Anheuser-Busch InBev, Ladies Night II
In this follow up to the widely-liked Ladies Night, the guys have dressed up again for a reason. This time, it's to compete in the Ladies Night Finals of pool.
Still in bad dresses and wigs with their mustaches, they play against each other as the tune "The boys are back in town" plays in the background. A woman observing them says, "These guys are good."
Taking offense, one of the gang in a leopard-print blouse asks in a falsetto, "Who you calling guys?"
Surrounded by the "gals," the bartender then announces, "You're in the finals...ma'am."
This Budweiser ad isn't meant to parody transgendered persons or gays. Rather, it plays on the Mrs. Doubtfire/Tootsie joke of obvious men dressing as women out of need--it's a joke older than television. The campaign was so successful it ran for many years and a variation included comedian Don Rickles mistakenly picking one of them up. One variation that was shot but never aired included a Los Angeles drag queen.
Anheuser-Busch, along with Miller Brewing Co., have the distinction of being among the few companies that advertises 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 longterm 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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