Bud Light’s woke marketing campaign destroyed America’s top-selling beer brand in spectacular fashion.
Now one of their former creative consultants is speaking out about how the company lost its way.
And a Bud Light creative consultant made this painful confession about the woke disaster that will leave you stunned.
The man behind Bud Light’s greatest campaigns breaks his silence
John Immesoete understands successful beer advertising better than most.
During his decade as Group Creative Director for DDB Chicago from 1995 to 2005, he helped develop Bud Light’s legendary "Real Men of Genius" campaign that contributed to making it America’s top-selling beer.
Those commercials resonated with regular Americans who just wanted to crack open a cold one after a hard day’s work.
But Immesoete watched in dismay as the brand he helped build got destroyed by executives who had lost touch with their customer base.
He recently released a documentary called "Once There Was a Brewery" that examines how Bud Light went from America’s favorite beer to a national punchline.
According to Immesoete, the problems began when Belgian company InBev acquired Anheuser-Busch in 2008.
"When InBev took over, they basically acted like they knew everything better than anyone else. They had their own ways of doing things. There was a famous quote they had with some guys in a meeting where they were showing all the work that was done in the past and there were a lot of Clyde sales commercials that were quite famous. Somebody at InBev had said, ‘tell me this, how do horses help sell beer?’ It’s like well, if you don’t know, you don’t know," Immesoete told Fox News Digital.
InBev executives couldn’t understand why Bud Light’s famous Clydesdale horse commercials were so popular with American consumers.
That attitude set the stage for the Dylan Mulvaney disaster that would cost Bud Light its crown as America’s top beer.
Former creative consultant reveals what went wrong with the Dylan Mulvaney campaign
The Dylan Mulvaney partnership wasn’t just bad marketing – it was a complete betrayal of everything Bud Light represented.
Immesoete explained that Adolphus Busch built the company around a simple philosophy: "making friends is our business."
But the Mulvaney campaign did the exact opposite by needlessly alienating millions of loyal customers.
"I don’t think that Dylan Mulvaney fiasco was necessarily just because this was a trans person. I think it was I think they did not do her a service by really giving her a bad script. It was a bad execution," Immesoete told Fox News Digital. "It didn’t fit the brand character at all. Making friends is our business. I mean, this was a rather lonely video, somebody breaking the fourth wall. It wasn’t an entertaining, funny story that people could relate to. It made it seem like her face was going to be on every can that was out there. That would be polarizing. I really couldn’t reverse engineer that particular commercial to understand what they were trying to do."
Boycotts spread across the country as millions of Americans walked away from the brand.
The financial damage was staggering – InBev watched $4 billion disappear from its market value.
For the first time in decades, Bud Light surrendered its crown as America’s best-selling beer to Modelo.
Executive’s tone-deaf comments poured gasoline on the fire
Just when executives should have been doing damage control, Bud Light advertising VP Alissa Heinerscheid decided to double down on insulting the customer base.
Heinerscheid, who departed the company after the campaign imploded, had previously dismissed Bud Light’s traditional appeal as "fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor" during a 2023 interview.
Immesoete believes her comments potentially did more damage than the ad itself.
He feared that the Mulvaney ad may have done irreparable damage to the Bud Light brand.
"I don’t know if they can ever come back from being considered the biggest disaster in marketing advertising history," Immesoete told Fox News Digital.
Immesoete contrasted Bud Light’s failed approach with American Eagle’s successful Sydney Sweeney campaign.
That advertisement featured the actress wearing American Eagle jeans with the slogan "Sydney Sweeney has good genes."
Critics attacked the ad, but it actually benefited the brand because American Eagle understood their target audience.
"The haters actually fueled its popularity. I think a lot of the consumers in that particular case, didn’t agree with the haters, and it propelled it even farther. I’m sure that American Eagle is happy they did that ad. The people that didn’t like it probably weren’t their consumer to begin with. And that’s not necessarily bad," he said. "I think with Bud Light, they tried to create advertising that would have, again, appealed to a very, maybe their social media bubble, but they didn’t understand their broader consumer, which was, you know, the entire country."
American Eagle recognized that the people complaining weren’t their customers anyway.
Bud Light went the opposite direction and stabbed their core customers right in the back.
The lesson every American business needs to learn from this disaster
Here’s what this whole debacle really shows about corporate America today.
Too many companies have hired activists in their twenties who live in social media bubbles and have no connection to regular Americans.
These marketing executives think they can lecture customers about their values instead of just selling them a decent product.
Bud Light learned the hard way that Americans won’t be bullied into supporting brands that attack their beliefs.
The company built its success by understanding what regular working Americans wanted – cold beer and entertaining commercials that didn’t insult their intelligence.
But InBev threw all that away to chase approval from radical leftist groups and mainstream media outlets.
They forgot the golden rule that Adolphus Busch understood over a century ago: making friends is our business.
When you declare war on half your customer base, don’t act surprised when they take their business elsewhere.
The Bud Light disaster should serve as a warning to every American company thinking about going woke.
Americans vote with their wallets, and they’ve made it crystal clear they won’t support businesses that hate them.
Smart companies will learn from Bud Light’s mistakes and get back to the basics of serving customers instead of lecturing them.
¹ David Spector, "Former Bud Light consultant speaks out on how brand lost its way," Fox Business, October 8, 2025.