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Anheuser-Busch did the unexpected. Following weeks of consumer backlash and conservative media ire, Bud Light placed Marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid on leave along with her boss, Daniel Blake, over a brand partnership with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney. The idea behind the partnership was to position Bud Light as a friendly brand for a younger generation of drinkers for which the issue of transgender acceptance has emerged as the new litmus test of progressive politics. In the end, Heinerscheid was left with three weeks of horrible press and billions of dollars in stock market losses with no visible army of new Gen Z Bud Light enthusiasts to show for it. Did conservatives just put one on the scoreboard for cancel culture?
The drama began on April 1 when Dylan Mulvaney took a sip of Bud Light on Instagram for the amusement of 10.8 million followers. Next thing you know, Kid Rock is blowing away Bud Light cans on YouTube with an MP5 submachine gun and right-wing media is doing wall-to-wall segments about Bud Light going woke. As of today, conservatives have been claiming a rare victory after news broke that Bud Light placed Heinerscheid and Blake on leave. They aren't likely to be coming back.
Cancel culture has been tricky for the Right to navigate since it became a mainstream catch-all concept for social censure, politicized firings, and speaker cancellations on college campuses. Figuring out its origins was easy. Figuring out how to end it has exposed rifts in the Right's commitment to the free speech and "letting the market decide." Look to the libertarians and the way forward is to disarm, vote with your wallet, and be done with the pearl clutching over any affront to values. The exhausted conservatives are ready to get even or build alternatives. A prime example of the latter was the Daily Wire's launch of a competitor to Harry's Razors after the company pulled ads from Daily Wire podcasts over complaints on Twitter.
One libertarian critic of conservative shut down tactics, Brad Polumbo, expressed concern that the Bud Light resolution was just cancel culture in reverse: "The more I read about this, the more it genuinely seems like a right-wing outrage mob targeted an employee and jeopardized her career over one specific, relatively minor in the grand scheme of life, thing they found offensive. That's... cancel culture?"
But what happened in the end with Heinerscheid and Bud Light was not cancel culture. If it was, that would mean consumers have only one option when a mega brand makes the calculated choice to alienate one audience's set of cultural values in favor of another: to cheer.
Bud Light has a real problem—one that the former marketing VP correctly identified. It is seen as the beer of blue-collar white men in their 40s stopping by the 7-Eleven to load up on 12-packs before passing out on the couch at home. That's not an entirely accurate impression, as Bud Light's core demo is a bit younger, but next-generation drinkers are not rushing to store shelves for light beer. Alissa Heinerscheid felt she had a mandate to change that. "I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light," she said on a podcast last month. "It was, this brand is in decline, it's been in decline for a very long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light."
Heinerscheid's answer to that problem was a somewhat charming 2023 Super Bowl ad featuring a millennial couple dancing in their living room with Bud Lights, as well as influencer outreach that culminated in the lightning-rod choice of a particularly eccentric transgender social media personality.
A marketing play by an iconic beer should work, or at least do no harm. All available evidence shows that Heinerscheid and Blake failed on both counts. Any serious company operating on traditional metrics of enhanced profits and strengthened brand loyalty would immediately fire anyone responsible for a $4 billion mistake and three weeks of unwanted negative attention. Perhaps we've gotten used to woke corporations taking it on the chin financially for social media applause, but Anheuser-Busch seems to have acted in an old-school way with a marketing lead who failed at marketing.
In a sense, all instances of holding people to account feel somewhat like cancellation. The line is fuzzy. But cancel culture is uniquely detached from institutional self-interest and questions about who is accountable to whom. It's companies dumping employees for ugly high-school-age social media posts that could have been made by anyone in the company. It's national news outlets putting the spotlight on unsuspecting high school students for ill-advised language, and punishing wrongthink by professors on college campuses where the purpose of the institution is supposedly to widen perspectives. These are the things of cancel culture. It's about social stricture, reshaping institutions to the will of disinterested minorities, and control.
The presence of angry people on Twitter doesn't mean Anheuser-Busch caved to a mob. Bud Light was facing nervous beer wholesale distributors from coast to coast, a 17 percent hit in the stock market, and all for an influencer outreach strategy that senior management say they knew nothing about. Anheuser-Busch InBev's stock will be fine a year from now, but the company learned that certain individuals in charge of an expensive flagship product didn't respect or appreciate the audience they already had. It is not cancel culture to course correct.
So let's not buy into the temptation to play "fair and balanced" on policing cancel culture in the case of a multinational company that protected its own market interests. In the case of Bud Light, it looks like Anheuser-Busch assessed the wisdom of a marketing strategy, and were not impressed.
Stephen Kent is a libertarian commentator, author of How The Force Can Fix The World, and advice writer on Substack at This Is The Way.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
