On the menu today: You would have figured that Anheuser-Busch deciding to put two of its highest-ranking advertising executives on leave would have put the Bud Light story to rest. But a Financial Times columnist argues that the beer company should have stuck “with its marketing approach, rather than wringing its hands weakly; these efforts to broaden Bud Light’s reach made perfect sense and it has since gained free publicity,” and calls out your friendly neighborhood newsletter writer for allegedly “thundering” in disapproval. Meanwhile, the coverage of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s fight with Disney is a five-layer cake, with coverage picking and choosing from any one of five narratives, some easier to grasp than others.
So You Want to Argue about Bud Light Some More, Huh?
Dear reader, do you feel like I “thunder” a lot to you?
Last week, while writing about Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson, I briefly quoted and linked to Financial Times columnist John Gapper; I thought his characterization of Murdoch as a “pirate king” was a useful one. It turns out Gapper wrote about me this weekend, but he disagrees pretty strongly with me on another issue:
A familiar storm of media outrage and faux offence followed Bud Light’s attempt to broaden its market. Alissa Heinerscheid, the brand’s vice-president of marketing and one of the pair now on leave, came in for a drubbing. “She wants to sell to people who, up until now, have had little or no interest in buying or drinking Bud Light,” thundered Jim Geraghty in the conservative National Review.
“Thundered,” huh?
How do you picture me when I’m writing these newsletters? Red-faced, veins bulging, eyes popping, screaming at my screen, like Alex Jones mid-meltdown? Ironically, last week, when I discussed polling numbers related to transgenderism on Meet the Press, one reader argued I offered “anodyne pablum” and another fumed about my “passiveness.” Apparently, in some people’s eyes, I don’t “thunder” enough.
Also notice that I link to Gapper’s column, but he doesn’t link to mine. I guess one of us is afraid of our readers seeing what the other has written, and thinking it sounds more reasonable than portrayed. Eh, maybe that’s just me “thundering” again.
Gapper writes, “I still struggle to grasp what was wrong with the ads themselves.”
Okay, but in the big picture, it doesn’t really matter if a Financial Times columnist sees nothing wrong with Bud Light tying its image to Dylan Mulvaney; it matters what the existing Bud Light customer base thinks, and what the rest of the potential beer-drinking market thinks. (I’d love to know how often Gapper buys and drinks Bud Light.)
Previous Bud Light customers have made their feelings clear. Sales are down 17 percent week to week in terms of dollars, while the volume of beer sold is down 21 percent for the week ending April 15.
Axios: “Servers across nearly 3,000 locations using BeerBoard’s network poured about 6 percent less Bud Light than other light lagers from April 2 to April 15, after the calls for a boycott.”
The New York Post reported that the regional supermarket chain Stew Leonard had seen Bud Light sales drop by 50 percent, and that sales of Coors Light had increased by roughly an equal measure.
E. J. Schultz of Ad Age observed a few days ago, “Outside of that original statement, they [Anheuser-Busch] have since sort of really walked, if not sprinted away from this issue, because of the heat they’re feeling from distributors.”
Different measuring sticks will give you different senses of the scale of the drop, but they all point to a drop — anywhere from 6 percent in bars to as much as 50 percent in certain grocery-store chains. Because the objective of advertising and promotion is to increase sales, you cannot say that this was a good move; there is no sign that the Mulvaney promotion attracted new drinkers — of if it did, it was more than offset by those who stopped drinking Bud Light.
You can argue, as Gapper does, that most politics-based boycotts rarely last very long. Maybe this one will die out quickly, too; I don’t have a crystal ball. I would note that when somebody stops buying Bud Light and switches over to Coors Light or some other light beer, there’s always the chance that they decide they like their new option better. Almost anywhere they sell or serve Bud Light, there are other options, other than a few sports stadiums.
Gapper ends his column with an argument that Anheuser-Busch should stick with Mulvaney:
That is why Anheuser-Busch should stick with its marketing approach, rather than wringing its hands weakly. These efforts to broaden Bud Light’s reach made perfect sense and it has since gained free publicity. The clamor does not change the fact that it needs more drinkers, whether pick-up drivers, urban couples or trans actresses. The rest is froth.
Ignore the sales drop, and just keep doing what you’re doing, huh? Have faith that eventually the people upset about the Mulvaney promotion will lose interest and forget, and eventually those who like the Mulvaney promotion will start buying Bud Light in greater numbers? Is that the suggested plan?
The New York Post quoted Benj Steinman, editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights, saying that last week at a closed-door meeting in D.C., “Anheuser-Busch executives told US beer distributors they will ‘spend heavily on the brand after spending fell off a cliff last year.’”
