Miller Lite Boycott Calls Grow Over Beer Commercial: 'Did Nobody Learn'

Social-media users are now calling for a boycott of Miller Lite over what they describe as a "woke" advert. It follows a backlash against Bud Light over a partnership with a transgender influencer.

The commercial at the center of the outrage discusses the historical role that women played in beer brewing. It appears as an apology from Miller for some of its prior advertising campaigns, which the company itself described as "outdated" and "sexist."

Miller is just the latest company to be targeted for apparent "woke" marketing. Experts have said such campaigns provide an opportunity for brands to appeal to consumers in new markets. However, critics have accused companies of alienating their traditional customer base.

"Women were among the very first to brew beer, ever," Ilana Glazer, a comedian who has starred in films The Night Before and Rough Night, says in the advert, while walking through a brewery. "From Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages to colonial America, women were the ones doing the brewing."

She adds: "Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer? They put us in bikinis."

Glazer then walks through a room covered in previous Miller Lite advertising materials featuring scantily clad women in sexual poses with their faces blurred. She drops a picture in a garbage can. "It's time beer made it up to women," Glazer says.

The comedian then goes on to explain that the company would be buying back its old marketing material. Miller will turn it into compost to make fertilizer so female farmers can produce over 1,000 pounds of hops. This would then be given to 200 female brewers to make 330,000 beers.

It is unclear why influential conservatives on social media are picking up on the advert now, when it was first released nearly a month before the controversy over Bud Light's partnership with Mulvaney began. Miller Lite's advertising campaign was announced on March 7, while Dylan Mulvaney first posted about receiving a commemorative can from Bud Light on April 1, and was timed for Women's History Month.

"Miller Lite saw the Bud Light disaster and decided they needed their own woke beer ad," wrote Clay Travis, a radio host, on Monday, in a tweet that, as of 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday, had been viewed 3.2 million times. "These companies are broken & have no idea who actually consumes their products."

"Did NOBODY learn from Bud Light's COSTLY mistake?" Graham Allen, host of the Dear America podcast, tweeted the same day. The post has since been viewed 4.4 million times. "Miller Lite just dropped this WOKE advertisement!!!"

"Miller Lite apparently wants the Bud Light boycott treatment too. Well they can have it," Rogan O'Handley, a self-described political influencer, wrote. "Newsflash: After a hard day's work, working class beer drinkers don't want to be lectured like they're in a Gender Studies class."

Meanwhile, Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, tweeted: "Miller Lite feminist ad blurs the faces of women in bikinis, destroys their ads, makes it into fertilizer, for being offensive. This kind of ugly (literally and figuratively, for ugly women) feminism much more harmful than anything Dylan Mulvaney did. Hopefully leads to boycott."

However, some users disagreed with the notion of the ad being "woke." Mike Kogan tweeted that it was "not woke nor offensive" but "based on history and is actually funny."

Trina Wood wrote: "Women are half the population, why wouldn't any company want to 'intice' more of us to try their product?"

Newsweek approached Molson Coors, Miller Lite's parent company, via email for comment on Tuesday.

In a press release, Miller Lite sad that "many in the beer industry (Miller Lite included) alienated the very people who helped create it" by "dividing women as consumers, objectifying them in their ads."

Elizabeth Hitch, senior director of marketing for the beer brand, said at the time: "We wanted to acknowledge the missteps in representation of women in beer advertising by cleaning up not just our s***, but the whole industry's s***."

Bud Light has faced an ongoing backlash since its promotional work with Mulvaney, who rose to prominence by documenting her first year of transition to more than 10 million TikTok followers. After calls for a boycott were raised, conservatives have refused to drink the beer, while other licensed venues have withdrawn the beer from sale.

The beer brand has since seen a rapid decline in sales in the U.S.—with much of that custom being picked up by competitors, including Miller Lite—and placed two of its top marketing executives on leave.

At the start of May, Anheuser-Busch's global CEO, Michel Doukeris, said it was placing "significant" investment behind Bud Light after a decline in sales representing around 1 percent of the brewery's global volumes.