Bud Light Continues Post-Mulvaney Marketing Blitz With ‘Relatable’ NFL Push

Bud Light is digging deeper into grassroots American culture to reconnect with beer drinkers following its sales-losing battle in the culture wars. 

The Anheuser-Busch InBev brand on Thursday kicked off this year’s installment of its long-running sponsorship of the National Football League with an ad featuring football fans carrying out game-day traditions. 

An extension of Bud Light’s “Easy to Enjoy” campaign, the “Easy to Sunday” ad includes vignettes of fans dancing at tailgate parties, celebrating in sports bars and donning team gear in parking lots. The nationwide TV commercial will be supported by local marketing campaigns designed to connect with fans of the 27 teams Bud Light now sponsors, up from 26 in the previous NFL season. 

The ad encapsulates Bud Light’s strategy to recover from a March promotion with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney that sparked a backlash and boycott of the brand: stick to beer, emphasize the “Easy to Enjoy” theme, and avoid anything that could be perceived as political. 

The brand’s summer ad campaign showcased seasonal mishaps, such as burning bare feet on hot asphalt and falling out of a hammock. Its NFL campaign features sports rituals that vary from team to team and state to state, and that aren’t associated with political identities or social causes. Only a smattering of dialogue is caught on the mic.

It is a shift in tone from the Super Bowl ads Bud Light rolled out at the end of last year’s NFL season, which evoked an air of sophistication with actors and celebrities, as well as last year’s NFL season launch commercial, which was reminiscent of a sitcom.  

“For me, it’s about relatability…. These are real people doing real things that they do every Sunday with their friends and family, and we were able to capture that authenticity,” Todd Allen, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, said in an interview.

Allen, previously vice president of global marketing for the Budweiser brand, took on the role with Bud Light in April from Alissa Heinerscheid, who oversaw the Mulvaney partnership. She subsequently went on leave. 

The Mulvaney saga continues to batter Bud Light sales. In May, it lost the title as the U.S.’s top-selling beer to Constellation Brands ’ Modelo Especial. 

U.S. retail-store dollar sales of Bud Light fell 26.5% in the week through Aug. 5 and 27.3% in the week ended Aug. 12 from their respective year-earlier periods, according to an analysis of NIQ data by Bump Williams Consulting.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer, earlier this month said its U.S. sales, profit and market share fell sharply in its second quarter. But Bud Light’s parent company conveyed optimism to shareholders regarding the brand, noting a survey it commissioned of U.S. consumers found the beer is still viewed favorably. 

The company tripled its marketing investment in Bud Light over the summer, and will keep its “foot on the gas throughout the entire football season,” Allen said, adding the beer remains the top-selling beer brand in the U.S. year-to-date.

“We’ve got stable performance with positive momentum in states that represent about 58% of our mix, so we’re starting to see some improvement,” he said.

Commercial partners are still taking the brand’s sponsorship dollars. 

Last week, the Washington Commanders announced a multiyear deal with Anheuser-Busch to name Bud Light its official beer sponsor, more than a year after the two parted ways following controversies at the NFL team. Bud Light as part of the sponsorship will host live activities on game days, including a summer concert series, and debut new signs including video screens, concourse displays and wall banners throughout FedExField.  

Bud Light this year will again produce special beer cans featuring logos of each of its sponsored NFL teams. 

“We are going to show up everywhere that NFL fans are this season,” Allen said. “We never hesitated to lean into the momentum that we have with our summer campaign to go all in on football.”

Write to Katie Deighton at [email protected]