The New York Post's Kyle Smith has seen the dethroning of the King of Beers. And he likes what he sees.
Sales have tanked. In the interest of driving them down a bit more, Budweiser is abandoning its current marketing strategy in favor of a desperate plea to fashionable millennials.
This holiday season, for the first time since Kris Kringle learned to stuff a stocking, Bud is ditching the Clydesdales in its TV commercials in favor of a campaign in which a series of young people will look directly into the camera and tell us which unseen friend they'd most like to give a Bud to.
What has driven the decline in sales and subsequent hipsterization of Bud? Smith says it's simple: capitalism.
The real problem for Bud is not insufficient appeal to the ironic drinker but that America’s taste buds have grown up and maybe even spent some time in grad school.
Craft beers—despite their tiny marketing budgets—account for 15 percent of the beer budget of the youngest legal drinkers. Bud’s market share, despite that gargantuan advertising spend, is down to 7.6 percent, nearly a 50 percent drop in just the last decade.
The failure of Budweiser is actually a story of the triumph of a liberalized marketplace, of decentralization and deregulation. Bottom-up demand produces a livelier, zestier array of choices than top-down command.
After Prohibition ended, tight government restrictions made it increasingly impossible for small breweries to operate. Around 1900, there were some 2,000 breweries in the United States, but by 1980 there were fewer than 200.
A series of actions swept away ridiculous government regulatory burdens that benefitted no one except Big Beer and their flavorcidal, lowest-common-denominator approach.
Jimmy Carter signed a little-noticed law legalizing home brewing in 1978, which allowed hobbyists to start tinkering around again, and in 1983, California and Oregon legalized brewpubs, inspiring other states to follow suit.
Today there are again more than 2,000 US breweries.
It seems the invisible hand has finally put down its Budweiser.