IT'S STILL COLORED WATER IN A BLUE CAN.

Not too long ago, Miller Lite and Bud Light trashed their value proposition with Normals, provoking a boycott that I was quite willing and able to go along with.

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday, and the only team to have won three consecutive NFL titles remains the Packers.  Anheuser-Busch bought air time ostensibly to make amends with Normals.

Free Press contributor Anson Frericks elaborates.

The ad, which features Shane Gillis, Post Malone, and NFL great Peyton Manning having fun at a wild barbecue,fueled by bright-blue cans of Bud Light beer, is no ordinary TV commercial. With its almost cartoonish celebration of masculine excess, the spot communicates two conventional beer-commercial messages: Bud Light is fun, and Bud Light is for guys. What makes it notable, though, is a third point, one it communicates only by implication: Bud Light is really, really sorry.

Bud Light is still trying to make up with the customer base it alienated on April 1, 2023. On that day, a brand that had been the top-selling beer in America for over two decades launched a social media campaign that would rock its customers, and not in a good way. Starring a transgender activist, Dylan Mulvaney, it celebrated Mulvaney’s first year of “girlhood.” Bud Light even sent Mulvaney a personalized can to mark this milestone date in Mulvaney’s transition from biological male to transgender woman, which millions had already followed on Instagram and TikTok.

This was not an April Fools’ Day prank as some believed, but a serious effort by the world’s largest beer company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, to “rebrand” its product.

What happened next was not amusing.  Anheuser might have gone woke as much to placate institutional investors who got their latest management fads from the World Economic Forum as to expand its market appeal, say, to the Diet Coke demographic.  But market tests, as ever, have steep grading curves.

On April 1, 2023, the ESG bubble popped. And Anheuser-Busch was caught holding the pin.

The reaction to the company’s partnership with transgender biological male Dylan Mulvaney was the culmination of America’s growing frustration with corporations shoving progressive politics down customers’ throats. The transgender issue was a hot topic. And a divisive one. Did most Americans care how people dressed or identified? No. But sex-change surgeries for kids were a different matter. Sixteen states had recently passed laws regulating the practice. Twenty-five states had banned biological males from competing against biological women in K–12 sports.

And Bud Light and the Jarrett regency handed Donald Trump a winning issue.  Then, notes Red State's Ed Morrissey, their advertisers overcompensated in their apology.

This made no impression among my friends at the party, as most of us were having too much fun socializing to pay much attention. If we had seen it, it would have produced gales of laughter, and not in the way Bud Light intended. Rather than return to the usual focus on friends and parties, Bud Light instead chose to parody men by making their masculinity ridiculous.

The nadir of this overcompensation was the sequence with the leaf-blowers used as phallic symbols while [careful, Ed, CAREFUL!] uhhh ... ejecting Bud Light out of excitement. The positioning of the tubes is anything but coincidental and would have made Freud himself blush. (In fact, check his grave; he might still have blushed.) That sequence starts 18 seconds into the ad, which seems just a tad premature, no? The whole thing looks like something Heinerscheid would have cooked up as her idea of toxic masculinity.

Whatever.  Captain Ed concludes,  "The message is clear: political correctness and The Shrieking of the Progressive Karens are dead."  And Bud Light is still colored water in blue cans, and attempting to sell it to dumb guys is still a thing.