Big Beer Has Lost Its Marketing Mojo. Just Look at These World Cup Ads
In early 2007, with the American beer industry all a-froth with the yet-to-crest light lager boom, the world’s biggest brewer decided to launch a streaming television channel. Even for mighty Anheuser-Busch — which was near the zenith of its own cultural and corporate power in advance of InBev’s hostile takeover in late 2008 — the project, Bud.TV, was an audacious gamble that verged on “creative hubris,” as The New York Times put it at the time. In “Bitter Brew,” the definitive 2014 book on the Busches and their semi-eponymous brewery, author William Knoedelseder wrote:
Aimed at twenty-one-to twenty-seven-year-old consumers who were hard to reach with traditional broadcast television ads, Bud.TV promised a lineup of one- to three-minute programs that featured the kind of hip, mocking humor that A-B commercials had become famous for, ranging from comedy sketches created by writers from Saturday Night Live and The Howard Stern Show to short films produced by actor Kevin Spacey’s company, Trigger Street Films…
The idea was insane, not least because in 2007, a vanishingly small percentage of Americans had access to broadband internet, and Google was still reporting YouTube’s revenues as “not material.” The Bud.TV boondoggle — which Knoedelseder reported at $30 million — offers a variety of lessons to the trade, chief among them being “do not launch Bud.TV.” But its short and failed existence teaches affirmative lessons, too. There was a time when A-B’s ads and marketing were so genuinely influential that even August Busch III, a legendarily disciplined executive and no sufferer of fools, allowed his failson August Busch IV to take a shot at expanding the macrobrewer into the business of direct cultural production. There was a “there” there! The company had notched six of the top 10 ads broadcast during Super Bowl XLI that year. People had been saying “whaaassup?!” to each other for the better part of the decade. The Bud-Wei-Ser frogs were national celebrities; Spuds Mackenzie was a dearly departed icon; the Real Men of Genius were, frankly, pretty genius. Bud.TV was doomed for operational reasons, and boy, did it die. But A-B’s “creative hubris” in launching it was not unearned.
Two decades later, America should be so lucky to have a macrobrewer with enough swagger, vision, and ambition to do something as delusional as Bud.TV. A week into the 2026 World Cup, and the ads and antics on offer from the company now known as Anheuser-Busch InBev range from adequate to asinine. Having already loosened its once-iron grip on the National Football League, ABI recently rolled out a Michelob Ultra ad for fútbol’s biggest event that is long on stars and painfully short on charm. In it, superstar Lionel Messi and lesser studs from Argentine and American squads play soccer… in a fancy hotel… with Billy Bob Thornton. I’ve seen stock photo albums with more coherence and character. Naturally, there’s also flag-themed packaging tie in for Ultra, a beer whose nation-leading sales figures boast a near-perfect inverse proportionality with its social clout. This is just basic, box-checking, replacement-level stuff from a company that dominated the zeitgeist as recently as a decade ago with “Dilly, Dilly.” Mich Ultra’s World Cup campaign isn’t additive; it isn’t anything, really. It’s just wallpaper.
I’ve written at length about how and why Anheuser-Busch InBev lost the mandate of marketing heaven, a sorry slide that has only hastened since its catastrophic mismanagement of the Bud Light fiasco. But the King of Beers isn’t the only brewer that’s abdicated that throne. The trade that invented or introduced the national imagination to such indelible, offbeat, and provocative icons as the Swedish Bikini Team (Old Milwaukee), Elvira, the Queen of Halloween (Coors Light, in spite of the right-wing Coors family), The Most Interesting Man in The World (Dos Equis), and the Men of the Square Table (Miller Lite) — not to mention drop-dead gorgeous art like Guinness’s “The Surfer” — has been kicking more rocks than goals lately. I’m not sure I’d go quite so far as CNN in proclaiming the 2026 World Cup a “make or break” moment for the American beer business, but it is certainly a huge opportunity for the struggling category. “A tidal wave of found occasions and reasons to celebrate,” is how Bump Williams Consulting’s president Dave Williams put it to Hop Take a couple weeks back. But, speaking of surfing, the industry’s biggest marketers barely seem to be paddling out for it.
