Posts Tagged ‘john ruberry’

Six months that shook the marketing world: Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney debacle and killing a cash cow

Posted: October 1, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, culture, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics, Sports
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By John Ruberry

It was six months ago today–April Fool’s Day no less–when Dylan Mulvaney, to cap off his 365 Days of Girlhood series, did his first of two social media posts hawking Bud Light. Previously, in the words of Alissa Heinerscheid, who was in charge of marketing the brew, it was a “fratty” beer. The effect on Bud Light sales was immediate–a consistent and sustained 30-percent sales drop.

Immediately, the “experts” in the business world and the media, who are in fact narrative-driven morons with crisp, broadcast-friendly speaking voices, immediately ran to defend InBev, the parent company of Anheuser-Bush, with a consistent refrain, as if they were reading the same script, declaring “Boycotts don’t work.”

While that’s generally correct, the sales drop for Bud Light, a brew that tastes the same as Coor Light and Miller Lite, was in fact a walkaway. “Joe Sixpack,” the typical Bud Light drinker who believes that men are men and women are women–despite mutilation surgeries and hormone injections–found a way to scream “F*ck you” to the elites who say otherwise. 

Bill Maher said on his HBO show that the average American is furious because “they’ve had an agenda shoved down their throat.” When one of his guests, US Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) objected to Maher’s truth, he struck back, “You have to accept everything they say or you’re a bigot.”

So true. 

The plummet in Bud Light sales is a major victory for conservatives, as well as the majority of Americans who have known the difference between males and females since they were two years old.

And gender, despite the claims of now former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, is not “a spectrum.”

Mulvaney, whose ditzy faux female social media posts are about as pleasant as loud audio feedback, as well as the rest of the Anheueser-Busch marketing staff, did what was deemed impossible: killing a cash cow. I had a couple of marketing classes in college. Cash cows were revered by my professors, they are product lines that sell well with minimal advertising support. Heinz Ketchup, Ivory Soap, and Kellog’s Corn Flakes come to mind. The bountiful profits from cash cows are “milked” to support struggling brands. It’s a marketing circle of life.

One of those professors, in a lecture decried the use of celebrity endorsements in advertising, calling it “lazy marketing,” He also warned that celebrities, particularly those from the entertainment world, are known to do things morally objectionable, or get involved with unpopular political causes.

Now Anheuser-Busch is now spending a lot of money on its Bud Light “Easy to Sunday” campaign tied to the NFL as well as producing, again, commemorative cans, but this time with the logos of popular NCAA football programs, instead of a one-off Mulvaney can that was not sold to the public.

Too little too late. 

As sales continue to lag for Bud Light, it’s likely that scarce shelf space in supermarkets and liquor stores will soon be allocated to better selling brews. Modelo Especial this summer surpassed Bud Light as America’s bestselling beer.

The Bud Light cash cow has gone dry.

As I predicted here at Da Tech Guy months ago, using transgendered people to hawk mainstream products, while not completely dead, is now close to it. 

We have witnessed six months that shook the marketing world. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Droogs’ paradise: Rough first week for the “Purge Law” in Illinois

Posted: September 24, 2023 by John Ruberry in News/opinion, opinion/news
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By John Ruberry

A legal challenge, struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court, delayed the start of Illinois’ ludicrously misnamed SAFE-T Act, but it finally went into effect last Monday. 

The SAFE-T Act’s opponents refer to it as the “Purge Law,” a reference to the movie about a generally peaceful dystopian society, except for an annual 12-hour period where all crimes, including murder, are legal. The SAFE-T Act abolishes cash bail. Accused criminals are either set free after their arrest to await trial. Or they are locked up with no bail. The latter category is reserved for the most heinous criminals, as well as flight risks, and those who are suspected of being likely to intimidate witnesses, and the like.

Most accused criminals in Illinois, public safety be damned, will walk free, albeit some while wearing an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, which, in case you didn’t know, are very easy to remove.

