The Revolution Will Not Be Advertised – Bud Light and the Secrets of Marketing in the Age of the Internet

LEUVEN, BELGIUM ­– Politics and advertising are similar in that everything is planned and everybody lies. The latter is an industry of deceit, when it comes right down to it. Lies are painstakingly crafted through many hours of meetings, focus groups and even get their own photo shoot and color palette.  

When you see a commercial on TV or YouTube that makes you feel a certain way – a flood of emotion or excitement – executives in Madison Avenue get goosebumps and a wicked glint in their eye because they’ve managed to associate the product or service they were hired to promote with a state of mind that makes your inner voice shout “take my money, please!”.

Of course, the Internet has changed how advertising is done. Television spots are still around and quite expensive to produce, but social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok, and many others, have opened the door to an array of new ways to get a rise out of people in the ‘right’ way (as far as ad execs are concerned), at a much better cost-benefit ratio.

Historically, one of the most effective techniques in print advertising has been the advertorial; articles that have all the appearance of being a real piece of journalism, but are instead paid ads written up by a team of copywriters at an ad agency to extol the virtues of a client’s product or to put down a competitor’s.

The Internet combines the power of these two mediums into a powerful new brew of duplicity that makes it far more difficult to distinguish between what is real and what’s just a clever ruse to get you to buy some beer. Nothing better exemplifies this than the recent Bud Light controversy and the millions of dollars Anheuser-Busch InBev – the beer’s parent company – got others to spend in order to drive sales of another one of its products, Modelo Especial.

The Same Oat Bag

Belgium-based multinational beverage company InBev bought Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion in 2008. In addition to the German-American beer property which many of us associate with Clydesdale horses thanks to a long-running ad campaign featuring the giant equines, the firm owns Grupo Modelo, Foster’s and Beck’s & Co. among several other brewing companies. 

Anheuser-Busch’s former chairman August Busch III was a notorious political funder, donating millions of dollars over the years mostly to conservative politicians, but always willing to bankroll key Democrats like Hillary Clinton. The company, as a whole, has given to both parties in roughly equal measure since 1989. Together with the Coors family, the Anheusers and Buschs are part of the American oligarch billionaire class, who have invested serious resources to keep the government out of their treasure chest over the years, led by Charles Koch and his decades-old political machinery.

Like Koch’s interlocking web of companies and convoluted corporate structures, AB InBev’s diverse holdings allows the business to exploit political discourse to further class interests. Just weeks after transgender ‘influencer’ Dylan Mulvaney’s Bud Light-sponsored video, the company put out a “pro-America” ad with the famous Clydesdales that elicited the ire of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Newsweek reported.

Meanwhile the billions-worth of free advertising garnered by the incessant coverage of Mulvaney’s 45-second video has sprouted an instant cottage industry of clout-chasers, whose unsolicited opinions are pushed by the algorithms of social media platforms, which are in turn, selling more ads on top of the tabloid-esque media circus surrounding the clip.

Kid Rock’s infamous response video, where the ‘conservative’ pop star recorded himself shooting up a few 12-packs of Bud Light with an assault rifle, set off a spate of imitators and invited a slew of both protestors and supporters of a narrative that has now been pounced on by other corporations, notably Target, which is learning how to boost retail sales through controversy. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, Bud Light sales have ‘tanked’ since April over the politically-inspired boycott. However, sales of AB InBev’s Modelo Especial have now replaced the American beer in sales volume across the U.S., making it the top seller in the country. The only ones truly affected are small “independently owned” Anheuser-Busch distributors.

Bud Light nevertheless remains one of the best-selling beers in America. The real winner is Modelo, which a decade ago didn’t even feature among the top ten beers consumed in the United States. This is only good news for the parent company, of course, which continues to add to its bottom line as the firm’s brands enjoy the free publicity received through unscrupulous media outlets like Fox.

Market Fundamentalist Extremism

An anonymous, blacked-out “whistleblower” claiming to be a former Anheuser-Busch employee was interviewed on Tomi Lahren’s show on Fox-owned Outkick stating that the Dylan Mulvaney video was part of a “strategic destruction of Bud Light”. The purported ex-worker expressed his anger over what he said was a deliberate plan to help the company undermine the staff by cutting back production in order to make it “easy for them to restructure”.

“Many of us are talking about that like they planned it in a way,” the unidentified guest told “constitutional conservative” host Tomi Lahren, who has cultivated a wide following among the right wing demo through her anti-immigration views. Lahren, who has called for Americans to arm themselves to “defend” against immigrants, is one of the most prominent ‘culture war’ figures in the media and peddles the kind of insidious, xenophobic narratives that promotes fear and sows division in society.

Fox has already been exposed for pandering and outright lying to their audience. But that’s nothing new in the media and is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. The difference is that we now have an automatic lie-churning machine called the Internet, which uses algorithms to push out specific stories and create narratives that not only fuel sales, but can determine elections and drive policy.

Kid Rock and his fans are no threat to AB-InBev. Quite the contrary, their outrageous behavior only helps the company’s brands get wider exposure, but even more significantly, the harm it causes downstream the economy through boycotts buttresses their position and furthers the oligarch class interests, which wants nothing more than to get the government as far away from their accounts receivables department as possible.

Corporations exploiting patriotic sentiment and nationalistic constructs to sell their wares and deflect the social costs of capital accumulation is by no means a recent phenomenon. Just as Anheuser-Busch sent out a horse-drawn beer wagon to present a case of Budweiser to the former governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, for his fight against Prohibition, a consortium of manufacturing companies called the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was getting ready to mount a propaganda campaign to link mechanized labor with the concept of freedom.

Comprised of at least six-hundred American firms, NAM spearheaded lobbying efforts to oppose child labor laws and unions since its founding in 1895. In the book “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market”, authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, delve into how NAM developed a unique marketing strategy in the 1930s to push back against Roosevelt’s New Deal on behalf of its electrical industry members.

The so-called “Tripod of Freedom” linked the founding principles of the nation, such as representative democracy and political freedom with a term invented whole-cloth by the astute copywriters hired by NAM: “free enterprise”. Based on the Chicago school market fundamentalist ideologies, NAM introduced this concept and married it into the very fabric of American foundational mythology.The idea of “free enterprise” as a de facto constitutional right of every American citizen has helped the American oligarch class maintain their power and to exert ever-increasing control over the state and its politicians, to the point of being practically indistinguishable. But now, with the added propaganda capabilities of the Internet, they can even pretend to start a revolution while maximizing profits at the same time.