Remember last month, when Bud Light sent influencer Dylan Mulvaney a customized bottle of beer and some people — Kid Rock among them — decided to freak out about in the most embarrassing way possible? Well, it’s happening again, only this time the culture wars are being fought over a Miller Lite advertisement that’s already two months old.
As Los Angeles Magazine reported, the ad featured Ilana Glazer, who talks about the gulf between the prominent role women once had in brewing beer and the abundance of bikini-clad woman in decades’ worth of beer ads. “It’s time beer made it up to women,” Glazer says — and touts a Miller Lite plan to buy up sexist advertising and “convert it into good shit for women brewers.”
In this case, that involves shredding it, using it as compost and using that compost as fertilizer for hops — which are then, as per the ad, donated to female brewers. It ends with a call directing people who might want to rid themselves of beer ads they have at home to a page on Miller’s website where they can donate them.
It’s worth pointing out here that the url mentioned in the commercial no longer appears to be working — suggesting that this ad campaign has run its course. It’s not entirely clear how persuasive the ad is intended to be — are there really that many guys with circa-1989 swimsuit model ads for various beers who feel an increasing dread about them?
The presence of Glazer and the overall gist of the ad seem, like Bud Light’s work with Mulvaney, to be a way of attracting people who might never have thought of themselves as Miller Lite drinkers. Spoiler alert: like every company making beer, Miller Lite would like more people to drink Miller Lite. And a stance of “sexism is bad, and aren’t these ads from the 80s and 90s a little ridiculous?” isn’t exactly radical.
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“The Afterparty” aims to be the next “Only Murders in the Building”Still, some more reactionary elements online have reacted badly to the ad. Writing at HuffPost, Kelly Vera has a good overview of the reactions from some easily offended right-wing Twitter users. Which also begs the question: if you’re that angry about a Miller Lite ad, isn’t it better to avoid this very public acting out about the ad in question? It’s not hard to think that many more people have now watched this ad due in no small part to the very efforts of people who nominally hate it.
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