ST. LOUIS — Anheuser-Busch is known for great Super Bowl commercials. It could use one this year.
The world’s largest brewer returns to the big game Sunday with six national ads, 4 minutes of air time, famous faces and elaborate concepts.
“They spend a gajillion dollars,” said Benj Steinman, president of Beer Marketer’s Insights, a trade publication.
But in recent years, it hasn’t been enough. The company that once topped the USA Today Ad Meter every year for a decade with Dalmatians, satin sheets and Clydesdales hasn’t won one for six years. And business could use the jolt: A-B is selling less beer, North American revenues are flat, and leaders say that needs to change.
This year’s crop of potential slump-busters features a celebrity chef, a cast of sports stars bowling for bragging rights, and a journey to the digital frontier where drinkers of the company’s newest beer, Bud Light Next, jump between realities.
Daniel Blake, who oversees the company’s Budweiser advertising, dismissed the Ad Meter drought, saying the company cares far more about social media engagement than the USA Today contest.
That said, CEO Carlos Brito was quick to brag to investors the last couple times the company won. And when asked about this year’s commercials, Blake all but guaranteed this year’s Budweiser spot, a story of a Clydesdale’s resilience, would reclaim the title.
“It’s going be one of the the most iconic commercials in the brand’s history, and in Super Bowl history, when it’s all said and done,” he said.
That’s always been the goal at Anheuser-Busch. Decades before USA Today started bringing its Ad Meter focus groups together in 1989, A-B worked more like a marketing firm that sold beer than a brewery that did marketing.
It was the home of the iconic Clydesdales, the “King of Beers” and “This Bud’s for You.” It was the company once run by Gussie Busch, who named a baseball stadium after an A-B beer. And under his son, August A. Busch III, the company was spending a fortune to sponsor every sporting event it could touch, including the Super Bowl.
“Mr. Busch told me: I want you to make our brands famous,” said Bob Lachky, who oversaw advertising at the brewery in the 1990s and 2000s.
‘Bankers’
And make it famous they did. Working with Midwestern ad firms like St. Louis-based D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, they put on Bud Bowls where stop-motion bottles of beer faced off in a big game of their own. They introduced Spuds McKenzie, Real Men of Genius and the Budweiser frogs.
They didn’t win the Ad Meter immediately; Pepsi dominated most of the 1990s. But in 1999, A-B cracked the code.
The winning ad told the story of two Dalmatians separated at birth, the first of which begins the ad getting picked to be a firehouse dog. As it’s carried away to a lifetime of adventure, the dog blows a raspberry at its twin. But two years later, the firehouse dog is riding in the truck when it sees a Budweiser Clydesdale wagon, with the other dog on top, which sticks its tongue out as they pass.
The years that followed saw Cedric the Entertainer accidentally spray a shaken beer into his date’s face, Bud Light bros worship a “magic fridge,” and a Dalmatian training Hank the Clydesdale to make the hitch team in a Rocky-style montage.
The ads didn’t just win, they dominated, often taking more than half the spots in the top 10. In 2007, a particularly good year, A-B took first, second and third, plus four other top slots.
It all felt pretty good for the people in charge of the ads: Every year brought new assurance they were the best. But there were practical benefits, too. Great ads created characters the company could use to make props for retail stores, Lachky said. Dave Peacock, a former A-B marketing chief, said an Ad Meter win also let retailers know the brewery was doing its part to help them move product. “It was big for us as a selling tool,” he said.
And perhaps just as important, it justified the fortune spent on the big game. (Air time this year went for as much as $7 million for a 30-second spot.)
“If you invest the kind of resources in advertising that the Super Bowl requires, you want to win best ad,” Peacock said.
The company lost for the first time in the 21st century in 2009, a few months after the St. Louis brewery sold to Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate InBev. AB InBev came back to win in 2011, and then took three more from 2013-2015. But the closest it’s come since is third place; last year’s top ad, a Bud Light Seltzer Lemonade spot where a monsoon of lemons stand in for the troubles of 2020, finished 10th.
The old hands say the new company has lost its way.
Lachky said the pre-merger ads created their own worlds that no other brand could touch — full of puppies, Clydesdales and Bud Light bros willing to do anything for their favorite beer. The new spots, commissioned from firms on the coasts, could be for anybody, he said.
And A-B’s new owners, obsessed with efficiency and the bottom line, just don’t care about marketing like the old brewery did, Lachky added: “They’re bankers.”
Taking the Clydesdales out of last year’s game? “So lame,” he said.
Down, not out
John Antil, a longtime professor of marketing at the University of Delaware, agreed. “They’ve just given up on entertaining,” he said.
But entertainment — which is what the Ad Meter measures — isn’t everything, he said. Good ads also sell the product. They appeal to key audiences, not just anyone voting in a poll. And sometimes they drive people to social media, or maybe a company site, where emails or phone numbers can be collected and used to market directly to consumers.
Derek Rucker, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, said A-B is still doing some interesting things, like its fourth-ranked 2017 Budweiser ad depicting founder Adolphus Busch’s journey here from Germany, and its third-ranked 2018 ad highlighting disaster relief efforts. They’ve backed away from the special bond consumers have with Clydesdales a little bit, he said, and overcoming that is tough. But he said they’ve shown some versatility.
The company has also been introducing new products, like its seltzers, that need their own brands and characters.
Still, he acknowledged, the company has lost a bit of its luster. In recent years, he’s been more excited to see what Amazon’s done than A-B.
“It would be really cool to see the King of Beers become the king of advertising again,” he said.
It’ll take some time to determine whether that happens. But this Super Bowl’s ads are prepped and ready to go.
There’s a Michelob Ultra spot at a bowling alley where sports stars Peyton Manning, Serena Williams, Jimmy Butler and Alex Morgan engage in a friendly face-off for 10-pin supremacy. It’s a follow-up to last year’s 25th-ranked ad advancing the idea that great athletes win because they have fun, not the other way around.
There’s a Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda ad titled “Loud Flavors” that sees the drink win the endorsement of celebrity chef Guy Fieri — dubbed the “mayor of Flavortown.” A Bud Light Next commercial homes in on what else is “next,” from tradeable digital artwork to concerts in the metaverse.
And then there’s “A Clydesdale’s Journey,” Budweiser beer’s return to the big game after it took last year off and donated the ad money to coronavirus vaccine promotion. It’s a story about one of the giant horses falling, getting injured and then getting back up. After a painful rehab, it ends the ad galloping through an open field as the words “In the home of the brave, down never means out” flash across the screen.
Blake, the A-B executive, thinks that one’s a winner.
“The message is so timely,” he said. “That’s just so powerful in today’s climate, and something that people are really going to gravitate towards. It’s a reminder that this is who we are — we face these challenges and as Americans we bounce back stronger.”
The Super Bowl starts at 5:30 p.m. local time on NBC. Ad Meter ratings will be released Monday morning.