Oh, and now Anheuser-Busch is getting grief for not being sufficiently supportive of the LGBTQ+ community.
The decision to place Heinerscheid and fellow Anheuser-Busch marketing exec Daniel Blake on leave and the promise to distributors of a new ad campaign indicate that Anheuser-Busch does not see the whole Mulvaney brouhaha* as a win — and that it sees Gapper’s advice as attempting more of the same and hoping for different results.
*You know I was tempted to write, “brew-ha-ha.”
DeSantis vs. Disney: Pick Your Narrative
Yesterday on Howard Kurtz’s program on Fox News, I tried to succinctly characterize the coverage of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s fight with Disney as a five-layer cake, with coverage picking and choosing from any one of five narratives, some easier to grasp than others.
Layer one: “Why is DeSantis picking on Disney? Who doesn’t like Disney?” This is for those who still associate the name “Disney” with its founder Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse, and the company’s old family-friendly image.
Layer two: “Thank goodness someone is finally standing up to Disney!” This is for those who see Disney as the villain, propagating “woke” values in its movies and programming, and will cheer just about any government effort to restrain or even punish the company. This is for those who are familiar with the video of Latoya Raveneau, executive producer for Disney Television Animation, talking about her, in her words, “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” and how she, “was just, wherever I could, adding queerness.”
Layer three: “Wait, even if we don’t like what Disney is doing, this isn’t the proper role of state government.” This is for those who prioritize governments not picking winners and losers in the marketplace and see DeSantis and Florida Republicans as doing just that.
Layer four: “Wait, this is the state taking steps to undo previous decisions that picked winners and losers in the marketplace.” Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District agreement, set in 1967, represented a special deal between the state government and Disney that amounted to the Disney Corporation having its own local government. In addition to special tax privileges — including the authority to levy taxes to pay for its own fire-response and medical services — Disney is, or was, exempt from local-government building codes and environmental regulations within the district. If you’re a true free-marketeer, Disney’s original special deal with the Florida state government is the kind of favoritism you don’t like in the first place.
Layer five: DeSantis did the right thing (reevaluating and rewriting a nearly six-decade-old deal which gave one of America’s largest corporations unparalleled powers, creating a de facto corporate government for the area) for the wrong and probably unconstitutional reasons.
DeSantis probably hurt himself by writing in a February 28, 2023, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
When corporations try to use their economic power to advance a woke agenda, they become political, and not merely economic, actors. . . . Leaders must stand up and fight back when big corporations make the mistake, as Disney did, of using their economic might to advance a political agenda. We are making Florida the state where the economy flourishes because we are the state where woke goes to die.
That’s going to be a big applause line on the campaign trail, but at least one judge and perhaps more are likely to see it as an open declaration that the state government’s reevaluation and revocation of the Reedy Creek deal was done as retaliation for Disney’s political stances and statements. Bob Iger and everyone else at the Disney Corporation have the same First Amendment rights as anyone else, and the state cannot take action to punish the company for expressing views the governor or state legislature don’t like.
In his campaign book/autobiography, The Courage to Be Free, DeSantis wrote on page 197:
After the fight over the Parental Rights in Education bill, there were more rumblings about the continuation of Disney’s special self-governing status. I made it clear publicly that, regardless of Disney’s political antics, such an arrangement was an anachronistic example of corporate welfare. I announced that I was willing to reevaluate — and even eliminate — Disney’s special deal, though getting the Legislature to agree would have been unthinkable just a few weeks before Disney executives made the fateful decision to take sides in the woke culture wars.
Behind the scenes, I was not, as a father of children ages five, four, and two, comfortable with the continuation of Disney’s special arrangement. While the Walt Disney corporation and its executives had a right to indulge in woke activism, Florida did not have to place the company on a pedestal while they do so — especially when the company’s activism impacted the rights of parents, and the well-being of children. As originally envisioned, Disney’s special arrangement was premised on the notion that the company would act in the best interests of the state of Florida, which, unfortunately, was no longer the case. The Walt Disney Company had decided to bite the hand that fed it for more than fifty years.
Again, whether you like it or not, there’s a good chance that judges will look at those statements and conclude the revocation of the Reedy Creek deal was retaliation for the company’s stances on the Parental Rights in Education bill.
Disney filed a lawsuit against the state to reinstate the old deal.
This is why you’re going to see a lot more coverage focused on the narratives in the first two layers. They’re simpler and easier to understand.
ADDENDUM: You’re going to want to read John McCormack, Dan McLaughin, and Jeff Blehar on Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s rare interview with the Wall Street Journal and Alito’s declaration (concerning who leaked the drafted Dobbs opinion), “I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody.”