Turn on the news at any time during the day and you’ll most likely be flooded with yet another update on America’s new immigration policies. No matter what your politics, you may cope with the stress of the situation by cracking open a can of the most American beer of them all: a good old shiny can of Budweiser. But you may be shocked to learn that your all American beer company was not only founded by an immigrant; it is running an ad about that immigrant during the most coveted ad spot of the year — the Super Bowl.
America’s most popular beer brand, Anheuser-Busch InBev, was co-founded by a German immigrant, Adolphus Busch, in the mid 19th century. And it is his journey pursuing the American Dream that will be documented in a one minute long Budweiser commercial. The ad, which will be viewed by nearly 200 million spectators, has been in the works for a while now. As AdWeek reports, the commercial took nearly two months of 14 hour long days to shoot, and cost an estimated $13 million to produce.
The ad, which you can watch here, details the trials and travails of an immigrant to the United States. And it seems decidedly on the side of the immigrant (“You’re not wanted here!” an angry American shouts at Busch’s character. “Go back home!”).
The all-American beer company insists that nothing could be more American than the immigrant’s tale that’s featured in the ad. As Laura Rowan, group strategy director at Anomaly, told AdWeek, “This is the story of the original self-made man, one of the founders of the American dream.”
It’s an interesting stance to take indeed, considering the advertising measures Budweiser took during the last six months of 2016, when they removed branding from cans entirely, replacing it with a single word: AMERICA. It would seem that for Budweiser, there’s no contradiction between being patriotic and being pro-immigrant.
The company insists that the commercial has nothing to do with Trump’s latest executive order banning immigrants from Muslim-dominated countries. “There’s really no correlation with anything else that’s happening in the country,” Budweiser VP Ricardo Marques told AdWeek. Still, Marques told AdWeek that the story is relevant today “because probably more than any other period in history today the world pulls you in different directions, and it’s never been harder to stick to your guns.”
Indeed. Touché to Budweiser for sticking to theirs.