Of course, without cash bail, which often is paid for by a friend or relative, accused criminals can be expected to be more likely to skip out of town and blow off their trial dates.

Welcome to Illinois, the criminal paradise, where Alex and his “Droogs” of A Clockwork Orange fame, will feel at home.

Here are some of the lowlights of the first week of “the Purge.”

One of the first accused thugs arrested and set free pretrial was a woman raising hell during an unofficial, and at times disruptive, Mexican Independence Day automobile caravan celebration in downtown Chicago. Esmerelda Aguilar of suburban Cicero allegedly attacked four Chicago police officers with pepper spray. Prosecutors didn’t even ask the Cook County judge presiding over her hearing to detain Aguilar.

Cook County prosecutors, in another case, didn’t ask for another accused criminal to be detained in another egregious case. A Ukranian national, Ivan Muryn, was ordered by a Cook County judge not to drive, to submit to electronic monitoring and to surrender his passport. According to CWB Chicago, Muryn has been “charged with failure to report an accident involving death.”

That death was of his wife. According to the Arlington Cardinal, Muryn was arguing with his spouse while driving in Inverness. His wife removed her seatbelt and she “fell” out of his car, and then she was fatally struck by another vehicle. Muryn kept driving. Yeah, she “fell” out of her car.

Outside of the Chicago area, two California men were pulled over in Henry County, near the Quad Cities, driving an old bus that contained over 5,000 pounds of marijuana. The value of the drugs is estimated to be worth between $6 million and $14 million. They were not jailed, even though the duo is accused of committing an Illinois Class X felony. The drug bust is being called one of the largest in Illinois history. 

Eight days ago, the sheriff of Williamson County in southern Illinois released 30 jail inmates, because of the SAFE-T Act, the sheriff said he could no longer detain them as they awaited trial. 

Back to the spiritual descendants of Alex’s Droogs.

Criminals are risk averse. If criminals believe they can get away with lawbreaking, or if they are caught, they won’t get locked up, they become emboldened. 

Early Thursday morning, at least 10 people, including a 72-year-old man who was beaten, were robbed on Chicago’s North Side. 

In an encore performance on Saturday night, in at least five incidents, a dozen people were robbed at gunpoint in a two-hour period on the city’s Northwest Side.  No one has been arrested for either wilding spree.

That last story led CWB Chicago to quip, “Did anyone in Chicago NOT get robbed or shot last night?” Oh yeah, of course people have been shot in Chicago this weekend, including an 86-year-old man.

Violence also hit DePaul University’s North Side campus on Saturday night. Four students were mugged, and one of them was beaten, another was pistol-whipped.

The Purge is here.

No one has recently heard from the SAFE-T Act’s primary champion, possible presidential candidate Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is on an extended vacation with his wife. Citing “security concerns,” the Democrat governor’s staff isn’t saying where Pritzker is. The governor, laughably but repeatedly claimed that the SAFE-T Act was about, “Making sure that we’re also addressing the problem of a single mother who shoplifted diapers for her baby, who is put in jail and kept there for six months because she doesn’t have a couple of hundred dollars to pay for bail.” The truth is, and Pritzker knows it, is that these Jean Valjeans of motherhood weren’t being jailed in Illinois, and they haven’t been so in quite some time.

Oh, back to Pritzker and his vacation: What about the security concerns of Illinois’ 12 million residents?

Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney who is more of a social worker than a prosecutor, says Illinois is “on the right side of history” now that the SAFE-T Act is up and running.

Well, history sometimes takes an evil turn.

John Ruberry regularly blogs, more nervously than ever, just outside of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Tide is our woke laundry detergent

Posted: September 17, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

After years of calling out the outrages and absurdities of political correctness and its successor, wokeness, I still manage to be regularly shocked. Yesterday I stumbled across a box while grocery shopping that boasted, “Ultra concentrated Tide–turn to cold to use 90 percent less energy***.”

Yes, even laundry detergent has gone woke. 

