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I honestly don't understand the weird outrage towards these ad campaigns. People getting angry over "woke" ads just don't understand that not all ads are aimed at them. The drag queen Bud Light endorsement was a short instagram reel and it was aimed at that person's followers, not conservatives or rednecks. It's real main character syndrome energy to get mad because an ad campaign doesn't reflect your own individual or group likes/dislikes/personae.
I don't understand why it's hard to understand. These ads are potentially offensive on several levels.
They offend the core demographic of the brand by selecting a message that is antithetical to the values of the core demographic of the brand.
One level deeper: They selected this message precisely because it offends their core demographic. The only other possibility is that the marketers really have no idea who their core demographic is, but as the Bud Light exec said in the video that was circulating, this was not the case. They want to replace their uncool customers with cool customers.
One level removed: From the POV of someone who doesn't care about either brand, it just seems like an insanely bad idea to market against one's customer base, making it offensive to notions of common sense or of an orderly rational universe.
There is a baked-in dishonestly to several parts of either ad in their concepts of their new targeted demographics. Are women of any biological persuasion really going to be moved to drink lite beer because of these ad campaigns? Is the Miller Lite ad seriously presupposing that sexist ads drove women away from beer as more a likely explanation than sexist ads were created to appeal to the major beer-drinking market: men who like hot women and cold beer? Let alone the claims made about the preponderance of beer-brewing women or the gender of one particular spokesperson.
One almost has to not look at all to not find something offensive to mere common sense.
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Maybe they think it's not as simple as you do?
For example, a moderately more complex story could be "Group A tries to appeal to Group B with an ad that Group B likes because it offends Group C." Is A talking to C? Well, that depends on how you precisify "talking to".
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These aren't "buy our insurance because it's 23.6% cheaper than the competition" kinds of ads. These are lifestyle type of ads. They are promoting certain style and outlook on life and associate it with the brand. If this style is offensive to people who previously associated themselves with the brand, then these people would feel negatively towards the brand from now on. And such kind of action is aimed at everybody, all the time - multi-national brand is not something you advertise in secret. And culture war is not something you join unwittingly - not that BL marketers didn't publish plenty of proclamations suggesting very clearly on whose side they are joining.
Let me give you an extreme example. Suppose some crazy marketer, after taking too much cocaine one night, decided that Nazis - I mean the real ones, the guys prancing around with swastikas and tiki torches - are an under-covered market, and his brand needs to have a campaign aimed at them. And suppose, by a series of freak accidents and misunderstandings, this plan gets approved, set in production and the resulting ad - featuring all a real Nazi loves and seeks in life, presented as a positive lifestyle associated with the brand - is posted on official Instagram channel.
After that happened, and the inevitable aftermath - do you think your explanation that people just don't understand that not all ads are aimed at them is going to play very well or convince somebody that it doesn't mean anything that they disliked the ad?
P.S. For the "trigger warning" part of the audience, hopefully minor, but ever vocal, explicit disclaimer - no, I am not comparing anybody to Nazis. Except for, you know, the actual Nazis.
And that the product is bagels. Or menorahs.
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That's part of the bargain to be a lifestyle brand. If you want people to value your product not just for its practical utility but for what that product says about the people who consume it, then they're going to be as insulted by the unfavorable brand implications as they are flattered by the favorable. It doesn't matter that the ad wasn't "aimed" at them. Lifestyle brand advertising works by influencing what other people think of the product's customers, not just the customers themselves. The whole reason you choose to become a customer of a lifestyle brand is because of what you expect it will make other people think of you.
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