Anheuser-Busch InBev, Ladies Night - Don Rickles
Three young guys at a club chat about their friend (comedian Don Rickles). "He thinks he can meet that girl," says one.
Shoving a guy out of the way to get into position at the bar, Rickles approaches the woman from behind and his eyes bulge as he anticipates meeting this full-bodied gal. His friends lean forward to watch from afar.
"Hi cupcake," he says to her. "What do you say I buy you a Bud Light and you appreciate it?"
She turns and it's one of the "ladies," with a mustache and hairy chest, from the ongoing Bud Light campaign. Rickles' face turns to horror and the watching friends slam backwards in the couch as they see this.
In closing, Rickles is now painfully dancing with the woman he's just picked up. His friends mockingly say, "Nicely done...fun to watch."
This Bud ad is more of a parody of transgendered persons than others in the campaign, which are more innocent and don't have people wincing at their presence.
Anheuser-Busch, along with Miller Brewing Co., have the distinction of being among the few companies that advertise in gay media and also have a mainstream media commercial with a gay theme.
Beer companies are well represented in the Commercial Closet Ad Library, largely due to an effort in the mid-1990s to pull away from the industry's longtime sexist advertising themes that objectified women. Such commercials were summed up by the Swedish Bikini Team ads from Stroh Brewing Co. for Old Milwaukee. Looking for new material to mine, brewers began extensively playing with gay and transgender themes in their advertising. However, because beer drinkers are stereotypically macho, the tone of many of the ads were more often negative.
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