Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

If anything, I'll accept a free beer from those Aggies (as long as it's one of their faux craft brands, there's no way I'm gonna drink a Bud Light under any circumstances, naturally).

Hear me out here:
Maybe, just maybe, if you were THAT anti-Bud Light then you weren't their target market to begin with.

Yeah, I guess I'll just never understand the stupid meathead douchebag culture.

But it's a fair point that Budweiser probably should have.  Over the decades, through numerous multifaceted marketing campaigns, they've specifically cultivated a relationship with the "Average Joe" of "Middle America."  They've created campaigns celebrating the geography of the heartland, the mainstream blue collar workers, and even hate-ads specifically targeted at the "elitists" who would dare to drink "dark, hand-crafted" beers.

They've definitely targeted a specific demo over the decades.

Agree with all of this. Bud Light was America's most popular beer for decades. During those decades they had a long string of silly and sometimes "fratty" ads such as:

• Farting horses
• Frogs
• Lizards
• Wassssup
• Etc

So this new marketing employee looks at this situation and apparently says:
"The brand I work for has the most successful marketing of any of the cheap, mass market light beers so naturally what I should do is to totally upend the marketing strategy, that makes sense."

Again, this relates to knowing your customer.  If you employ gay friendly ads for yogurt, it won't do a thing bad, but if you did it for say men's work boots, it probably would.

Some products are more geared to men who want to think of themselves as virile and are probably conservative, don't do gay ads for them.  I would stay away from any ads that are "socially relevant" for just about any product.  Quite a few men are basically anti-gay, covertly or openly, they don't want anything to do with it. 

Don't try and sell Camaros or F150s using two guys who are more than buds.

You seem to not know, and maybe the not knowing is the point.

Bud Light has been employing gay friendly ads for DECADES. It had some decidedly more militant ones at points. If there really is a case that many men are simply too proud or insecure to drink a beer associated with gay folks, then this was inevitable. The only thing that changed was these folks being made aware of something. 

Shit, this particular "gay ad" was not targeted at this cadre of men, nor would they have ever seen it, but for the need for content. I guess the lesson is that in a past era, a company like Bud Light could quietly chug along with its socially relevant ads, and for some reason, folks didn't get offended in that same way. And now, for reasons probably beyond a company's control, it cannot. 

Well, then they were practicing some accidental inclusion.

Not really.  Long string of targeted ads for Middle America/heartland/traditional values types of people, plus years worth of targeted ads against "elitist craft beer snobbery."  Both campaigns are firmly entrenched in cultivating average joe, middle america, redneck types.

But the bolded isn't the case. Their marketing strategy has involved Pride Month and Gay Friendly ads for a looooonnnngggg time.

This company literally made a graphic celebrating the gay marriage Supreme Court decision within a day of it coming down. And a year later ran an ad where two shrill Hollywood actors demanded you respect gay marriage.

What's fascinating is that apparently some people just had no idea this happened.

I don't care to go searching for a link right now but the employee responsible talked in interviews about moving away from the "fratty" campaigns. She literally was trying to completely upend the marketing strategy of the most successful light beer marketer in America. 

It wasn't just another thing added on, there was an underlying effort to change the culture. 

It's possible this was a minor thing and somehow caught fire in SM, I dunno.  I would have vetoed it entirely were I in position to do so.

Stick with frogs or lamps.

You would've upended that longtime marketing strategy. Would've been an interesting choice. 

This is precisely how, and WHY, targeted advertising works.

You said it yourself earlier, somehow THIS one slipped through and made an impression.  Most of them never did.

Why? Why did this one create the Perfect Storm?  Couldn't tell you.  I'm not in touch with douchebag bigotry.

The impression part fascinates me, only because some of the other ads were clearly more looking to be divisive. But those are sort of whitewashed over. 

That's why I've now become interested in why THIS one caught fire.  

Only reason I can think is that this didn't involve something "gay", it involved "trans". I was talking to a very good friend last weekend and his wife was saying that they were thinking of sending their kids to private school or home-schooling because the schools are telling little boys they might be girls and vice versa. Which... As a parent of 3 in a MUCH more liberal state than where they live (NC), I've heard none of this. But it's something that she finds so terrifying that she's talking about home-schooling to avoid it. 

It's easy to lump all of LGBTQ+ into one group. But although most of the country has learned that LGB isn't the big scary bogeyman that they thought it was 20 years ago, "T" still very much is. So bigotry is still "safe" when it comes to that one.