This year, Budweiser’s Super Bowl commercial will tell the immigrant story of company co-founder Adolphus Busch. A marketing executive at Budweiser said the ad is “super relevant today,” but he also cautioned that the commercial is not meant to be taken as commentary on the current political climate in the United States.
Budweiser unveiled a 15-second teaser ad over the weekend to preview the minute-long Super Bowl commercial, which briefly depicts the story of the German-born, Anheuser-Busch co-founder. Busch and his brothers left Germany in 1857 and moved to St. Louis, where he would later take over his father-in-law’s company and turn it into the world’s largest beer producer. The brand’s Super Bowl ad will reportedly follow Busch’s journey to St. Louis while paying homage to the struggles immigrants face building new lives far from their homelands.
Ricardo Marques, Budweiser’s vice president of marketing, told AdWeek that the elements of Busch’s immigrant story the commercial looks to evoke include “the pursuit, the effort, the passion, the drive, the hard work, the ambition, that’s really what this is about more than anything else.” While Marques argued that the Anheuser-Busch co-founder’s story is as relevant today as it was 160 years ago, he added that despite the ongoing political debate around immigration and refugees, the commercial is not intended to be any sort of commentary on current political events.
“There’s really no correlation with anything else that’s happening in the country,” Marques told AdWeek. “We believe this is a universal story that is very relevant today because probably more than any other period in history today the world pulls you in different directions, and it’s never been harder to stick to your guns.”
Here’s a teaser for the commercial, titled “Born the Hard Way.”
In 2015, Budweiser aired a Super Bowl spot titled “Brewed the Hard Way,” which also touted the brand’s long history, but irked the beer industry’s growing contingent of craft brewers (and their fans) as well.
AB InBev-owned Anheuser-Busch and its brands are typically Super Bowl fixtures as the company holds exclusive advertising rights in the alcohol category. In addition to Budweiser’s Adolphus Busch commercial, the company’s planned ads this year also include a new 60-second Bud Light spot focused on friendship, a new Michelob Ultra ad, and the first-ever Super Bowl spot for the company’s Busch brand of beers.