Marketing and Advertising

Miller Lite Surpasses Bud Lite’s Self-Immolating Beer Ad With One That’s Even More Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

By now it should be clear what was wrong with the Bud Light promotion featuring silly biological male drag queen Dylan Mulvaney,. First of all, it was incompetent: alienating your core market to score political correctness points with  groups that don’t care about your product is idiotic. It was also irresponsible: investors in the company don’t own stock to be part of political grandstanding, they want to make money, and a company has an obligation not to undermine that objective. It was disrespectful too: making one’s product into a symbol of one side of a culture wars skirmish forces consumers to take sides, and is a slap in the face to consumers who don’t happen to agree with the company’s stance.

None of this was difficult to figure out, but a smug female marketing VP decided to use her job to advance her own political beliefs rather than to do what she was hired to do: sell beer.  This, of course, should have meant a bonanza for the competitors of Bud Lite; if Bud’s sales were going to implode (and they have, down about 25% with no relief in sight), light beer-lovers (weird as they may be) had to go somewhere. But even before the “Drink Bud Lite, show your support for self-identifying women with penises” campaign, Miller Lite had issued the smugly woke video above during Women’s History Month. It’s worse than the Bud Lite ad, even though it won’t lose as many loyal customers:

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Ethics Dunce: The American Bar Association

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

What do you call an esteemed legal organization that willfully encourages its members to violate its own ethics rules? There are two acceptable answers: 1) An Ethics Dunce, and 2) The American Bar Association.

That is a screenshot above of an email that arrived yesterday.

“Congratulations on Your 2023 nomination,” it began. “This year marks our 9 year anniversary of “Recognizing Excellence in the Practice of Law™”. Our Selection Committee is hereby extending to you an invitation to join this elite group¹.  Accept your invitation and join by May 23rd, and your name will be included in our roster announcements published in “The National Law Journal” and the Sunday “The New York Times” print edition on May 28th. Please note that only 56 spots remain available. Less than 1% of lawyers in the United States are recognized as Lawyers of Distinction.”

I am many things, but a “lawyer of distinction” I am not. I haven’t practiced law for more than a decade; legal ethics is not the practice of law. Lawyers of Distinction is, to cut to the chase, a scam, and one that is used by lawyers to deceive clients. For the National Law Journal to provide cover for the unethical advertising scheme is bad, but a while back the ABA included an advertisement for “Lawyers of Distinction” in the ABA Journal. The ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, followed by most jurisdictions, specifically forbids misleading and deceptive advertising, which a lawyer announcing that he or she was “chosen” as a “lawyer of distinction” definitely is. The association attracted a lot of criticism for running the ad, and may not have sunk so low again: I don’t know, because I no longer receive the ABA Journal, but once was enough for me.

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The Bud Light Trans-Pandering Fiasco Sucks Ann Althouse Into Her Most Clueless Post Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

I am, as regular readers here know, generally an admirer of Ann Althouse, the retired Madison Wis. law professor who has operated a long-time blog with a wide following I can only envy. But when Ann jumps the rails, she doesn’t fool around, and her post today commenting on the Bud Light-Dylan Mulroney ethics train wreck makes me marvel, not for the first time, at some of her blind spots.

As usual, someone else’s article triggered her analysis; in this case, it was “Bud Light suffers bloodbath as longtime and loyal consumers revolt against transgender campaign/’In Bud Light’s effort to be inclusive, they excluded almost everybody else,’ says a St. Louis bar owner” at the Fox Business website. The passage that triggered Ann was this:

“Bud Light vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid said she was inspired to update the ‘fratty’ and ‘out-of-touch’ humor of the beer company with ‘inclusivity’ in a March 30 interview with the podcast ‘Make Yourself At Home.’But her effort to be inclusive excluded the people who matter most — Bud Light drinkers, according to St. Louis-area operator John Rieker. ‘It’s kind of mind-boggling they stepped into this realm,’ Rieker, who owns Harpo’s Bar and Grill in Chesterfield, Missouri, told FOX Business. ‘You’re marketing to an audience that represents a fraction of 1% of consumers while alienating the much larger base of your consumers.'”

