First Drop: With Buds Like These…

Forget a single personalized Bud Light can thirstily sent to a transgender influencer. Anheuser-Busch InBev executives have shown their true colors this spring, and they aren’t rainbows – they’re just a cowardly yellow.

And no amount of Pride cans will undo the dangerous caving to bigotry that was shown by A-B leadership in their betrayal of the LGBTQ community in recent months, one that came about because they ran scared from boycott bullies symbolized by minor league gun-wielders like Kid Rock and Travis Tritt, rather than stand up to these and other social media flamethrowers who are all too happy to trade lives for likes.

Faced with a social-media amplified boycott of their products that has led to share loss and threats – all following a playbook of political outrage that has little to do with that single message and personalized can shared with trans entertainer Dylan Mulvaney – Brendan Whitworth (U.S. CEO of A-B) and Michael Doukeris (CEO, A-B InBev) have both shown little backbone.

Smarter executives might have recognized the boycott as what it is – an outgrowth of the venomous fertilizer sprayed by a group of anti-trans conservative activists to devolve an America that believes, rightly and by a wide majority, in protecting trans people from discrimination.

Braver leaders would have pushed back.

Here’s the right thing to do, regardless of the media environment: rather than lean into not wanting to be “divisive,” draw the line at hate. Acknowledge that you’re absolutely frightened by threats against your drivers and your company; wonder if you maybe didn’t pick the right spokesperson as an ally (Mulvaney’s own flamboyant, stage-entertainer driven style is by no means typical of many trans people, it should be noted), but, please stand up for the LQBTQ people you’ve tried to court, because those are the ones who suffer the most at the hands of a years-long political movement driven by bigotry and hatred against trans rights, and because even if you’ve decided they aren’t your intended core customer, it would be a show of moral decency toward a threatened group.

Instead, they put Bud Light’s marketing chief, Alissa Heinerscheid, and her boss, Daniel Blake, on leave. Whitworth backed away from the issue by saying A-B “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.” Doukeris blamed the social media environment, telling investors that Mulvaney’s post was “not an advertisement” while lamenting that “The reality is no longer what the fact is,” but is more about the comments the fact generates.

Here’s the reality, gentlemen: Since losing the battle over same-sex marriage, and particularly over the past five years, the religious right has thrown itself into battle against transgender rights as an increasingly vituperative rallying point to gather support and maintain its relevance in the national conversation. The number of anti-trans bills and executive actions introduced in states has grown from about under 20 in 2019 to more than 500 last year, with more than 11 states enacting laws limiting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, not to mention restrictions on books and lesson plans in schools and threats against drag performers. It’s a campaign that, starting with the wedge issue of whether transgender youth should be allowed to participate in girls’ sports, has evolved into templated letters and bills that are supplied by a variety of conservative groups that have pushed their agenda under the guise of “parental rights” or “defense of women.”

What’s so gross about this movement is that it’s political bullying of the worst kind, picking on the vulnerable to achieve political power.

“We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” Terry Schilling, the head of social conservative advocacy group American Principles Project, told the New York Times. “And we threw everything at the wall.”

That transgender kids are 7.6 times more likely to commit suicide that their peers is a fact that has been hammered into the mind of any parent whose child has come to them with the feeling that they aren’t who they are simply by what’s represented by their genitalia. In places like Texas, under its governor’s anti-trans fiat, here’s the grim calculus: If you support your trans kids, you risk getting handed a prison sentence. If you don’t, you risk handing your kids a death sentence.

Here’s how things have changed:In 2019, two major campaigns dealing with trans visibility hit the market, with little to no reaction from those same forces who now have both Bud and Target, which pulled Pride apparel after threats against employees, on the retreat.

The 2019 campaigns weren’t small, by the way: One was the Mastercard True Name campaign, in which the credit card company let cardholders with participating banks allow a chosen name to appear on the front of a credit or debit card without requiring a legal name change. It’s a move that removed danger and embarrassment for thousands of trans Mastercard customers in the U.S. The other was “First Shave, the story of Samson” – a short video in which a young trans man, Samson Bonkeabantu Brown, was shown shaving for the first time, under the guidance of his father. It went viral as part of Gillette’s #MyBestSelf campaign.

I reached out to Lucas Crigler, the ad exec – and trans man – behind True Name about the differences between 2019 and 2023 with regard to marketing campaigns based on trans outreach.

A veteran ad man, Crigler allowed that Mulvaney might not have been the right partner for Bud Light, that the company may have misjudged both its audience and the timing with the outreach. But he also lamented that the poor timing was nothing compared to the ginned-up outrage.

“This is not the first ad campaign in all of history to flop,” Crigler told me, “Yet the backlash is wildly disproportionate to the blunder. It’s abhorrent, the amount of violence that’s been threatened against not only Ms. Mulvaney, but also the A-B execs. What is this world coming to? It’s heartbreaking and terrifying, really.” If he’d pitched True Name in 2023, Crigler said, “I absolutely do believe it would not have been as easy to sell. There would have been more fears the MC execs would have had to work through. And I don’t think our campaign would have been as successful, no. We were lucky. Good prevailed, while evil seems to be running rampant these days. With none other than drag queen artists being the scapegoats and kids being the Trojan horses.”

I also reached out to Samson Bonkeabantu Brown, the young trans man featured in the First Shave commercial in 2019 about whether he thought things had changed.

“There probably was blowback on the First Shave ad, but I thankfully wasn’t privy to much of it,” he said. “Between the work that the PR, marketing and social media teams at P&G and Grey Advertising Canada did to delete comments and my own performance schedule at that time – 2 theatre shows back to back that I wrote and performed in – I was pretty shielded from negative responses.”

I asked him if he felt like he would have done the same ad today.

“I would have still done the ad today, in spite of the threat of controversy,” he said. “It’s possible that the results would have been the same for Gillette, but it’s hard to say. It may seem naive to say, but I wholeheartedly trust that I would still be protected from the vitriol due to the protections that are in place in my life.”

I didn’t ask him whether he felt he could put that trust in a company like Anheuser Busch. Of course it’s a different product, and he’s an artist, not an ad man. But at the same time, I have to worry – with cowardly friends like Bud, who needs enemies?