Bud Light Summer with $10M stimulus

The proposal, a 100-plus-page document designed to look like legislation, includes — along with jokes, diagrams and hidden prizes — details about items the brand is giving away, including 100,000 passes to sporting events, tickets to concerts at local amphitheaters and a first round of Bud Light as consumers return to bars.

Campaign to bring back fun

The campaign parodies political activity and brings a lighthearted, humorous tone to marketing at a time when the country seems poised to return to pre-pandemic normalcy after a tumultuous year. And while consumers flocked to legacy brews like Bud Light early in the pandemic, the health crisis overall has affected the brand’s ability to market itself, per Bud Light’s Vice President of Marketing Andy Goeler.

“It’s been a challenge, obviously, through this whole COVID period. So much of our brand is about bringing the fun, getting people together and sociability. So now that we’re starting to come out of it, we decided that … it’s kind of our responsibility to bring the fun back,” the AB InBev veteran said.

Celebrities in charge

To help promote the campaign, Bud Light tapped NFL star Rob Gronkowski as the Bud Light Secretary of Summer and hired comic actor Sam Richardson (“Veep”) to act as Chief Bud Light Summer Stimmy Bill Reader in a series of new spots fashioned to look like C-SPAN coverage. Extending the faux legislative process, the brand will promote the proposal on TV and social for a week, asking fans to “endorse” it before it is “approved.”

Along with its $10 million in prizes and giveaways, the campaign also includes influencer content, with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, esports athlete TimTheTatMan and Instagram meme accounts MiddleClassFancy and Friday Beers presenting their own addendums to the proposal. The influencer outreach and collaboration with Gronkowski and Richardson follow Bud Light’s previous tie-ups with pop cultural figures, most notably pop musician Post Malone.

“If you don’t remain culturally relevant, you become yesterday’s news very quickly,” he said. “We do the normal things, like social listening, and we have teams that monitor different social conversations in these different areas. But I have to tell you, the real truth with all this data and analysis and all these brilliant people that are helping to guide us: sometimes we just sit around over a beer and talk about Gronk or Post Malone.”

Even while offering a variety of benefits to consumers, Bud Light parodying a politically charged topic like the stimulus could be seen as risky, especially as the country continues to be polarized following the presidential election in the U.S.