Here are Althouse’s reactions, with my reactions to her, because this cannot be left unrebutted: Continue reading →

How DEI And Globalism Pollutes American Culture: The Bud Light Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Even though Budweiser choosing a silly, female- (and male) mocking trans “influencer” to promote a product with a market base guaranteed to find the campaign offensive, it made sense to do it anyway. How? Why? The answer shows just how difficult it will be, and already is, for the United States to maintain its unique values, ethical, political and otherwise, in a global culture determined to force our outlying experiment in individual liberty into conformity.

That video above is from Refinitiv, a hugely influential international company I never had heard of before last week. It is an American-British global provider of financial market data and infrastructure, founded in 2018 as a subsidiary of London Stock Exchange Group. The company has an annual turnover of $6 billion with more than 40,000 client companies in 190 countries. Though it presumes to rank companies according to their “ethics,” it is a soul-less, ethics-free company itself. For example, Refinitiv bowed to pressure from China during 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, censoring over 200 stories by Reuters by removing them from its Eikon platform for consumers in Mainland China. The company then developed a “Strategic China filter” to block politically-sensitive stories from readers in Mainland China.

This is the company that Budweiser was submitting to by turning Bud Lite into a DEI pandering product. Refinitiv wields a powerful Diversity and Inclusion Index “designed to measure the relative performance of companies against factors that define diverse and inclusive workplaces.” Woke and “socially conscious investors, including institutional investors, rely on the index to make investment decisions. A declining or inadequate index can mean billions in lost investments.

Budweiser’s seemingly incomprehensible decision to do a complete 180 degree reversal in its public image was driven by slavish fealty to this made-up index, which has power because people and organization have chosen to give it power. In this it resembles the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing advocacy group that can brand an organization as “racist” or as a “hate group” just by saying so. To Refinitiv’s world view, making a trans celebrity a spokesperson justifies gold stars and bonus points.

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A”What’s Going On Here?” Special: Bud Light’s Promotion of Dylan Mulvaney

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, a self-promoting trans-girl who for some reason is an internet “influencer,” posted a video last week promoting the brand’s Easy Carry Contest, in which participants must demonstrate how many cans Budweiser’s worst brew they can carry to win $15,000. Bud Light had sent Mulvaney a  commemorative can featuring an illustration of the Ex-Man’s face with a message congratulating her on “365 days of girlhood.”

Then all hell broke loose. Conservatives are calling for a boycott of Bud Light. Kid Rock posted a video of himself wearing a MAGA baseball cap, shooting up a case of Bud Light and saying, “Fuck Bud Light, and fuck Anheuser-Busch!”

“What’s going on here?”

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“Ick” Or Ethics? Michael Crichton’s 1981 Film “Looker” Is Coming True…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In “Looker,” a 1981 science fiction thriller starring Albert Finney, James Coburn and Susan Dey, involves a high tech research firm that concludes that real, live models, even after cosmetic surgery, can’t approach the physical perfection that will optimally influence consumers. Models are offered a contracts to have their faces and figures scanned to create 3D computer-generated avatars, indistinguishable from them, which are animated for use in commercials. Once their bodies duplicated digitally, they get lifetime paychecks (though not for as much as Miguel Cabrera, currently at $400,410,623 and counting, gets) and can retire, since their computer-generated, more perfect dopplegangers will be doing their work for them. For some reason, the evil tech firms has all of the models murdered, but that part of the plot is irrelevant here.

42 years later, Levi Strauss & Co. announced in a press release yesterday that it is partnering with an AI company to “increase the number and diversity of our models for our products in a sustainable way.” Yeah, those digital models in “Looker” were also “sustainable,” even though the models’ flesh and blood models were disposable. Levi’s will test the use of AI models to “supplement” real-life models later in 2023.

