I’m a perfectionist and hard as I try to publish commentaries without grammar and spelling errors, invariably some escape me. Thank you to those who take the time to flag them and help me promptly clean up my copy so that others can read a more polished version. I won’t thank you by name as being publicly known for supporting this blog might not be good for one’s career.
An even bigger fear of mine is getting my facts wrong. I strive to provide links to credible sources that support my positions, even though few people ever click on the links. I can handle people disagreeing with my contrarian views, but I never want to be credibly accused of spreading “misinformation.” Alas, I’ve been censored on LinkedIn for citing information published by leading medical journals and accomplished physicians, but I took comfort knowing that the authorities I cited were more knowledgeable and credible than the censors who suppressed my posts.
A few months ago, I published this commentary about Bud Light’s controversy choosing TikTok transgender star Dylan Mulvaney as one of its brand ambassadors. I cited two commercials as being among the all-time greats: Coke’s, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke,” featuring young people from all over the world on a hilltop in Italy promoting love, harmony and Coke, and the ads for the launch of Miller Lite beer. I’ve long regarded the misspelling of Miller “Lite” and the beer’s initial slogan, “Everything You Always Wanted in a Beer. And Less,” as sheer marketing genius.
It’s well known that Coke’s ‘Hilltop ad” was conceived by Bill Backer, who oversaw Coke’s account for the once legendary agency McCann Erickson. Coke to its credit features an interview with Backer on its website talking about how the ad came together. Unknown to me until yesterday was that Backer was also responsible for Miller Lite’s slogan. I discovered that reading Backer’s obituary in the New York Times.
Talk about someone with an overabundance of talent!
What prompted me to research Backer was a comment someone attributed to him on LinkedIn about not wanting to take direction from MBAs. I can’t find the LinkedIn reference, but I did find this 2015 interview Backer gave to Wall Street Journal after the season finale of the hit show “Mad Men,” which featured Coke’s “Hilltop ad” as being created by the fictional star Don Draper, who was modeled after Backer.
Backer told WSJ he stopped watching “Mad Men” because it was too much of a “soap opera” and “didn’t show the stresses of the (advertising) business.” But what I found particularly illuminating was this comment: “The agencies are not able to build brands the way they used to. The old brand mangers that built solid brands are gone. It takes a while to build a brand and that amount of time isn’t there anymore. Companies don’t give brands enough time.”
The Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney debacle was overseen by Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, a Harvard business school grad who attended Groton boarding school (65K a year). Bud Light’s sales have been steadily declining, and the brew is in danger of losing its longtime perch as the No. 1 selling beer in America.
The media refers to Bud Light as being victim of a boycott, but that’s mistaken. If Bud Light was a victim of a boycott, likely all the brands of Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns Bud Light, would be experiencing a significant decline in sales. Beer drinkers aren’t boycotting Bud Light so much as rejecting the unintended rebranding of the beer.
“The label Bud Light is simply too toxic these days,” opined Breitbart columnist John Nolte, who lives in rural North Carolina and strikes me as someone who associates with people who drink beer. “No one wants to be associated with it. No one wants to face the stares and jokes that come with buying Bud Light.”
Most calls for boycotts never take hold. If they did, United and American airlines would have gone out of business years ago. The reason that Bud Light continues to lose customers and sales is that the product has become indelibly associated with Dylan Mulvaney, particularly her now famous image luxuriating in a bubble bath surrounded by cans of Bud Light.
A day doesn’t go by where I don’t come across multiple stories about Bud Light’s declining sales, even in the corporate media. The stories invariably feature Mulvaney’s infamous Bud Light photos, reinforcing the brand’s chosen association with the TikTok star. When people think Bud Light, they think Dylan Mulvaney, who I’ve yet to find even a single source confirming she drinks beer. A recent podcast conducted with Mulvaney in her living room revealed a bottle of Dom Perignon and what appeared to be bottles of wine and liqueurs.
