After Budweiser partnered with
transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney last month, the Bud Light brand’s sales fell 17%, according to an analysis of Nielsen data by Bump Williams Consulting.
In the wake of the sales
plunge, two top marketing executives have been placed on leave. So what does the Budweiser marketer behind the talking frogs and “Wassup?” think of all this?
Robert Lachky, who was
behind those ads in 1995-2000, blamed the Mulvaney partnership for tanking sales. “It took us 20 years to take Bud Light beer to the Number 1 beer in the country, and it took them one week to
dismantle it,” Lachky told the Daily Mail..
Lachky, who left Anheuser-Busch in 2009 and now runs his own consulting firm in St. Louis, said the company has no one to blame but
itself.
“It's self-inflicted,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He claims Anheuser-Busch suffers from a “complete lack of corporate oversight and it's been
that way since [InBev] took the company over.”
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This past week, CEO Michel Doukeris blamed “misinformation and disinformation” online for making people believe cans with
Mulvaney’s face were being sold across the U.S.
“We never intended to make it for general production and sale for the public...it was one post. It was
not an advertisement,” he told the Financial Times.
Since Anheuser-Busch partnered with Mulvaney, the company lost $6 billion in market
capitalization.