How the decline of Budweiser was decades in the making
By Gavin Newsham
Published Jan. 25, 2025On April 1, 2023, controversial transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney took to Instagram to advertise Bud Light beer, as the brewer promoted its tie-in for the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s March Madness basketball tournament.
In the clip, Mulvaney, 27, sat behind cans of Bud Light, sipping from one while pushing a competition to win $15,000 and, at the same time, declaring complete ignorance as to what March Madness was about and even what sport it involved.
But as Anson Frericks explains in “Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America’s Favorite Beer” (Threshold Editions), the promo caused instant outrage among Bud Light’s loyal patrons.
After decades of market dominance and industry consolidation, Budweiser blundered badly when it embraced woke culture and ignored its core base, according to critics.
“The reaction was explosive,” he writes.
“Customers called for boycotts. Celebrities chimed in. Kid Rock was among the first to do so, posting a video of himself shooting a stack of Bud Lights with a rifle. “F*** Bud Light and F*** Anheuser-Busch,” he eloquently concludes.
Frericks came to “Last Call” as the ultimate insider and a Bud fan long before he worked for them and even before he was old enough to drink it.
In 1989, he watched the Superbowl between his hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals, and the San Francisco 49ers, a game also dubbed “The Bud Bowl” as it was the first time a company, Anheuser-Busch, and its two largest brands, Bud and Bud Light, produced an ad specifically for the Superbowl that would not run after the Superbowl.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/25/lifestyle/how-the-decline-of-budweiser-was-decades-in-the-making/