What’s the best soccer-themed beer campaign you’ve seen this summer? Can you even call any to mind? I will admit I cracked a smile at Guinness’s spot, “The World’s Cup,” which features two pints of the well-known foamer doing their best Andrés Cantor impression. Cute and clever, if not an instant classic.
It’s downhill from there. Miller Lite launched a lumpy chungus it’s calling the “MVP Matchball” — an oversized soccer ball that holds 12 cans of beer in built-in pockets, but not a beer ball à la the F.X. Matt lager orbs of yore. Parent company Molson Coors also promised its distributors “an expected 60% [year-over-year] increase in national media spend,” which presumably includes a big push around this ho-hum spot of some schmo taking his pants off. Increase that spend all you want; you’re not gonna make that schtick stick.
The other big soccer stunt to come out of the MC Marketing Mediocri-verse this summer is Coors Light’s “Coooors Light Tallerboy.” Half a dozen normies from my personal life have texted me with mild amusement about it, suggesting the gimmick is breaking through a bit. A little chuckler featuring Cantor himself might be helping. But here’s the rub: The perennially underconfident company only made 125 of these things to celebrate a tournament expected to draw millions of fans to the U.S. over the course of the month. Silver Bullet brand-handlers will likely crow about “sold out” social-media chatter and content-farm headlines about a coming re-up, but this is hardly dominating the discourse. More disappointingly, the item isn’t actually an extend-o-extrusion tallboy full of lager, but rather, per the release, a “canister that holds and chills three full [sic] Coooors Light cans at once” — a sleeve, in other words. Boo this sleeve! Commit to the bit!
Heineken did commit to the bit, but their bit is sh*t. The reeling Dutch macrobrewer introduced a special-edition 6-pack that contains five bottles of its flagship and one of Heinz ketchup. Their names both start with “Hein,” see? Do you get it? Well, then… can you explain it to me? Even Heineken’s publicists don’t seem too sure what their marketing masterminds were going for with this too-cute-by-half collaboration. “An unexpected combination at first glance, but a familiar one in practice,” declares the release in a cadence all too familiar to anybody who’s read slop copy generated by an artificial intelligence program. “On the surface, it’s simple. But it reflects something recognizable… that some of the best connections can come from the places you least expect.” This may be true in principle, but it is not true of a Heineken x Heinz tie-up — particularly given the Dutch are known perverts for mayonnaise. With the Oranje Legioen showing out in force stateside and scoring oodles of media coverage, there was a lane for Big Green to make a bigger, weirder bet that might have yielded real dividends for its fizzling flagship. Instead, it played it safe, and will continue playing… ah… catch-up. (Sorry.)
Rounding out the top-five beer-flavored beer macrobrewers is Pabst Brewing Company, which in extremely Pabst fashion, appears to have entirely missed the memo on the biggest marketing opportunity of the season. I will not discuss Truly’s “Believe U.S.A.” campaign other than to say that Boston Beer Company is a dozen years late to the “we bought a town!” routine (it didn’t work out so great for Bud Light the first time) and that “Ted Lasso” is cloying fiction.
