Miller Lite advised people to “appreciate the humor” in the campaign after receiving backlash for an ad that portrayed women as the “founding mothers” of beer.
The beer brand’s ad, which was originally published in March but has recently resurfaced online, slams the industry’s past marketing campaigns revolving around objectifying bikini-clad models and instead offers to donate fertilizer so that female brewers can grow hops, the flowers used as a bittering and stability agent in beer. Advertising criticism follows weeks of controversy over Bud Light’s decision to offer a personalized beer can to transgender social media celebrity Dylan Mulvaney.
“Here’s a tidbit: women were pioneers in the beer-making industry. Women have always been the ones responsible for brewing, from ancient Mesopotamia through the Middle Ages and colonial America. How did the business pay tribute to the women who created beer a century or more later? To celebrate Women’s History Month, the company “put us in bikinis,” as female comedian Ilana Glazer phrased it in the ad. “Wild. Look at this s–t. Miller Lite believes it is high time for the beer industry to make amends to women; therefore, they are embarking on a quest to clean up the industry as a whole, not just their own. Miller Lite has been searching the web and buying up all of this sexism in order to use it to their advantage when marketing to female brewers.
The advertising and the brand’s references to social justice and intersectionality sparked outrage among social media users. However, in a statement sent this week to several media sites, Molson Coors—the Canadian-American multinational business that controls the Miller Lite brand—insisted that beer aficionados should not take the advertising seriously.
A spokeswoman for the company explained that the video’s message was “women shouldn’t be forced to mud wrestle in order to sell beer” and that it also featured worm poop. Neither of these points should raise any sort of eyebrow; therefore, we’re hoping beer drinkers will find this March video to be a source of laughs (and craziness).
Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, has reportedly suffered a sales slump after the brand teamed with Mulvaney, a male who claims to be a woman, and tracked his supposed gender transition on social media, prompting the current outrage over the campaign. Executives at Anheuser-Busch have hired veteran Republican lobbyists and issued nebulous apologies to conservatives who once drank their beer in an effort to win them back as customers.
Attempts to distance themselves from Mulvaney have drawn fire from the other side of the political spectrum, with members of the LGBTQ community voicing their displeasure and demanding that Anheuser-Busch state its support for the ideology or face a second boycott.
Bud Light’s VP of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, who handled the Mulvaney campaign, resigned after a video of her condemning the “fratty” representation of the brand went viral. Miller Lite’s senior marketing director, Elizabeth Hitch, also seems to have played a significant role in the production of the commercial.
Miller Lite “recognized that without women, there would be no beer,” she remarked in a news statement. To celebrate this, we decided to do something that would help the future of both women and beer: clean up the sexism that permeates the beer advertising industry as a whole, not just our own.