” the letter demanded, before unveiling evidence the legislators say “overwhelmingly shows” the influencer’s following “skews significantly younger than the legal drinking age”.
“We would urge you, in your capacity at Anheuser-Busch, to avoid a lengthy investigation by the Beer Institute by instead having Anheuser-Busch publicly sever its relationship with Dylan Mulvaney, publicly apologize to the American people for marketing alcoholic beverages to minors,” wrote Cruz and Blackburn, “and direct Dylan Mulvaney to remove any Anheuser-Busch content from his social media platforms.”
Anheuser-Busch Now Has Another Problem to Deal With https://t.co/XgVzL5xKeO
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 19, 2023
The senators’ letter also included “a series of documents requests” aimed at shining a public light on “how Anheuser-Busch vets its partnerships” and how the company “failed in assessing the propriety” of its Mulvaney campaign.
In the body of the letter, the senators make their case for Mulvaney’s social media audience being well below the legal drinking age:
Publicly available data indicates that both the Instagram and TikTok platforms skew heavily toward younger audiences. As Hootsuite, a leading social media marketing platform pointed out recently, if you want to reach children—Instagram, which is where Anheuser-Busch rolled out the Mulvaney/Bud Light partnership—is the ideal social media platform.9 Hootsuite noted that “overall, Instagram is Gen[eration] Z’s favorite social media platform. Global internet users aged 16 to 24 prefer Instagram to other social platforms. . . even ranking it above TikTok.” For marketing professionals seeking to reach the age 16 to 24 year old cohort, Instagram is an ideal platform.
TikTok users also skew equally young. A leaked presentation about TikTok user demographics showed that 17% of the TikTok user base is 13 to 17 years old and 42% of the audience is between the ages of 18 and 24 years of age.12 While Anheuser-Busch appears to have targeted its rollout of the Mulvaney/Bud Light partnership on Instagram, it is obvious, given Dylan Mulvaney’s significant social media following on TikTok, that this influencer campaign would spill over to TikTok as well.
While Anheuser-Busch continues to face fallout from the controversial transgender sponsorship, the bleeding from the decision appears not to be limited to Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch, or the alcoholic beverage industry.
A number of transgender and nonbinary influencers say the consumer backlash to Bud Light has made other major brands reticent to work with the growing cottage industry of male-to-female social media stars.
