Bud Light’s influencer marketing disaster—6 lessons for brands a year later

It’s almost time for the NCAA basketball tournament and that means we’re approaching the first anniversary of Bud Light’s marketing debacle. The episode has thankfully disappeared from the general media, but not from finance-specific channels. Anheuser-Busch InBev recently revealed it lost more than $1.3 billion in North America in 2023, most of it from a drop in Bud Light sales. Market share decrease. Volume nosediving. EBITDA crashing. It’s a hat trick of failures. Also read: How the Bud Light controversy changed beer marketing The company still made its numbers globally but that’s a lot of heavy lifting to counter the rococo death stagger of the U.S. business and especially Bud Light. Here’s a six-pack of learnings if we care to pop them open and indulge. Influencer marketing? Yes. Turn over the reins of your brand? No. Most of the influencer deals I know of have the influencer, not the brand, responsible for messaging. Sometimes it works to everyone’s benefit. Sometimes it’s wallpaper with no consumer interest and fades into the ether. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Agency A-List winners here And sometimes it’s a corrosive agent damaging everything it touches. It’s the wrong influencer with the wrong message executed the wrong way. Any deal where the brand abdicates responsibility for creative is courting disaster. What’s the collateral damage? Maybe because I worked in beer so long and the category is loaded with examples of mortifying creative decisions, this is the first question we ask ourselves for any idea. The larger the brand, the greater the risk of damage. If you’re not sure of the answer you better dive in and get a handle on this. Alienating the current consumer base is universally a bad idea. Test It This is one of the rare times where pretesting creative can actually help. It can point to something with the power to alienate and damage the brand. I’m unaware of any influencer creative that gets pretested. It’s a pain and may upset some gossamer personalities, but it may have saved AB a billion dollars. This was a bad creative idea, poorly executed. There’s an audience waiting to be offended Far left or far right, it doesn’t matter. There’s a group waiting to be outraged online with whatever your message is. Plan on it. Most of the time it’s noise in the background and their affront is not reflective of the population at large but it’s still worth noting. Don’t confuse boycott with brand estrangement While media personalities were outraged and called for a boycott, the majority of drinkers simply didn’t (and still don’t) want to be seen holding a Bud Light. They’re not boycotting the brand. It’s that they no longer aspire to the type of sociability the brand represents. It’s much deeper than the fleeting pain of a boycott. Brand reaction can make the damage worse You could argue the AB corporate reaction post-Dylan Mulvaney made matters much worse. Waited too long. Tone deaf dismissive comments from execs outside the U.S. Clumsy official statements. The appearance of not having thought anything through. It took a bad situation and made it three times as bad. A clinic in how not to do PR. The fact the Bud Light numbers remain in freefall is testament to the harm done to the brand. It’s a living breathing case study for the rest of us. Ad Age A-List and Creativity Gala Buy your ticket to the in-person event Click here

Bud Light’s influencer marketing disaster—6 lessons for brands a year later

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