Only Tom Wolfe Could Have Dreamed This Up

I woke up this morning to discover that a Miller Lite ad from Women's History Month last March has gone viral. I watched several YouTubes on the ad -- indeed, a couple of YouTubers have already done multiple videos on it -- and just trying to parse out the message, as far as I can tell, its pitch is that Miller ads used to be sexist back in the day, because they featured women in bikinis. However, Miller now regrets this, apparently because women actually invented beer, or something like that.

So Miller has more or less begun a campaign to get people to look in their garages for old beer ads, or something like that, and maybe send them in to Miller, which will shred them and turn them into compost. Miller will then either donate the compost to hop growers, who will donate the hops to women-owned breweries, or maybe donate the compost to women-owned breweries directly so they can start to grow the hops themselves, or something like that.

But I don't see any place Miller wants people to send the old sexist beer ads to, or there's no announcement that there'll be neighborhood drives to collect old beer ads for shredding, so there's no real call to action, except maybe to think general good thoughts about Miller. Just sort of feel regretful that Miller used to sell its beer by exploiting women in bikinis, but we're past that, so just drink whatever.

So first, this wasn't really an ad. If anything, it said Miller used to be an evil sexist company but is now going to do something vague and completely ineffective to expiate for it, so drink our beer, except they're calling it [redacted] Well, good [redacted] anyhow.

Three months later, people discovered the ad when looking for other ridiculous beer marketing campaigns in the wake of the Dylan Mulvaney catastrohe, and they found this one. Nobody noticed it when it came out, but now it's likely to do the same sort of damage to Miller Lite as Mulvaney did to Bud Light.

Only Tom Wolfe could have dreamed smething like this up.

Here's why Tom Wolfe would have had so much fun with it. The ad isn't meant to sell beer, although you'd think that's what a beer ad is supposed to do. Instead, the ad is there to appease government or government-approved watchdogs who monitor corporate conduct for adherence to diversity-and-inclusion guidelines. The ad is there to show that a cetain percentage of the corporate budget goes to goodthink. Nobody pays attention to it, it's just there because that's what the authorities want.

There's an added bonus that the marketing trade guilds will give their members little awards for their corporate goodthink campaigns, and the game goes on. Somebody named Geoffrey Ingersoll sums it up very well:

The oddest thing about ads like these is that they’re designed to target people who have nothing to do with the brand from soup to nuts.

Elite, probably female dominated and undoubtedly very liberal ad agency and marketing professionals and then of course the twitterati.

But if… https://t.co/ASjNuM0DQ9

— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) May 15, 2023

The Bud Light paradigm is repeating itself with the media revealing the overrated, overcredenialed gentry behind the awful ads:

Elizabeth Hitch, the senior director of marketing for Miller Lite explained that the company wanted to shed light on how women play a key role in the production of beer.

. . . It seems like Hitch was one of the leads responsible for the creation of the controversial advertisement. The Chicago, Illinois-native has also been the Marketing Director for Molson Coors’ Hard Seltzers in the past. A few other roles she had taken up in MillerCoors includes marketing manager, associate brand manager and regional business analyst amongst others.

Hitch obtained her MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing and finance from Marquette University.

At the time of writing this article, her LinkedIn account seemed to have been taken down.

Other sources identify another culprit:

The ad was the brainchild of chief marketing officer Sofia Colucci. "We recognize that Miller Lite played a contributing role in this in the past. We’ve been collecting our and other brands outdated, old sexist ads, displays and posters for months. We have been buying and removing any pieces we could find on the internet.”

It's been a while since I took a marketing class, but if you look at this and the Bud Light VP or Marketing fiasco, it appears the latest textbooks include a new cardinal rule of marketing: if you have the opportunity to alienate your core customer base by interjecting your personal political agenda, take it! As Daily Caller's investigative reporting has uncovered, Colucci is a raging leftist. Or at the very least, supports the current thing.

Wait a moment. So Miller Lite has both a senior director of marketing, an Elizabeth Hitch, and a chief marketing officer, Sofia Colucci. Who both seem to have come up with this expensive ad that nobody in fact was supposed to notice, and nobody in fact did until Bud Light did something so egregious that it drew attention to how overpiad and overrated corporate types spend their time.

Reports are that the two ladies at Miller Lite have already emulated Alissa Heinerscheid and deleted all their social media profiles. There's no word yet on whether they'll be taking leaves of absence.