A preview of Budweiser’s coming marketing strategy is missing a few hooves.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Bud’s parent company AB InBev will not feature the brand’s signature Clydesdale horses in upcoming holiday advertising, instead opting for a hipper pitch to consumers. Young adults, who are guzzling the diesel less and less, are responsible for the shift.
The company has decided that persuading 21- to 27-year-olds to grab a Bud is the best chance to stop the free-fall. After years of developing advertising and marketing that appeals to all ages, AB InBev plans to concentrate future Budweiser promotions exclusively on that age bracket. That means it will not trot out the traditional Budweiser Clydesdales for this year’s holiday advertising. It means February’s Super Bowl ads will feature something more current than last year’s Fleetwood Mac. It means less baseball and more raves with DJ group Cash Cash.
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Since 1987, the company has showcased the brand during the holidays with a commercial of its famous Clydesdales, powerful, white-legged horses pulling a red Budweiser carriage through the snow. Instead, this season Budweiser will air spots featuring people in their 20s looking directly into the camera and calling out friends’ names as a narrator asks “If you could grab a Bud with any of your friends these holidays, who would it be?”
I’d grab one with a Clydesdale, dammit.
Budweiser will reportedly also turn to more marketing featuring Jay Z, who has appeared in previous ad spots for the beverage, and go where the young kids go — sponsoring food festivals, for instance, since half of 21 to 27 year olds describe themselves as foodies, which isn’t pretentious in the least. (“Yes, waiter, I’ll have the wheatgrass-fed Matsusaka beef burger with Gruyere and the jicama fries.”) A question to AB InBev about whether or not the Clydesdales would still appear in upcoming Super Bowl advertising was unanswered at the time of publication.
The changes have been prompted by a data cocktail decades in the making: lighter beer offerings like Bud Light and Coors Light have bitten into (gulped?) Budweiser’s marketshare for years, and more recent numbers show that young people’s love of craft beer is piling on. Budweiser is no longer the kindsorta “American” staple brew it once was, and it needs a future.
The hope rests with a group of people that prefers more Lime-a-Ritas and fewer Buds. (“This Lime-a-Rita’s for you” is problematically polysyllabic and offensive.) Perhaps a Harry Caray-approved tall, cool Budweiser is the only energy drink that can propel such a Sisyphean task.
