Tomorrow the Bud Light please-take-us-back campaign continues with a lighthearted, traditional Super Bowl commercial.

Tomorrow the Bud Light please-take-us-back campaign continues with a Super Bowl commercial featuring Shane Gillis, Post Malone, and Peyton Manning as wacky, good-time-loving “Big Men on Cul-de-Sac” — a throwback to the goofier, lighter, apolitical tone of Bud Light advertising:

As noted in December, Bud Light sales never recovered; in fact, they’re still declining. “Bud Light sales were down 29.9 percent year-over-year for the week ending Jan. 20, compared with the same period last year.” Recall that the infamous Dylan Mulvaney social-media video featuring Bud Light was posted April 1, 2023.

Anson Frericks worked at Anheuser-Busch InBev for a decade, finishing his time at the company as president of sales and distribution. He’s got a new, exceptionally timed book out, Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America’s Favorite Beer. In a recent interview, Frericks told Semafor’s Dave Weigel:

I think that it was Kid Rock lighting up a case of Bud Light, and the broader social media reaction. I think that exemplified the feelings of a lot of people in middle America. “Man, you know, the last couple years, I kept my mouth shut when the NFL allowed players to kneel on the ground, because I want to watch the game. When Disney got involved in the parental rights issues in Florida – well, there’s only one Disney World, and my kids really want to go.” All of a sudden, you do this with a working class man’s beer.

You could see the effect right away. Sales data gets reported from Walmart and Kroger and 711. It was coming out every week, showing Bud Light sales were down 10%, 20%, 30%. That gets amplified on social media, where you’re seeing beer lines 20 people deep for Coors Light, and nobody in line for Bud Light. People were just tired of brands getting involved in progressive issues that historically had nothing to do with the product.

A portion of Frericks’ book was published by The Free Press, and his insider account suggests it was exactly what the skeptical outsiders suspected: Bud Light’s image was steadily reshaped by group of politically progressive advertising minds who operated in an urban bubble and who did not understand their existing customer base on any level.

The so-called woke mindset in business leaders can be harmful for a whole host of reasons, but a particularly big one is that it makes leaders much more focused on selling progressivism than selling their actual product. And as Bud Light is learning, once the damage is done, it’s particularly hard to undo, even with comedians, music stars, and retired NFL players returning to the old style of popular ads from the past. A significant portion of those former Bud Light customers looking for an inexpensive light beer probably found they liked the taste of the other brands better.