TheQuartering [5/11/2023]
The marketing genius behind some of Budweiser’s most iconic ads has slammed his former employer for destroying the image he helped create.
Robert Lachky, who created the memorable ‘Whassup?’ promo of 1999 and the ‘Talking Frogs’ commercial that debuted at the Super Bowl five years earlier, said it took him two decades to establish Budweiser as one of America’s most prominent beers.
But, he said, that all came crashing down last month when TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, 26, announced she was partnering with Bud Light and showed off cans featuring her face.
Now, sales of the light beer are down in every region of the United States.
‘It took us 20 years to take Bud Light beer to the Number 1 beer in the country, and it took them one week to dismantle it,’ Lachky said of InBev, Budweiser’s Belgian parent company.
During Lachky’s time at the Anheuser-Busch, he created many of the Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s.
One of the ones he created, in which three frogs croaked ‘bud,’ ‘weiss’ and ‘err,’ was dubbed ‘one of the most iconic alcohol campaigns in advertising history’ by Adweek.
And another, featuring a group of friends calling each other while sitting at their respective homes watching television and drinking a Budweiser, in which they ask each other ‘Whassup’ helped define the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Lachky also served as Bud Light’s brand manager, creating advertisements like the I Love You Man commercial in 1995 and the Real Men of Genius campaigns.
Under his tenure, Bud Light surpassed Miller Light as the top-selling light beer country.
He left Anheuser-Busch in 2009, just four months after InBev acquired the company and began implementing aggressive cost-cutting measures, including several rounds of layoffs — though Lachky says it was his own decision to leave.
Now, Lachky — who runs his own consulting firm in St. Louis — says the company only has itself to blame for its plummeting sales.