Bud Light and the Brand Fail Outrage Cycle
On Monday, someone on Reddit posted a photo of a Bud Light bottle bearing the slogan, “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night.” The next day, the internet’s very swift, very public flogging cycle began.
First the story was on BuzzFeed, then it was on Gawker, then Slate, and soon all over social media.
It should go without saying that a beer brand shouldn’t suggest people relinquish the right to say “no” to requests made of them when they are drinking. They should especially not do this at the moment of a national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses and the ancillary role alcohol plays in the commission of these atrocities.
We all know this, and it would be intellectually dishonest to suggest that the person who wrote the slogan had any idea that his or her ham-handed attempt at evoking spontaneity could be construed as an endorsement of sexual violence. The man or woman who dreamed up the line is probably not an actively bad person, but at least in this instance, they were almost incomprehensibly careless and insensitive.
Still, at a time when brands are constantly interrupting our daily activities to persuade us that they are trustworthy and fun in the same way people are, there is something immensely gratifying in catching them red-handed, putting forth a message so hopelessly out of touch with what actual humans are thinking that all involved have no choice but to acknowledge “Bud Light” is not a genuine idea about adventure or excitement but an artifice created to enrich the shareholders of a giant company through the sale of a product that by all accounts is not very good.
This is to say that the outrage that has erupted is probably less about our abhorrence for rape culture (which, duh, is very bad) and more about an expression of humanity akin to when the people in the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence had a giant party where they burned a bunch of robots.
As was the case when DiGiorno made a dopey interjection or the time the Houston Rockets made a “controversial” emoji joke about horses, media companies profited from our Bud Light outrage by packaging it into news stories beside ads, often sold to the very same brands that the media company has at some point made fun of. Such is the circle of life.
And yet, as mechanical as the Brand Failure Outrage Cycle has come to feel, it can always be traced back to the work of individual human beings. In this case, according to an email sent to me by a Bud Light spokesperson, the offensive line was one of 140 such taglines crafted by copywriters at the brand’s advertising agency, BBDO. In addition to all of the people who presumably approved it at BBDO, the line was OK’d through internal reviews at Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch (itself a subsidiary of AB InBev) and later by the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. “This was a mistake that shouldn’t have happened,” the spokesperson told me. “Both women and men reviewed the scrolls internally, and we just missed it. You don’t have to be female to recognize the issues with this scroll; it just shouldn’t have run.”
This all poses the following question: How the hell did not a single one of these people raise a concern over putting an obviously rapey slogan on a bunch of beer bottles? The answer, it seems, is that they made some very human mistakes.
Sean Jecko, a freelance brand strategist who has worked with the likes of Virgin Atlantic, Home Depot, and Patron, attributed the oversight to people at BBDO and Bud Light “falling in love with the campaign.”
By this, he means that over the course of countless hours spent brainstorming ideas to perfectly fit the adventurous nature of the campaign, the people involved lost sight of how one of 140 slogans they churned out might be perceived outside the context of #UpForWhatever. Instead, he suggested, agencies, “Need to slow down and be a little more considerate about the messages that we’re putting out.”
In some sense, these people are caught between a rock and a hard place. Jim Tobin, president of the Ignite Social Media agency, explained to me that part of what makes advertising professionals effective is their ability to immerse themselves in a brand concept and tweak it a thousand different ways until they have hit just the right note — in the vacuum-like vortex of the campaign, of course.
To prevent his agency from falling prey to the sort of myopia that perhaps caused Bud Light to put such an abjectly shitty slogan on their bottles, Tobin has employees double-check the copy written by people who work on other brands, allowing them to offer the perspective of someone who hasn’t spent the past six months thinking of a million ways to communicate the same idea.
Not everyone in advertising has this luxury. Though Ignite Social Media is independently owned, the vast majority of ad agencies are themselves mostly cogs in the machinery of four or five giant holding companies that essentially own the entire marketing, advertising and public relations industries. As Jecko points out, these companies have come under increasing pressure to churn out content as fast as possible for their clients, and as a result, many of the quality control checks that once prevented these sorts of brand screwups have been thrown out the window. “I think we’ve gotten to the point now where things are happening so rapidly that we don’t have time to think anymore — we just react,” Jecko said.
And so where does that leave us and our outrage? Bud Light has of course apologized profusely and promised to remove the bottles from stores. Someone from BBDO and/or Bud Light will, at the very least, be getting yelled at. Are we now being too hard on the poor saps who were just trying to do their jobs against tight deadlines and unreasonable demands?
Randy Cohen, who used to write The Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine, says we’ve played this just right by subjecting Bud Light to “relentless mockery and scorn,” presuming that all of us forget about this a week from now, as we almost certainly will.
Bud Light was, after all, quick to apologize and remove the label.
“They should have to hide their faces and not come out to parties for about a week — and then life goes on,” he told me over the phone. “We should all feel pretty good, we mockerers (sic) and scorners.”
And of course, not a single person I spoke to thought Bud Light would lose so much as a penny in sales from the whole ordeal.
“In a way, Bud Light did just what they should do. They said, ‘Holy crap, what have we done? We were completely wrong,’” Cohen said. Still, he joked, “If people don’t stop buying Bud Light for the taste, why would they stop buying it for this?”
And therein lies the great irony of all of this. The great corporate machines of Omnicom Group, the American company that owns BBDO and scores of other agencies, and Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Belgian company that owns Bud Light and more than 200 other beer brands, will march on unabated.
Though our anger is directed at the faceless entity of Bud Light, the only one who will truly pay a price for its insensitive slogan is whichever employee the company’s management chooses to make an example of.
