How Bud Light killed DEI:
The Scene
Anson Frericks says he tried to warn them. For a little over a decade, Frericks worked at Anheuser-Busch InBev, finishing his time at the company as president of sales and distribution. He left in 2022 to co-found Strive, the anti-woke investment company that rebelled against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) guidelines for companies, arguing that political and ideological goals were crowding out policies that made sense for shareholders.
His Strive co-founder, Vivek Ramaswamy, ran for president. Frericks watched InBev tumble into controversy, after a Bud Light sponsorship video with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney backfired, turning the brand into a conservative punchline. In “Last Call for Bud Light,” Frericks writes about what he saw inside the company, at what might have been the apogee of DEI — published at a moment when a new president is trying to root those policies out of the public and private sectors. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.
The View From Anson Frericks
David Weigel: One of the turning points you write about, after the company is purchased by InBev, is the decision to move the headquarters from St. Louis to New York. What was the impact of that?
Anson Frericks: The company had been headquartered in St Louis since the 1870s. It was in the heartland. There’s an old saying: If it plays in Peoria, it’ll play across the country. And Peoria is pretty close to St Louis. After the company was bought by InBev, a lot of the execs who had been living in New York moved to St. Louis, which wasn’t the sort of metropolis they were used to. Their rationale for moving the company was, well, we can’t get great talent to St Louis.
This is around the same time that Donald Trump is coming up, running for president, so the move is almost a metaphor about culture moving the coast. You lost a lot of people that were more Midwestern or family oriented. You picked a lot of people that were younger, more urban in their tastes. In the Midwest, Anheuser, Busch, Bud Light, Budweiser, had 50% plus market share. It was much less in New York. I’d say that the Dylan Mulvaney downfall started there. We started dropping country music sponsorships and started replacing them with techno festivals and techno sponsorships.
You write about the “Bud Light Party” campaign in 2016, and how ineffective it was when one part of that emphasized LGBTQ rights and gay marriage. What was the long-term impact of that? Why wasn’t it a warning of what didn’t work?
It was just a really ineffective campaign, with a slight leftist tilt to it. Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer were the spokespeople, but their ads didn’t really move the needle in New York or Los Angeles. Neither did the LGBTQ commercials. The message was, nobody wants Bud Light to even be close to politics. The people who worked on that campaign were fired, but seven years ago, the lesson was forgotten.
What sort of policies got implemented that weren’t necessarily increasing shareholder value?
The company always talked about its 10 principles, which guided everything. They were about dreaming big, acting like owners, and attracting the best talent. One principle was that we promote people based on their abilities. That got changed in this time period to: We promote people based on the quality and diversity of their teams. There were diversity dashboards introduced at the organization; all of a sudden you would see your team there, with breakdowns of how many people were black, white, and a bunch of different immutable characteristics. It was very clear what that meant internally.
The surveys that asked if people were satisfied by this were high, but they were encouraged to be high. If the CEO of the company has a DEI target, he says, the people below me need to have high scores. You focus on that, and you get punished at each level of the organization if you do not have a good score within your division. I think it was a distraction, the amount of time that the company was spending on employee affinity groups and increasing DEI scores, as opposed to figuring out how we’re going to improve the business.
A lot of the problems you had to address would be told to you by the Human Rights Campaign: You need LGBTQ positive commercials, and you need to offer gender affirming care for your employees, if you want to get 100% on our survey. Twenty years ago, the score was based on actions like: Make sure you are not excluding LGBTQ people from your hiring practices. Fair enough. But it got very aggressive over time.
Alissa Heinerscheid, who was VP for Bud Light in 2023, got a lot of the blame for what happened. What was her role?
We had a guy who was a 40-year company veteran, Andy Goeler, as the head of Bud Light. He was probably the best marketer the company ever had. He really did revive Bud Light for a time, after the disastrous “Bud Light Party” campaign — he came up with “Dilly Dilly.” But I think the company, as part of their DEI mandates, wanted to make a point of having the first female VP of Bud Light.
I knew Alissa. I don’t remember her being a remarkable employee. And I think she brought her politics to the job. At that time, in 2021 and 2022, you couldn’t really push back on brand people who said they wanted to make it more progressive and do more political advertising. And something that might fly in New York City might not fly in the rest of the country, where the customer base was.
With the Dylan Mulvaney partnership — I don’t think that people in Chelsea realized how controversial the transgender movement was. At the time, there were 25 bills in various state legislatures about banning gender affirming care for minors, or “biological men” competing against women in sports. When they saw that sponsorship, a lot of people scratched their heads. And the company could either stand by Alissa and Dylan Mulvaney and say, “No, this is the direction of the brand, we’re going to be like Ben & Jerry’s” or “hey, we screwed up, and this is not what the brand stands for.” The response was indicative of a company that could not serve multiple masters.
I have a “Bud Right” koozie on my desk from the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign — you know Vivek really well. Did his campaign have an impact on any of this? Did Trump?
I don’t think that had much of an impact. I think that it was Kid Rock lighting up a case of Bud Light, and the broader social media reaction. I think that exemplified the feelings of a lot of people in middle America. “Man, you know, the last couple years, I kept my mouth shut when the NFL allowed players to kneel on the ground, because I want to watch the game. When Disney got involved in the parental rights issues in Florida – well, there’s only one Disney World, and my kids really want to go.” All of a sudden, you do this with a working class man’s beer.
You could see the effect right away. Sales data gets reported from Walmart and Kroger and 711. It was coming out every week, showing Bud Light sales were down 10%, 20%, 30%. That gets amplified on social media, where you’re seeing beer lines 20 people deep for Coors Light, and nobody in line for Bud Light. People were just tired of brands getting involved in progressive issues that historically had nothing to do with the product.
What impact do you expect, on all of this, from Trump’s orders banning DEI?
I think it’s gonna be three-fold. I think certain companies, where DEI was never really part of their authentic culture, have cover to quickly roll it back. You’ve already seen — tractor supply companies, Harley Davidson, Walmart, companies that sell to an audience that never really believed in these policies anyway. There’s a second group of companies — I’ll put Meta in that category — that just didn’t see these policies helping the bottom line. They saw that a lot of the systems for employees were divisive, and the calls by employees to get involved in political issues didn’t help them at all.
The third group of companies are hardcore believers in DEI, and they’ll probably be resistant. You’ve seen companies like Costco and JP Morgan double down. I think those companies are gonna continue to get dragged into headlines and have problems explaining their actions, and I think it will probably eventually go away. But I don’t think that we can say that we’re at the end of DEI.
If you’re not with one of those companies, and the Human Rights Campaign wants a meeting on diversity and inclusion, do you just not take it? Is that the move?
Just don’t take the meeting, unless it’s part of your business. If you’re a business in downtown New York City and you work with DEI consultants, maybe it’s worth it. Otherwise, I don’t think that it makes sense to have meetings with those groups that have nothing to do with the mission of your organization.
