Remember that Budweiser Super Bowl ad we told you about earlier this week? You know, the one everyone is talking about because it tells the story of an immigrant coming to America and overcoming anti-immigrant sentiment but then creating the Anheuser Busch brewing company?
We asked at the time of our post “if the ad was even true?” Turns out, it’s not. From Slate:
Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad is a moving immigrant story. It’s just not Adolphus Busch’s: https://t.co/xgy6e5ZFNQ pic.twitter.com/S6bZ5huyvC
— Slate (@Slate) February 5, 2017
Slate interviewed, William Knoedelseder — author of “Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer — who called the ad and “alternate view of the Adolphus Busch story” and “fanciful”:
What was your first impression of the ad?
It’s got wonderful production values, it’s very expensive and, I think, very effective—and mostly fiction. It’s an alternate view of the Adolphus Busch story. What’s true is, yeah, there was a guy named Adolphus Busch. He did land in New Orleans and come up the river to St. Louis, and there was a guy named Eberhard Anheuser that he became partners with. But the rest of it, as far as I know, is just fanciful. I particularly love the thing on the river where he’s on some sort of raft or a barge with the black guy, some sort of reference to a fella whose name we can’t say on the radio from Huck Finn. That, as far as I know, never happened. They’re just playing with another myth of the Mississippi. Ironically, that’s what Adolphus would do. He used the Battle of Little Big Horn to sell Anheuser-Busch. No one had ever done that before.
So not only is the Super Bowl ruining the ads with political statements, they’re fake, too. If we can’t trust beer companies to be honest, who can we trust?
My faith is beer ads is starting to wane. https://t.co/L1JDrLBFoD
— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) February 5, 2017
Fake news meets fake ads:
https://twitter.com/ConservEsq/status/828357326285504516
And let’s call it was it is: a “lie”:
The Budweiser Super Bowl ad is a lie. https://t.co/Dxtu8eBPmQ
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) February 5, 2017
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Related:
Is Budweiser trolling President Trump with its 2017 Super Bowl ad?
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