One year after killing Bud Light’s status as America’s top-selling beer, Dylan Mulvaney mocked the controversy in a light-hearted, girly music video.
The new video, titled “Days of Girlhood,” includes images of the transgender influencer prancing around in lingerie and in a pastel bikini for an all-female pool party.
In the video, which has numerous visual allusions to such movies as “Mean Girls” and “Legally Blonde,” Mulvaney sings, “the patriarchy’s over, you can hold our beer!”
At that moment, the former Bud Light spokesperson shoots water from a pink gun at a table of unlabeled cans of beer — a clear parody of a famous protest by Kid Rock.
The Bud Light flap began almost exactly a year ago when the brand cheered the social-media personality’s “year of girlhood” and issued a special commemorative can.
The backlash was swift and brutal.
Bud Light had been America’s top-selling beer brand when it partnered with Ms. Mulvaney. But in subsequent months, sales cratered by about a quarter, tens of billions in market cap was lost, and there were numerous demonstrative public actions against Bud Light by Kid Rock and others.
Layoffs followed both throughout the supply chain and at Anheuser-Busch’s marketing team.
In recent months, Bud Light has tried to live down the flap and rebrand itself in a more masculine vein by signing a new sponsorship deal with the UFC mixed-martial arts promotion, partnering with football legend Peyton Manning, and sponsoring the upcoming tour of comedian Shane Gillis, who once was fired from “Saturday Night Live” over purportedly racist jokes.