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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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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.