“While AI will likely never fully replace human models for us”, “—-yeah, tell it to Susan Dey—-we are excited for the potential capabilities this may afford us for the consumer experience,” said Dr. Amy Gershkoff Bolles, global head of digital and emerging technology strategy at Levi Strauss & Co, sounding a lot like James Coburn, the evil advertising genius in “Looker.”

Meanwhile, in arguably related news, Levi Strauss & Co. will be laying off 800 employees — almost 20% of its corporate jobs.

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Stop Making Me Defend Hillary Clinton!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hillary Clinton is being skewered on social media for the above promotional video promoting her upcoming Columbia U. course “Inside the Situation Room.” Clinton was brought onto the faculty to co-teach the offering, which is open by application only to students attending the university’s School of International and Public Affairs and undergraduates from Columbia College, Barnard College, and the university’s School of General Studies.

Some of the criticism is in line with that of Glenn Greenwald and other Clinton adversaries who regard her as a warmonger. “The US official who has urged more wars than anyone over the last 3 decades with the possible exception of John Bolton – including Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine – is teaching Columbia students a class called ‘Foreign-Policy Decision-Making.’ And boy they’re excited!” Greenwald tweeted. The rest of the brickbats are aimed at the video itself, which the Blaze described as “cringy.”

Oh, it’s that, all right. But both critiques are unfair, at least regarding Hillary. Regardless of what Clinton’s policies and proclivities were, she certainly has sufficient background in the field of international diplomacy and foreign policy decision-making to provide students with useful perspective. The press release about the course promises that students will learn “how to analyze and understand the complex interplay between individual psychology, domestic politics, public opinion, bureaucracy, the international environment, and other factors which feed into decisions about foreign policy,” including the “use of force, signaling and perception, intelligence and its analysis, the deployment of other instruments of statecraft, and more.” Hillary is qualified to provide guidance and the benefit of her experience on all of that. I’d take the course, just as I took the negotiation seminar taught by Adrian Fisher, who was the principle U.S. negotiator of the SALT Treaty.

The critique of the goofy video is certainly called for, but Hillary is innocent. She didn’t write, direct or conceive the stupid thing: that’s on the university. Nor is her the quality of her performance being fairly knocked: she’s a lot better than her stiff co-instructor, who has the ineffable air of a bad community theater actress about her. Helen Mirren couldn’t make that script work; I think Hillary was a good sport to do the video, lame as it was. She had just joined the faculty, and she was being cooperative, collegial, and willing to spoof herself to boost student interest.

Well, good for her. I came away from that video liking her more than I did before seeing it.

Parody Ethics: What Is This Case Doing At The Supreme Court? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Well, KABOOM! There goes my head.

Absurdly, Jack Daniel’s, the largest American whiskey manufacturer, sued VIP Products, one of the principle American dog toy manufacturer (Spuds loves their toys) over a parody plastic squeaky toy modeled on Jack Daniel’s bottles. (Spud likes a squeaky toy that looks like a Coor beer bottle). On the dog toy, as you can see, instead of describing “Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey” manufactured by “Jack Daniel’s,” the toy is “Bad Spaniel,” “Old No. 2 on your Tennessee carpet.”

Oral argument at the Supreme Court was yesterday. Finding a likelihood that consumers would confuse the “Bad Spaniels” toy with Jack Daniel’s, the trial court ruled in favor of the liquor company and barred VIP from continuing to manufacture the parody toy, ruling, believe it or not, that that consumers would confuse the “Bad Spaniels” toy with Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Yeah, I always have that problem, mixing up dog toys with liquor bottles. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed on both counts, because the trial court’s theory was…well, let Sidney Wang explain:

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: “Regina: The City That Rhymes With Fun!”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I can understand one dim bulb not realizing that this was a vulgar, juvenile, and offensive promotion. But an entire tourism organization? Nobody stepped up and said, “Wait a minute! Are you people nuts?”?

