Some are saying it’s another example of a company going “woke” and ignoring its core customer base
Milwaukee – In what looks to be a trend, another Beer company has decided to go so-called “woke” in their advertising, and the backlash has already begun. Miller Lite marketing executive Elizabeth Hitch has been under fire recently after an ad that some are calling “out of touch with the people who use their product.” This is on the heels of plummeting sales and controversy at Bud Light following a marketing campaign with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney earlier this year.
In the Miller Lite ad, comedienne Illana Grazer walks through a brewery destroying old Miller Lite posters, dropping pictures in garbage cans while bikini-clad models’ faces are blurred, and announces, “It’s time beer made it up to women.”
In a press release from March Miller Lite senior director of marketing Elizabeth Hitch spoke about the company’s goal to turn “bad $#!t, old objectifying beer advertising into good $#!t, literal fertilizer to grow hops that will be donated to female brewers.”
The release said the company’s goal was to “help amend the industry’s sexist history of beer marketing and rectify the past.” Some are saying it’s just another example of a company going “woke” with feminist advertising and ignoring its core customer base while portraying women as “fragile victims.”
“Miller Lite feminist ad blurs the faces of women in bikinis, destroys their ads, and makes it into fertilizer, for being offensive. This kind of ugly feminism is much more harmful than anything Dylan Mulvaney did. Hopefully leads to boycott,” Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, posted on Twitter.
A spokesman for Molson Coors said there is nothing controversial about the ad.
“This video was about two things: worm poop and saying women shouldn’t be forced to mud wrestle in order to sell beer. Neither of these things should be remotely controversial and we hope beer drinkers can appreciate the humor (and ridiculousness) of this video from back in March,” the statement read.
Publicsq. Founder and CEO Michael Seifert did not mince words about the controversy.
“Miller Lite thinks women are fragile victims” he wrote on Twitter. “Bud Light doesn’t know what a woman is. Is it too much to ask to just brew beer instead of meeting your ESG requirements?”
Bud Light and Miller Lite have handled the backlash of controversy in very different ways, but it is uncertain (at least in Miller Lite’s case) how much the controversy will affect the bottom line. If history is any indication, it may get ugly for the brewing giant in Milwaukee.
Photo courtesy of Miller Lite.