If you are getting the sense that beer marketing has lost its way: good, because it has. As I’ve argued before here and elsewhere, this is a function as much of the bloodless professionalization of the business (a multi-decade process by which business-school consumer-packaged-goods generalists supplanted brewing execs who came up in the trade) as of the dramatic fragmentation of the American media landscape and the mainstream monoculture it helped to shape and sell to for a century. The effect is now being exacerbated by beer’s well-documented doldrums: It is no coincidence that shortly after MC’s one-time marketing whiz left the company in November, she landed at Feastables, the CPG appendage of obscenely bankable YouTube dingus MrBeast. Talent gravitates to growth markets, and beer hasn’t been one for years.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. “The beer category has largely ceded great advertising to insurance, of all categories,” said Pete Marino, the outgoing president of Bardstown Bourbon Company, at Beer Marketer’s Insights spring wholesaler confab, per a report from Beer Business Daily. (The former MC executive is exiting the distiller’s parent company, Lofted Spirits, amid allegations of workplace discrimination and compliance violations. He told BevNET in April that his departure is unrelated to that lawsuit, in which he is named; Lofted Spirits has called the suit’s claims “without merit.”) He argued that the industry must “go back to recruiting entry-level beer drinkers by making beer cool again,” citing Garage Beer’s mini-movie tie-in with the “Predator: Badlands” film release in October 2025 as an example of the sort of forward-thinking experiments that the trade must do more of. Marino is a newly minted member of the insurgent brand’s board, so obviously he’s going to say that. But I did like that move. A beer company? Taking a risk on streaming video? Where have I heard that before?
The decision makers for the beleaguered brewing industry may feel like the moment calls for fiscally conservative marketing — and politically conservative, too, in ABI’s case. But just like in soccer itself, there’s risk in playing it too safe on the marketing front. For example, one of the most viral stories of the tournament so far is the sheer decimation of Boston’s beer reserves at the hands of Scotland’s fearsomely thirsty “Tartan Army.” It’s a funny story, at ABI’s expense: “The Scottish fans just drank the place dry, and all they had [left] was Bud Light,” one eyewitness told the local news.
Industry marketers, take note. Macrobrewers that don’t get back to producing timeless characters and knee-slapping jokes for mass-market events like the World Cup may still wind up being remembered — as a punchline.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
When Anheuser-Busch InBev signed a $100 million endorsement deal with the Ultimate Fighting Championship in October 2023, it was already clear that the firm had decided to try to reingratiate itself with the right-wing chuds it had enraged earlier that year by accidentally reminding them trans people exist. It was a grim choice that paid predictably dark dividends over the course of the past week, when one of the MMA league’s two-time champs tagged Bud Light in a brutal AI video he posted to social media of himself beating a woman who looked like trans actress Dylan Mulvaney, and another fighter grabbed the mic on the White House lawn Sunday evening to bellow a racist, transphobic smear about former First Lady Michelle Obama from the Bud Light-branded Octagon. Darker still: ABI has yet to offer even a half-assed disavowal of either vile incident, or even respond to requests for comment about the same. Among Big Booze backers of the event, it is shamefully not alone.
📈 Ups…
Congrats to Allagash sales vet Josh Fruchtman on his new dual gig at Dad Strength and Atlas Brew Works, new hop water WHEN?… The Brewers Association and CiderCon are “co-locat[ing]” their annual conventions in San Antonio for 2027, which makes a) fiscal and logistical sense and b) my life easier… The first weekend of the World Cup sent draft sales soaring 16 percent by volume year-over-year in the BeerBoard-tracked on-premise universe… KC Bier Co. is one of those craft breweries that bet on a big tournament boom, and it’s panning out, with sales up 10 percent year-over-year for the opening weekend…
📉 …and downs
If I were in the THC drinks trade, which is on the verge of being regulatorily nuked from Washington, D.C., I don’t think I’d refer to my job as “hope dealer,” but I guess that’s just me… Pabst Blue Ribbon’s push for Independence Day includes packaging its beer with actual fireworks, what could go wrong?… Hop acreage strung in the Pacific Northwest this season was flattish compared to 2025, per new USDA report, with Citra’s share creeping up again for the second straight year… New CDC data suggests drinking during pregnancy has risen since 2020… The trade-hated ICCPUD study linking even light drinking to morbidity was peer-reviewed and published independently, despite getting shelved last year by the feds…
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