Bud Light is being criticized after pandering to lost customers with a county-themed commercial and preventing viewers from offering feedback by disabling the comments on YouTube.
The commercial, which debuted during the Thursday NFL Draft and was later published to YouTube, shows four friends opening cans of Bud Light at a country music festival as the song Chicken Fried by the Zac Brown Band plays.
It is one of a number of commercials released by the company since the partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney at the beginning of April caused sales to plummet.
In the three days since the 30-second video was released it has accrued more than 8 million views, but received less than 200 likes. By comparison, the song Chicken Fried was uploaded 14 years ago and has 135 million views and 571,000 likes.
It is not clear how many users ‘disliked’ the new commercial – in 2021 YouTube removed a feature allowing the public to see how many dislikes a video has. Some people argued at the time in doing so it was catering to large corporations that would often become the victims of ‘dislike attacks’.
Disabling the comments on YouTube did not stop viewers from discussing the advert on Twitter. ‘Real smart, p*** off that demographic, then cynically try to lure them back with this. Don’t fall for it,’ one user wrote.
