Clay Travis Tried To Give Away Free Bud Light - and No One Would Touch It

Brittany M. Hughes | May 9, 2023
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By this point we all know the phrase, "Go woke, go broke." But it turns out that some companies have screwed the pooch with their customer base so bad, they can't even give their products away. 

Outback founder and sports journalist Clay Travis decided to put together a little experiment to figure out if Bud Light fans really have given up on the iconic beer brand after the company plastered the grinning mug of a transgender “woman” on its can and hired him to peddle their swill. And suffice it to say, the results weren’t good for Bud Light.

To test whether beer drinkers would down an 8-ounce of Bud Light even if it were free, Travis set out several big coolers around a Nashvile-area concert last weekend. The crates were filled with all kinds of beer including Bud Light, Yuengling, and Michelob Ultra, with signs reading, “Pick which beer you want.”

By the end of the night, Travis said he was left with melted coolers swimming with rejected Bud Light cans.

“No one would take the Bud Light all night long,” Travis said. “Big issue going forward for Bud Light is many don’t even want to be seen with product. They just pick another brand.”

Travis called the experiment "an unmitigated disaster" for Bud Light.

Related: Too Late? Anheuser-Busch Responds to Beer Fiasco After ‘One Single Can’ Ruined the Brand

"[M]any are now avoiding the beer to avoid being mocked for drinking the beer. There’s no quick fix here, brand is slaughtered in red state beer drinking communities. Bet there is hardly any at SEC tailgates this fall," he wrote. 

That doesn’t spell good news for Bud Light or its parent company, Anhueser-Busch. Sales have dropped like a boat anchor for the nearly 40-year-old beer after trans TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney released a video last month revealing the company had hired him to be their latest spokesperson. The company has since fired two of its top marketing executives, rolled out a stereotypical pro-America ad, and even released a statement walking back the Mulvaney partnership and attempting to rebrand the whole debacle as a mistake that upper management wasn’t even aware of, all in a desperate attempt to stop the financial bleeding and put the company back in the good graces of its largely blue-collar male customer base.

But if Travis’ social experiment is any indication, it’s gonna take a lot more than tip-toed apologies and a 20-second shot of a Clydesdale marching past an American flag to get good ol’ boys to drink beer marketed by a dude who thinks he’s a little girl. If only someone could had seen it coming.

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