The media refers to the Mulvaney backlash as being part of the “culture wars,” but it’s really indicative of the “class wars” that began when Hillary Clinton referred to a huge swath of Americans as being “deplorable.” When Bud Light’s controversy first began, a podcast interview with Heinerscheid surfaced where she trashed the work of her predecessors who made the brand the top selling beer in America. Most early mentions of Heinerscheid noted her Harvard degree and made other references to her privileged past.
The Bud Light debacle underscores the sorry state of marketing and advertising today. When I worked in the industry, companies were very protective of their brands and logos, going to great lengths to protect where and how they were used and associated. The level of thought was such that companies produced manuals almost as think as War and Peace articulating the acceptable use of their brand images.
Bud Light seemingly didn’t put a lot of thought into its decision to send Mulvaney a can featuring her image. As best I can tell, the decision was based on Mulvaney having millions of followers on TikTok, and the mistaken assumption that if she featured Bud Light in her videos, people would be attracted to the beer.
According to a report in today’s New York Post, an eight-year San Francisco-based marketing firm called Captive8 was responsible for introducing Anheuser-Busch to Mulvaney. The Post reports that Captive8 was co-founded in 2015 by Krishna Subramanian — a Silicon Valley investor who sold online ad network BlueLithium to Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million and that its clients include Walmart, American Express, Twitter and KraftHeinz. Subramanian makes himself available for media interviews as an expert on influencer marketing.
Subramanian strikes me as a tech geek who mistakes number of followers on social media with influence. One example proving that’s not the case is controversial journalist Jemele Hill, who has 1.4 million Twitter followers. Yet Hill’s book “Uphill” was an epic failure, despite a fawning mention in the New York Times, where even bad reviews spur book sales. Bloomberg reported that Hill’s podcast featured on Spotify was being discontinued, although the Detroit native disputes the story. Bloomberg, among the few publications that quickly acknowledges and corrects errors, hadn’t removed or corrected its story as of this writing.
Jim Vinoski, an authority on manufacturing, Patrick Anderson, a Michigan economist, and Doug Sheridan, a Houston-based authority on the global energy industry, are among the people I follow on LinkedIn. The followings of the three experts are a fraction of Hill’s Twitter following, but I’m certain their influence is much greater because of their compelling thought leadership on complex subjects about which they can speak with authority.
Cal Newport, a Georgetown professor who writes about the intersections of technology, work, and the quest to find depth in an increasingly distracted world, argues that social media influence is greatly exaggerated and a waste of time and brain power. Newport doesn’t have a Twitter or Facebook account and yet he’s written multiple bestsellers. As an aside, there’s published research indicating that Twitter makes you stupid.
Learning that Bill Backer was responsible for Miller Lite’s legendary advertising when the brand was launched puts to shame, Elizabeth Hitch and Sofia Colucci, the executives responsible for promoting the beer today. Miller Lite in March released the accompanying video decrying sexist beer ads of years past, but Miller Lite, at least in its early years, didn’t rely on women in bathing suits to promote its beer. Hitch and Colucci seem ignorant of the genius that preceded them.
Whereas I regard Miller Lite’s advertising under Backer among the best ever, the feminist diatribe produced by Hitch and Colucci easily ranks among the most obnoxious and off-putting commercial messages ever produced. They are fortunate the ad doesn’t appear with the same frequency as Mulvaney’s Bud Light images.
According to Newsweek, Hitch has an MBA in marketing and international business at the Kellogg School of Management, part of Northwestern University.
Reading up on Backer I saw references that McCann Erickson once had Ford Motor Co. as a client. I also learned that after Backer retired, he moved to Virginia where he became president of the Piedmont Foundation, which supports land conservation.
I wonder if Backer might have some issues working on the Ford account today.
Ford last year paid $19.2 million to settle allegations that it lied in its advertising and the company is in the process of destroying fertile farm land in rural Michigan to build an electric battery plant. Ford had wanted to build its plant in Backer’s adopted state of Virginia, but Gov. Glenn Younkin told the company to take its business elsewhere because of a China-based company’s involvement in the project.
I’m not sure if even Backer could make Americans feel good about a company that issued nearly 100 safety recalls in the past 18 months and proudly manufactures its electric iconic Mustang in Mexico.