Okay, who wants to save money?

Pretty much everyone. 

However, when you look at the triple asterisks–you mean one isn’t enough?–you learn about the cold water claim, according to Tide, it occurs “on average when switching from hot to cold water.”

What if you mostly use warm water laundry washes?

Tide’s propagandistic green marketing push goes back to 2021. The ultimate goal of Tide, which is owned by Proctor & Gamble, is to “save the planet.”

Of course, it is.

When Mrs. Marathon Pundit and I purchase detergent, we look for fair prices, which means we don’t buy overpriced Tide, but more importantly, we want soap that cleans our clothes without damaging them. 

That’s all. We are modest folks.

The Marathon Pundit household is confident that the fate of Earth is not connected to our choice of laundry detergent.

As for Tide, it has a sustainability page on its website, where among other things, Tide claims people washing their clothes can “get great results, no matter the water temperature. Tide is specially designed to give you the best clean in every wash, even in cold water. Tide even cleans better in cold water than the bargain brand does in warm.”

Sorry I don’t believe it.

I have reasons to be skeptical of overreaching claims, as I am old enough to remember being told that carbon emissions would lead to a new ice age. That is, until I was lectured by my “betters” that carbon emissions would lead to global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps, as soon as the last decade. Al Gore predicted that last one. Yes, he did–don’t believe the lying fact-checkers.

Not only am I skeptical of leftist claims, but I am also doubly so of marketers’ claims.

As a liberated 21st century male, I do a lot of our family’s laundry. Unless a fabric is super-delicate, most of what I wash is–sorry Tide–done in warm water. Our clothes come out cleaner and there is no soap residue, as is usually the case when, against my better judgement, I wash clothes in cold. With whites I use the hot water cycle.

But Tide tells us cold water is better.

Hogwash.

Oh, my guess is that the marketing geniuses with Tide are out-of-touch rich slobs who have hired help handling their laundry chores.

If you are squeamish, you may want to skip the next three paragraphs.

I’m a runner and I run about 40 miles a week. Athletes’ foot and jock itch, usually caused by the ringworm fungus, is something I have to cope with every summer. The best way to eliminate this pernicious fungus is to wash infected garments in hot water. You hear that, Tide? Color garments might get damaged by hot water, yes, but apple cider vinegar soaking for infected color garments is great way to kill fungus.

Let’s stick with white socks. And if you had any doubts, now you know why athletes wear white socks.

Not only is cooler water, both cold and warm, ineffective in killing fungus, washing in such temperatures runs the risk of spreading the fungus to other garments. Oh, if you have a significant other who you share a bed with and you are infected with a fungus skin rash, and then your partner pulls a sheet from you as you are sleeping, guess who might acquire that rash? Even after your bedsheets go through a full cycle of a cold or warm water wash.

Oh, I’ve unknowingly put on infected clothes months after a failed wash, and guess what happened?

Let’s just say fungi are survivors.

Once again, Tide, I buy laundry detergent to clean our clothes. My way. Without wokeness, haughtiness, and without soap stains and the spread of fungus.

Back to bed sheets: Hot water washes, not cold or warm, kill bed bugs.

And finally, I don’t believe Tide’s claim that using cold water while washing clothes and bed sheets consumes “90 percent less energy.” I’ve been lied to way too many times.

Use Tide detergent. Save the planet. Get bitten by bed bugs. Spread fungal infections.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Review: Season 3 of Ragnarok on Netflix

Posted: September 3, 2023 by John Ruberry in culture, entertainment, media
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By John Ruberry

Moving to a new town, particularly after a tragedy–the death of your father–is a painful experience. Which is what high school student Magne Seier (David Stakston) and his younger brother, Laurits (Jonas Strand Gravli), confront when they move to the small Norwegian town of Edda in the Netflix series Ragnarok. 

And Edda isn’t just any town. The largest employer there is Jutul Industries where their kindly but weak-willed mother, Turid (Henriette Steenstrup), finds a job. More on Jutul in a bit.

