Anheuser-Busch InBev, Ladies' Night Volleyball
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 Bud Light Amateur Beach Challenge ladies volleyball.
With loud rock music, the commercial shows some tough volleyball spiking women, and the announcer says, "They're lean, they're mean..." and then one in absurd drag falls to the ground, saying in falsetto voice, "They're killing us."
As another of the tough women spikes a ball onto the side of the drag team, one gets it right in the groin.
The end shot has four women leaning over the fallen one, asking, "What's wrong with her?"
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 has been so successful it ran for many years and carried variations that 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, 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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