Bud Light Shoots A Commercial With Shane Gillis to Try to Bring Back Football Fans
Over a year after a right-wing cancel crusade decimated Bud Light’s popularity among both bros and dudes, Shane Gillis is here to repair the light beer brand’s relationship with guys who watch football, punch drywall and call everything “gay.”
In April 2023, transgender comedian Dylan Mulvaney appeared in a brief Instagram video promoting Bud Light while holding a personalized beer can in advance of the upcoming NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. Almost overnight, both Mulvaney and Bud Light became the largest-ever targets of conservative, anti-trans hatred as bomb threats shut down Anheuser-Busch factories, stalkers harassed the content creator and Kid Rock sprayed bullets from his submachine gun in the general direction of some Bud Light cans. Within weeks, the beer brand walked back the campaign and severed ties with Mulvaney, leaving her to her death threats while Bud Light sales hit rock bottom.
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Almost a year and a half later, Bud Light seems fixed to return to their roots with a 2000s-style part-commercial, part comedy sketch featuring Gillis as football coach and Bud Light-lover who is ready to convince America that Bud Light isn’t gay anymore.
Steve Gerben, Gillis’ co-star and co-creator on the Netflix series Tires, plays a similar role as his character on the show in the above commercial, and, honestly, the scene works as both a beer commercial and a C+ comedy sketch. The commercial is certainly closer to the “Dilly Dilly”-style campaigns of Bud Light’s pre-woke era than it is to the ads from their brief experiment in LGBTQ+ acceptance, and, if the business commentators are correct, we’ll be seeing plenty of the football confession commercial in the upcoming NFL season.
However, despite Gillis’ considerable star power within the Manosphere, the Bud Light boycotters aren’t yet convinced that the brand has embraced anti-trans tradition. “The Bud brand is tarnished, beyond repair to many, through no fault other than that of their own corporate leadership,” one such holdout wrote in the replies.
“Maybe. But as for me and my house, we’ll still never drink another Bud Light again,” another added.
Other comments like “Bud Light is dead to me” and “Fuck Bud Light” continue to pile up with hundreds of likes, and it’s becoming more and more likely that, rather than Gillis helping Bud Light reclaim their right-wing appeal, the stench of “we gave a trans person a beer one time” may very stick to Gillis and threaten his relationship with his base.
If Gillis continues his partnership with Bud Light, it should be clear to him now that the damage done to the brand by an Instagram post 15 months ago will take an even greater effort from the comic to repair, as the testimonials are absolutely unflinching. “I was so loyal to Budweiser for most of my adult life. Budweiser products will never be in my house. They don’t understand their customers and they defamed my family name,” wrote one still-triggered former customer who is hilariously named David Mulvaney.
