Featured Image Credit: Miller
Topics: Food and Drink, Politics, Viral
Kit Roberts
Miller Lite has hit back after a recent ad campaign sparked a backlash from conservatives online.
The brewer launched the new campaign to coincide with women's history month in March, as it took a look at the various ad campaigns they used during the 1990s and early 2000s for the sale of beer.
Many of these featured models in bikinis, and even two women wrestling in a fountain over beer.
Advert
The ads featured many big names including Pamela Anderson and even Meghan Markle in a 2010 campaign, though the future Duchess of Sussex was not wearing a bikini.
The ad took aim at the old adverts, with comedian, Ilana Glazer, saying: "Here's a little-known fact, women were among the very first to brew beer ever. Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer? They put us in bikinis."
The ad goes on to call on anyone with old marketing materials to send them in so they can 'turn it into good s**t'. By that they mean turning them into compost and turning that compost into fertilizer, to give back to women-led brewers and hop growers.
Makes sense.
Ilana condemned beer companies' use of scantily clad models to sell beer, as well as drawing attention to the history of women in brewing.
In the advert, Ilana examined old beer adverts, before saying: "It's time beer made it up to women."
But the campaign has since become a target for conservative voices, including senior Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, who used it as an opportunity to tout conspiracy theories about 'institutional capture' of advertisers.
Responding to a tweet claiming that 'Miller Lite has joined the woke cult', he wrote: "So much of the bizarre world we see around us is the result of institutional capture—e.g. the capture of our corporations and advertising firms. But to understand these phenomena you also have to understand the power of the new social credit scores for corporations: CEI and ESG."
Nonetheless, Miller Lite parent company, Molson Coors, has insisted that there was nothing 'remotely controversial' in its campaign, after conservative activists drew attention to it online.
A spokesperson for the group told Fox: "This video was about two things: worm poop and saying women shouldn’t be forced to mud wrestle in order to sell beer. Neither of these things should be remotely controversial and we hope beer drinkers can appreciate the humour (and ridiculousness) of this video from back in March."
Activists latched on to the advert in the wake of Bud Light's partnership with influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The campaign saw beer drinkers staging a 'boycott' of the product by destroying crates of Bud Light in various creative ways, though presumably they had to spend money buying the beer in order to do so.