Bud Light aired a spot ahead of UFC 334 at Madison Square Garden showing ring announcer Bruce Buffer trade places with a steakhouse server to serve customers. The brand is also selling a $99 "Fight Night Feast" box with a tomahawk steak and a "Bud Light beer money," per The Hollywood Reporter.
The ad is fine. A man whose actual job is screaming fighter names in a voice like a foghorn is now in a bow tie, pouring drinks for people who paid not to be in the octagon. "I like to be self-deprecating" is doing the focus group's job. But the ad is the warm-up. The real product is the bundle.
The "Fight Night Feast" is a tomahawk steak, a Paramount+ gift card, a pair of training gloves and a "Bud Light beer money," a real dollar bill printed with a beer logo, all for $99. Beer money has always been the funniest object in advertising: a fake dollar that can only buy the thing on the bill. It never pretended to be currency, and that is why people liked it. Bud Light has promoted the gag to an ingredient, the way a restaurant prints its menu on the receipt.
The math is the joke. $99 for a steak you could cook yourself, a gift card you have to redeem, gloves you have to wear to a gym, and one commemorative dollar that can't buy anything but more of the same. The bundle is a cage match between the checkout counter and the fan's wallet, and the sponsor picks when the bell rings. "The best part of fight night is getting together with friends over an ice-cold Bud Light and some great food" is not marketing. It is the sponsor reading its own press release back to you.
Buffer did the press tour like a man who has never been sold a product in his life. "It's like we made it," he said, about the UFC landing a mainstream beer sponsor. Thirty years in, the spectacle got the beer, the beer got a ring announcer in a bow tie, and everyone in the room is calling it a milestone.
YOUR TURN: Would you buy the box, or is the beer money the only honest dollar in it?
Comments (1)