How does Magne cope? By becoming a reincarnation of the Norse god Thor. And if “jutul” sounds familiar, they are the enemies of the Norse gods. 

Over the first two seasons, Magne, for the most part reluctantly, puts together a new gathering of the gods, including assisted care home resident Wotan Wagner (Bjørn Sundquist) as the new Odin, another high schooler, Iman Reza (Danu Sunth), as the new Freyja, and Harry (Benjamin Helstad), a mechanic and a boxer, as the new Týr. 

While Wotan/Odin wears an eye patch–the mythological Odin was one-eyed–he doesn’t ride a an eight-legged horse. The contemporary Odin travels around Edda in a motorized scooter. But he does look into the future with rune stones. There is also a tip of the hat to the importance of dwarfs in Norse mythology. A minor character, Halvor Lange (Espen Sigurdsen), a doctor at Wotan’s nursing home, is a dwarf.

Magne of course has Thor’s hammer.

Laurits is the reincarnation of the devious trickster god, Loki, and it’s difficult to ascertain whose side he is on. As it is with his “child,” his onetime tapeworm, the Midgard Serpent, who Laurits calls “Little O.”

In the third and final season of Ragnarok, the gods expand their crew, adding Kiwi (Ruben Rosbach), as Heimdall, and Laurits’ love interest, Jens (Vebjørn Enger), as Baldr.

Ragnarök, according to the Norse mythology, is the end time of the world, when the jutul or jötunn, often sloppily translated into English–as it is for this show–as giants, battle each other. In the first season, we are introduced to the Jutul family, led by Vidar (Gísli Örn Garðarsson), his wife Ran (Gísli Örn Garðarsson) ,and their high school age children, Fjor (Herman Tømmeraas), and Saxa (Theresa Frostad Eggesbø). Vidar is the CEO of Jutul Industries, which is poisoning the fjord off of Edda, and Ran is the principal of Edda High School. All of this is quite awkward, to say the least, for Magne.

The following paragraph contains Season Two spoilers.

A battle between Magne and Vidar at the end of the first season in inconclusive, which is not that case with their second confrontation; Magne kills Vidar with and ancient axe. That is one of the few ways gods and jutuls can be slain. That leads to a power struggle between Saxa and Fjor for control of Jutul Industries. Ran withdraws into depression, and Laurits, who we learn is Vidar’s son, plays both sides of the conflict. 

As Season Three begins, Turid is planning her wedding, inevitable conflict is coming, and oh yeah, final exams and graduation at Edda High School loom. As for that battle, the two sides line up, as in a western movie, or more accurately, as with the final showdown in Akiro Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

While I enjoyed the first two seasons, I see Season Three as a big letdown. The performances are still compelling, the cinematography still great, and an enjoyable presence who was largely absent in Season Two, the radio announcer (Jeppe Beck Laursen), briefly returns. Ragnarok’s unseen announcer is reminiscent of the one in the M*A*S*H television series. 

And I have to say it, the Laurits and Jens romance is very in-your-face one–as if the writers are yelling out, “Look, they’re gay! Gay! Gay! Gay!” Much more is left to our imaginations with Magne and his female love interests. The creepy romantic encounter at a party with Ran and two male students from her high school in the first season is mostly off-screen. Are the writers and directors trying to compensate for the decades of absence of gay characters in movies and in television series? Oh, one more failing: the CG to create the Midgard Serpent, is unconvincing.

As a whole, Ragnarok is still worth your time, particularly if you enjoy coming-of-age dramas and ancient mythology, but don’t expect so much in this final season.

As of this writing, it is the seventh-most popular offering on Netflix.

Ragnarok is rated TV-MA for violence, sexual situations, marijuana use, and underage drinking. It is available in Norwegian with English subtitles as well as dubbed English. Besides Norwegian, there are smatterings of Old Norse and English throughout Ragnarok.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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