Bud Light Marketing Lady Replaced

The end of the brand's transgender misadventure.

Alissa Heinerscheid, former Bud Light marketing VP.

Note: I normally save these sorts of more cultural/political posts for ZeroHedge, but this one was interesting enough that I thought I’d share here too.

You Know Things Are Bad When This Happens

The last person corporations operating in America want to hire for a high profile job in 2023 is a white man, so you know things are bad for Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) when they just replaced the lady pictured above with man pictured on the right below. 

As reported by Ad Age on Friday, Alissa Heinerscheid, the marketing mastermind behind hiring the homosexual female impersonator Dylan Mulvaney to sell Bud Light, of all products, has been relieved of her duties at the brand and replaced by Todd Allen, Vice President of Global Marketing at Budweiser. Mrs. Heinerscheid has taken a leave of absence, according to Anheuser-Busch. Perhaps she will come back refreshed to put her talents to work on a wine cooler brand or something, but her exit from Bud Light may be an inflection point in corporate wokeness.  

How Anheuser-Busch Got Into This Mess

In a post earlier this week ("Why Anheuser-Busch Went Woke"), we looked at a couple of theories for why Anheuser-Busch let Heinerscheid hire Mulvaney in the first place. One theory was to appeal to ESG investment managers; another was to woo regulators: 

Corporate Wokeness Finally Goes Too Far

Even so, as Isaac Simpson put it in an extraordinary post on his Substack (It Knows We're Here To Kill It), using a drag queen to market Bud Light was a step too far: 

In the span of seven years, our beloved mega corporations have become canvasses for far-left propaganda. Nike went against America, Gillette went against men, the NFL went gay, and Postmates’ launched a “bottoms menu” encouraging customers to heighten anal sex by ordering certain foods. These weren’t one offs. They were broadcasted to the public, seen by kids. Some people threatened boycotts, but normies shrugged it off. Just marketers trying to get attention, nothing to see here.

But then Bud Light put a Theater Kid on its iconic blue can. Just one step too far. The perfect humiliation. The ultimate symbol of the American working class painted over with a performative homosexual influencer. There was simply no capitalist explanation. In no world would gay elites and Brooklyn dog moms ever drink Bud Light, and no reasonable marketing person could think otherwise. Even my most centrist, reasonable, rational friends texted me. “Wow…I thought this was an April Fool’s joke…this is insane!” It will be remembered as a tipping point.

Simpson pointed out something I hadn't seen reported elsewhere: the Daily Mail sent paparazzi to tail Heinerscheid in Manhattan, and someone got them to take it down. 

But while the can itself is the bigger and more distracting story, a smaller one reveals the importance of this moment. The Daily Mail published, then quietly took down, a tabloid article with paparazzi shots of the marketing executive behind the atrocity. No media sources, left or right, have covered the deletion. The Daily Mail said nothing about it, no retraction. It’s not the article’s existence that matters—there’s been others published about her, but none quite so demeaning. It’s that powerful people were so appalled by the yellow press treating a marketing executive as a public figure that they demanded a silent retraction.

The marketing person in question is Alissa Heinerscheid, née Gordon, a Harvard WASP (apparently they do still exist, and this is what they’re doing) with New York Times nuptials and an $7.5 million condo overlooking Central Park. She has not the slightest f**ing clue what a Bud Light-and-Parliaments liquid lunch feels like when taken at a tailgate, construction site, or par 3 golf course—surely 80%+ of use cases for this terrible “beer,” if you could even call it that anymore.

The mention of her seven-figure Manhattan condo reminded me of something similar. Years ago, a New York-based blogger did some digging on a New York Times reporter (who's since become a Washington Post columnist) who also lived in a seven-figure apartment in Manhattan. He was contacted by people representing her, and convinced to delete his post. As with Heinerscheid, elites steering our culture are supposed to be beyond our scrutiny. 

That said, the dismissal of Heinerscheid must have come as surprise to Simpson, as he wrote in his post that Anheuser-Busch wouldn't be able to get rid of her:

AB InBev’s precarious position comes from the fact that it can’t fire Heinerscheid. It can’t apologize. It can’t rededicate itself to the American working class, that deplorable mass of Christian bigots. Global brands are now unable to purge themselves of weak links, insofar as they forward the correct ideologies. This is classical Communism—there is no good or bad performance, only good or bad people, and no good Party Member can be held accountable. “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

That they have kicked her off of the Bud Light brand, though, lends weight to Simpson's observation that this Bud Light fiasco was a tipping point. He goes on in his essay to say it's possible to beat corporate wokeness monster. You can read the rest of his essay on his Substack here.