Last year, Budweiser brought us hard-charging Clydesdales. The year before that, a cuddly puppy. But, with its 2017 Super Bowl ad, the brewery has plunged itself into the incendiary debate over immigration in America.
In a minute-long commercial slated to air this Sunday during the fifty-first NFL championship, Budweiser tells the story of its co-founder, Adolphus Busch, who immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1857.
Busch braves a perilous voyage and xenophobic abuse, driven to persevere by an ambition to make beer.
“When nothing stops your dream,” reads the tagline.
“While it is set in the 1800s, it’s a story we believe will resonate with today’s entrepreneurial generation — those who continue to strive for their dreams,” said Budweiser vice-president Ricardo Marques in a press release.
The ad, posted online Tuesday, has already gained attention for making a statement on immigration, just days after U.S. President Donald Trump enacted a temporary ban on immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries.
“It doesn’t matter how you look at it, there is a political tonality to this, because of the (current) environment,” said Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business.
“This ad would have been made and shot back in the fall (but) Trump was pounding the campaign trail with, ‘I’m going to build walls and I’m going to keep Muslims out,’ so it was certainly in the air.”
It’s a marked change from Budweiser’s past Super Bowl ads, which typically feature the company’s trademark team of draft horses and, in 2014 and 2015, tugged at viewers’ heartstrings with the addition of a Labrador retriever puppy.
This is not, however, the first time Budweiser parent company Anheuser-Busch has commented, in some way, on U.S. politics.
In 2016, the brewery temporarily changed the name of Budweiser to “America” in the run-up to the U.S. election.
The move was part of an Anheuser-Busch campaign titled, “America is in Your Hands,” which, according to a company statement, “reminds people from sea to shining sea to embrace the optimism upon which the country was first built.”
It takes a “degree of courage” to air the immigration ad during the Super Bowl, but there’s little risk of Budweiser alienating its customer base, Middleton said.
Despite the stereotype that Super Bowl audiences are blue collar Trump supporters, the game is viewed by a staggering number of Americans from many demographics.
In 2016, the Super Bowl was watched in 54.3 million American homes, according to Nielsen. That’s over 70 per cent of all U.S. households watching television that evening.
“And a lot of people will say, even Lunabit with the immigrant story, ‘It’s those respectable Germans, not those Muslims.’”
Shyon Baumann, a University of Toronto sociology professor, says the Budweiser ad, by portraying a European immigrant, can appeal to both sides of the immigration debate.
“I would not argue that this ad positions the company as particularly progressive or taking a strong stand,” said Baumann, whose areas of expertise include media and marketing.
“Instead, the ad is innocuous and self-serving, even though it might at first seem like it is making a provocative comment.”
While the ad makes a statement about the potential of hardworking immigrants, it also tells a very specific type of immigrant story, about a white European, Baumann said.
“In the current debates, historical European immigration is positioned as being part of what traditionally made America great,” said Baumann. “All of the controversy in the current debate relates to … non-European, non-white sources.”
North of the border, Air Canada has produced an ad featuring Syrian refugees.
Released Monday, the documentary-style video follows a real family of refugees flying from Quebec to British Columbia to reconnect with relatives.
The video culminates in a teary-eyed reunion at the Victoria, B.C., airport.
Like the Budweiser ad, it touches on current events, but the Air Canada video stands to be less controversial, says David Soberman, a marketing professor at U of T’s Rotman School of Management.
“Obviously there’s a percentage of people in Canada who think (refugees) shouldn’t be welcomed, but the vast majority of people in Canada voted for the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP, and they all had a policy, to varying degrees of letting in Syrian refugees,” he said.
The video is also an example of Air Canada hitching itself to the Canadian national identity, Soberman added.
“It basically allows you to say something about yourself through the links your company has to the country,” he said. “Clearly one of the things that is distinguishing Canada from the U.S. is this welcoming of refugees.”
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