Anheuser-Busch Inbev said Tuesday that revenue growth in most of its global regions was offset by a drop in North American sales, in a sign of continuing fallout from a promotion with a transgender influencer that cost it sales.
The world’s largest brewer and parent company of Bud Light said adjusted earnings for the latest quarter rose 4.1% to $5.4 billion on revenues that climbed 5% to $15.6 billion.
Revenue in the United States for the July-September period, however, tumbled 13.5%. AB InBev, based in Leuven, Belgium, noted that sales to retailers were down “primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light.”
Bud Light sales plunged amid a conservative backlash after the brand sent a commemorative can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in early April.
I think they just didn’t appreciate our current media environment well enough. They thought they could try to expand sales to new customers with a TikTok ad campaign that their core consumers would never see. What they didn’t plan for was the fact that right-wing “news” has become pure Christian nationalist grievance propaganda that scours social media for anything they can use to outrage their audience; they didn’t expect that their little TikTok ad campaign would become the biggest story in the right-wing outrage ecosystem for weeks.
If they didn’t expect that their head has been in the same for eons. I think this is the leadership of the company making decisions based on their environment and what investors wanted. They knew it would piss off the right. They assumed the right was irrelevant.
Which might be true in like 40 years, but for now the kids they’re appealing to aren’t drinking beer. Hell. The way trends are going they never will. Alcohol to my knowledge isn’t nearly as popular as it was, and people see it for what it is among the younger generations.
No amount of rainbows and trans influencers will convince people to start drinking poison. But your average idiot with no sense of the consequences of their actions?
Guess who they tend to vote for.