MillerCoors Exits Industry-Wide Beer Campaign

Still pissed over an ongoing dispute that started with a Bud Light Super Bowl ad shaming the company for using corn in its brewing process, MillerCoors will be sitting out an industry-wide campaign meant to lift the sagging beer category…

The brand-agnostic effort will begin this summer and include funding from Anheuser-Busch InBev and Corona owner Constellation Brands, according to a report from Beer Marketer’s Insights.

But on Monday when the Beer Institute announced the collective effort at its annual meeting in Saint Louis, they noted that MillerCoors would be sitting it out.

“We love the concept. We are all for anything that can lift the category,” MillerCoors spokesman Adam Collins told Ad Age.

But “we can’t re-engage on the campaign until Anheuser-Busch stops their category denigration campaign,” Collins said, in reference to Anheuser-Busch ads criticizing beer brewed with corn syrup.

The rift between Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors began on Super Bowl Sunday when Bud Light returned to last year’s popular “Dilly, Dilly” medieval kingdom to accuse both Miller Lite and Coors Light of using corn syrup in their beers.

The spot’s corn syrup accusations, though not denied, drew a quick rebuttal from MillerCoors as well as from the National Corn Growers Association.

Then MillerCoors took to the New York Times where they jumped ugly with Anheuser-Busch. And MillerCoors’ CEO Gavin Hattersley got fiery about his competitor on the company’s 2018 fourth-quarter earnings call…

“Anheuser-Busch could not have handled it as a better gift if they tried harder. Our distributors are proud. They are fiercely competitive and they like nothing more than a good fight. Nothing we could have done could have fired them up so much.”

And things only got hotter when MillerCoors pulled out of a previously planned meeting for a multimillion-dollar, “Got Milk” style advertising campaign that would have resulted in an almost unheard of alliance between Anheuser-Busch InBev, Molson Coors, Heineken NV and Constellation Brands.

In March MillerCoors sued Anheuser-Busch InBev over its controversial Bud Light Super Bowl ad. And that litigation further poisoned any chance of MillerCoors participating in the planned collective effort to redeem Big Beer’s sagging fortunes.

MillerCoors’ Communications Chief, told the Wall Street Journal that the planned campaign to revive the declining beer sector would be “waste of time and money…while the dominant industry leader is spending millions of dollars demonizing beer ingredients.”

Heineken USA will also be staying on the sidelines until all the major players (read MillerCoors) are on board.

“In principle, we support this initiative. Once everyone comes to the table, of course we will be there,” a Heineken spokeswoman told Ad Age. “We hope that we reach a point where all major players can fully participate.”