Wow.

Experience Regina, the tourism organization in Saskatchewan’s capital city of Regina, came up with an oh-so-clever idea for new tourism campaign slogan: “Show us your Regina.” They really did that. They had a second slogan too: “The city that rhymes with fun.” Get it??

Venus is a town in Texas, by the way. Just thought I’d mention it.

Back to Regina: oddly, many people found the two slogans inappropriate. Actually, just about everyone did, which again raised the question of how these locker-room level gags got past the first brain-storming session. So, because nobody involved possessed either good taste, the sense God gave an oyster, or the guts to stand up and make the tourist promotion equivalent of, “Uh, General Custer? I don’t think going down into the valley is such a good idea,”Experience Regina’s CEO had to release a quick abject apology. groveling,

“I want to start by apologizing, on behalf of myself and our team, for the negative impact we created with elements of our recent brand launch.  It was clear that we fell short of what is expected from our amazing community with some slogans that we used.”

Now he needs to resign for assembling such an inept and sophomoric staff.

Incidentally, there is a Delores, Colorado. Maybe he can start over there…

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Source: Outkick

Ethics Hero And “Bite Me!” Déjà Vu: San Jose Sharks Goalie James Reimer [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

You may not believe this, given how often it is I have to do it, but I hate repeating myself. This post is essentially identical to this one, from January: same issue, same pandering, power-abusing sports league (the NHL), same awards (Ethics Hero and A “Bite Me!”), same despicable news media coverage; different team (the Sharks in place of the Flyers) and different player (Sharks goalie James Reimer replacing the Philadelphia Flyers’ Ivan Provorov…during the game against the Islanders,).

As in the case of the Flyers two months ago, the Sharks hosted a Pride Night (what someone’s sexual activities have to do with hockey and why they are something to be proud of remains a mystery to me), and announced that, in addition to offering silly LGTBQ+ themed, “Great Stupid”classic items like these…

…during the game against the Islanders,and promoting it with pandering blather like this…

…the team also committed its players to wearing special pride-themed jerseys during pre-game warm-ups. Well, you can’t do that, not ethically. It’s compelled speech by an employer with a threat of negative consequences for any employee who doesn’t comply. I would (and have) refused to go along with such edicts as an employee in the past even when I happened to agree with the sentiments I was ordered to endorse.

Like Provorov, the Sharks goalie declined to be pushed into endorsing something he chose not to, stating,

“For all 13 years of my NHL career, I have been a Christian — not just in title, but in how I choose to live my life daily. I have a personal faith in Jesus Christ who died on the cross for my sins and, in response, asks me to love everyone and follow him. I have no hate in my heart for anyone, and I have always strived to treat everyone that I encounter with respect and kindness. In this specific instance, I am choosing not to endorse something that is counter to my personal convictions which are based on the Bible, the highest authority in my life,”

He should not have been placed in a position where he had to make such a statement. (I would have preferred to see a shorts statement about compelled speech and political endorsements in general, but that’s just me.)

Predictably, and just as in the case of Reimer, the Woke Borg, Mainstream Media Division, attacked. One hockey writer described Reimer as “absolutely a homophobe” and beclowned himself by writing, “Here’s also what I believe, Jesus would unequivocally love and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. He’d be the first to wear a rainbow.” Another sports writer wrote that Reimer is “hiding behind the Bible to refuse to endorse gay people having rights and existing.” A bit less mainstream, a newsletter about sexism in sports spat out, “Under the umbrella of disingenuous bullshit, you can fuck right off with this statement. If you truly believed the queer community is welcome in hockey, you’d wear the shirt. You do not get to have it both ways. Jesus is not impressed.” More assumptions about that well-known hockey fan, Jesus of Nazareth!

The NHL and the Sharks are the ethics villains here for putting their players in this position.

The NHL and the Sharks are the ethics villains here for putting their players in this position. The Sharks tried to both double down and weasel out, issuing this:

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