Fake Ad Bud Light 'Should Have Made' Goes Viral

One Twitter user has reworked a 2017 Bud Light ad to mock the company as the beer brand continues to face backlash and boycotts.

Bud Light came under fire in April after it partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The brand sent her personalized cans of beers with her face on it to commemorate the 365 days since she began her gender-affirming transition.

Bud Light has since faced ongoing condemnation and a national boycott, which has seen the beer brand plummet out of the Top 10 most popular beers in the U.S.

At the beginning of the controversy, Bud Light remained mostly quiet on social media, while its parent company Anheuser-Busch made official statements on behalf of the beer. U.S. CEO Brendan Whitworth said in a Friday, June 30 statement: "As we move forward, we will focus on what we do best—brewing great beer for everyone and earning our place in moments that matter to our consumers."

Anheuser-Busch's global CEO, Michel Doukeris, had said in May that the decline in Bud Light sales represented only about 1 percent of the company's global sales volume.

Then, earlier this month, Bud Light shared a 10-second video on its social media, which shows a woman calmly eating from a large watermelon while sitting at a picnic table. As she's eating, high winds throw paper plates and Bud Light cans all over the grounds of a park. Others run around her to clear the mess, the woman only looking up briefly before scooping up more watermelon. "It's fine, this is fine," reads the Twitter caption.

The video faced mockery online. Now Twitter user @stevenvoiceover has made a parody that has been viewed more than 75,000 times, saying "the Bud Light Advert They Should Have Made, Dilly Dilly."

It reworked a 2017 Bud Light advert that shows a king and queen at a royal banquet accepting gifts from members in the court, but every one is a Bud Light. Every time a present is handed over, the court raises a bottle of beer and says "Dilly Dilly." But the final gift is the incorrect beer, and the person is sent to the "pit of misery" as punishment.

In this parody video, this person is Alissa Heinerscheid, the erstwhile vice president of marketing for Bud Light. She has been edited into the video, handing over one of the cans, but this has Mulvaney's face on it.

Heinerscheid was said by the company to have taken a leave of absence in April following the backlash. However, text messages purportedly from a source within the company, obtained by right-wing news and opinion website The Daily Caller, appear to show that Heinerscheid had been let go. Newsweek has not verified this.

In the parody video, Heinerscheid speaks to the king with audio used from an interview she gave about broadening Bud Light's target demographic.

"So I had this super clear mandate," Heinerscheid said during a March interview on the Make Yourself at Home podcast. "It's like, we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. And my... what I brought to that was a belief in, OK, what does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that's truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different and appeals to women and to men."

The video added: "Representation is sort of the heart of evolution. You've got to see people who reflect you in the work. And we had this hangover—I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach."

In the parody video, the king orders Heinerscheid to be sent to the "pit of misery."

Reactions to the edited mock ad were mostly in favor of its humor. "This meme is Epic," replied one person, while another added: "Well done Steven. Wow."