Bud Light sales still reeling after trans ad debacle
Sales of top American beer brand Bud Light have continued to slide, months after the company was hit with a consumer backlash over a social media promotion featuring controversial trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
According to new Nielsen data, cited by Yahoo Finance, Bud Light sales plummeted 26.5% for the week ending August 5, faster than the 25.9% week-on-week decline for the period ending June 17.
Volumes of the beer, which is manufactured by Anheuser-Busch, crashed 29.7%, accelerating from a 29.3% decline one week earlier.
“Recent data continues to show that tracked channels reached a point of stabilization at significantly lower levels for Anheuser-Busch InBev than pre-controversy,” Evercore ISI analyst Robert Ottenstein wrote in a note seen by Yahoo Finance.
The declines began after transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney shared an Instagram video on April 1 promoting the light beer during the March Madness college basketball tournament. The clip featured Mulvaney in a black cocktail dress, elbow-length gloves, and an Audrey Hepburn hairdo feigning ignorance about sports and carrying a six-pack of Bud Light. A second segment showed Mulvaney in a bathtub covered in foam, brandishing a can with the influencer’s face on it.
The promotion triggered calls for a boycott, including from prominent voices such as musician Kid Rock, who posted a video of himself shooting a stack of Bud Light cases.
Mulvaney lashed out at Bud Light and parent company Anheuser-Busch in a video posted to social media on Friday, accusing them of abandoning the “Days of Girlhood” TikToker, and warning Anheuser-Busch that LGBTQ people also drink beer.
The performer claimed that public reaction was out of proportion with the video shared with her 1.8 million Instagram followers.
Despite transitioning to female just over a year ago, Mulvaney reportedly made as much as $1 million last year promoting products normally associated with women, including sports bras and tampons.
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