On April 1, 2023, controversial transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney took to Instagram to advertise Bud Light beer, as the brewer promoted its tie-in for the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s March Madness basketball tournament.

In the clip, Mulvaney, 27, sat behind cans of Bud Light, sipping from one while pushing a competition to win $15,000 and, at the same time, declaring complete ignorance as to what March Madness was about and even what sport it involved.

But as Anson Frericks explains in “Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America’s Favorite Beer” (Threshold Editions), the promo caused instant outrage among Bud Light’s loyal patrons.

“The reaction was explosive,” he writes.

“Customers called for boycotts. Celebrities chimed in. Kid Rock was among the first to do so, posting a video of himself shooting a stack of Bud Lights with a rifle. “F*** Bud Light and F*** Anheuser-Busch,” he eloquently concludes.

Frericks came to “Last Call” as the ultimate insider and a Bud fan long before he worked for them and even before he was old enough to drink it. 

In 1989, he watched the Superbowl between his hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals, and the San Francisco 49ers, a game also dubbed “The Bud Bowl” as it was the first time a company, Anheuser-Busch, and its two largest brands, Bud and Bud Light, produced an ad specifically for the Superbowl that would not run after the Superbowl.

“Although I was not legally able to drink, I knew Budweiser and Bud Light were cool,” he writes. “Knowing the latest commercials and catchphrases bought social currency at the lunch table.”

Since Frericks couldn’t legally buy or drink the beer, he did the next best thing.

He bought Bud Light neon signs, bottle openers, and commemorative steins on eBay and asked his local store for leftover displays.

“I decorated my room like a sports bar,” he recalls. 

The obsession grew when Morris went to Yale University.

When he graduated from Yale in 2006, Frericks took a job in Boston, sharing a loft apartment with two other guys and their own kegerator “that exclusively served Bud Light.” 

It seemed predestined Frericks would end up working for his favorite brand and in 2011, after Harvard Business School, he joined Bud Light’s parent company.

When sales of Bud Light peaked in 2008, making it the No. 1 selling beer in America, then owners Anheuser-Busch were subject to a hostile takeover from Belgian-based InBev, and the resulting $52 billion deal was not only the largest cash deal in history but created the world’s largest brewery, Anheuser-Busch InBev, or “AB InBev.” 

Three years later, after finishing at Harvard Business School, Frericks joined AB InBev. 

Twelve years later, though, Bud Light would lose its title as America’s most popular beer and the company’s decline was rapid and shocking. “I witnessed the brand evolve from one synonymous with Americana to one facing an identity crisis of its own making,” writes Frericks

And that was largely down to the Dylan Mulvaney promo, a clip entirely at odds with the values the company had spent decades building with customers. “Choosing Dylan as a brand ambassador was inauthentic,” he writes. “Dylan was sponsoring a March Madness competition with apparently no knowledge of what March Madness actually is. 

“Authenticity was lacking. So was logic.”

But the decision to use Mulvaney wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment choice gone wrong. It was, says Frericks, the almost inevitable result of the AB InBev merger and how the two approached business.

Anheuser-Busch, for instance, lacked financial discipline but knew how to build brand loyalty. InBev, meanwhile, was hot on efficiency but lacked the expertise to connect with consumers. “In theory, the combination would build on the strengths of each,” writes Frericks.

“In reality, the Inbev culture won and the brands ultimately lost.” 

Many mistakes were made.

Moving the company HQ from St. Louis to New York City in 2015, for instance, changed the culture of the company beyond recognition.

“In St. Louis, AB was THE company. Everyone in St. Louis wanted to be the Bud man. Many people from across the country moved to St. Louis to be the Bud man as well,” writes Frericks.

“In New York, AB was just another faceless corporation in a faceless building.” 

There were changes in the beer’s Visual Brand Identity, huge turnover in management, and billions of dollars of debt taken on to fund acquisitions.

Also in 2015, the conglomerate made a huge blunder with Bud Light’s “Up For Whatever” campaign where they printed 140 different slogans on their bottles. 

For the most part, they were inoffensive (e.g., “The perfect beer for busting out all two of your dance moves”) but one was disastrous. “It stated that Bud Light was “the perfect beer for removing ‘No’ from your vocabulary for the night.” 

Cue a social media firestorm. 

“The brand was accused of promoting ‘rape culture’ by advocating for the removal of ‘no,’ ” writes Frericks. 

While AB InBev recalled the bottles and issued an unequivocal apology, it failed to learn lessons.

In 2016, another campaign, the “Bud Light Party” commercials, also strayed from the tried and trusted. 

Scheduled to run throughout the 2016 presidential election, they featured comedians Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen — known Donald Trump opponents — and highlighted issues like gender pay quality and same-sex marriage.

Consumers weren’t impressed. 

Bud Light sales fell almost 5% in the first half of the year, failed to improve in the second, and then recorded its worst sales and share performance in the third quarter of 2016.

“And so an ad campaign that may have appeared ‘unifying’ to New York elites in fact felt out of touch and condescending to consumers in Red America,” says Frericks.

It’s precisely why history repeated itself in 2023 when they hired Mulvaney — only this time it was worse. “They say that learning in public is painful, but the lessons stick,” says Frericks. 

“But for Bud Light, the learning might not have been painful enough.”

The week before the partnership with Mulvaney, Bud Light sales had declined by 1.6% compared to the prior year. 

For the week ending April 8, sales were down 11%. 

By April 15, sales were down 21%. 

As Frericks explains, Bud Light had become the No. 1 beer in the US because it had always been apolitical, and it was those campaigns that focused on things that brought people together — like sports, music, and humor — that gained traction.

Instead, the company lost millions of customers and shed billions of shareholder value. It also resulted in thousands of lay-offs and a reputation damaged almost beyond repair.

“Bud Light has become the poster child of everything that has gone wrong with the stakeholder capitalism movement and large corporations going to war against perceived social injustices,” he writes.

For Frericks, meanwhile, Bud Light’s demise should remind other American brands to focus attention on their most important asset — the consumer. “That will be good for the company, and it will be good for millions of fans like me who count on the company to provide cold beer, good times, help when needed, and a ‘beer half full’ outlook on life.”