Laughing at Silly People Destroying Brands

A day in the life of Bob Iger, CEO of Disney

Have you ever been sitting around at home with your decades old, multi-billion dollar company and looked to yourself and said the following?

I hate this company and all the happiness it brings people. I hate the customers who pay for my private jet trips to secret rich people islands where I can hunt the poor. I hate the people who came before me who built this empire so that I can purchase alpaca chin hair sweaters that I only wear once and then throw away.

-Bob Iger (probably)

I’m sure we can all relate. You’re sitting in your summer study, carelessly tearing pages out of a first edition Huckleberry Finn that have problematic language on them, and your man servant enters with your breakfast of condor eggs and panda bacon. Then it dawns on you… Indiana Jones isn’t inclusive enough of crippled lesbians!

“Archibald! Warm up the Rolls! I’ve got an institution to destroy!”

You then get in the back seat of your Rolls Royce and are driven past a miles long slum of drug addled homeless people living in tents and sustaining themselves on fentanyl, crystal meth, and insanity… as if you were an African dictator. You then pull into the main office building at The Walt Disney Studios in Burbank.

You subtly give the statue of a smiling Walt Disney standing next to Mickey Mouse the finger as you walk through the front doors of the Michael Eisner Building. You grimace that the building is named for that hideous racist who made those problematic movies like Little Mermaid, Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast…. You know, the beloved classics that you spend your day destroying.

You stride down the long hallways doing your best to ignore the legion of middle aged, skinny, childless women and their misery, and do your best not to look in the direction of the animation tech-eunuchs they manage. You finally arrive at your office suite and start giving orders.

“The new Little Mermaid wasn’t crippled enough! I want a live action remake of The Lion King, but instead of happy funny African animals, I want them to be captured by white slavers and stuck on the Amistad and brutally whipped by racists for 3 hours! I want Aladdin to be redone as a Gaza refugee, and while we’re at it someone get Goofy a sex change operation!”

In the distance you hear Goofy go “Boorf?!?”

“And someone get me a miserable, narcissistic starlet to insult Snow White and 80 years of fandom while we pay her millions of dollars to play … Snow White! And make the Dwarfs taller, damnit. Do I have to think of everything around here? God, I’m a genius.”

Just then, George Lucas enters and politely asks why you’ve decided to make all the Storm Troopers wear rainbow helmets in the new Star Wars film, “The Empire Wins”. You throw a stack of $100 bills at him and say, “Eat it fatty. Do the truffle shuffle and tell me you are a problematic fairy princess. Take your shirt off, fatty! Dance! Do it!”

George Lucas does as he’s told and leaves.

You receive a note from the Board of Directors. They are worried because you keep making hundred million dollar movies nobody wants to see. You send a note back:

“Gentlemen… and non-binaries: I know revenue has been down. I want you to know I have it all under control. I have two words for you… Brie Larson. That’ll fix it.”

You lean back in your huge leather chair, gaze upon the wall-sized oil painting of you in a Roman Legionnaire uniform, holding the head of Mickey Mouse on your lance and smile. “It’s good to be the king…”

“Hey, I wonder if I can buy Mel Brooks’ movies…”

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Alissa Heinersheid - VP of Marketing for Bud Light

The year is 1999. Alissa is in her car as she leaves college on her way home to Connecticut. The John Boy and Billy Big Show is on the radio and they just finished another hilarious rant by Robert D. Raiford. Just before another classic hit starts spinning, a commercial begins to play. It’s for Bud Light.

Alissa chuckles to herself as she sings along with the catchy jingle sung by legendary Survivor front man Dave Bickler. Just then she realizes the song is about push-up bras. Why… her breasts aren’t very big! They are making fun of her!

She quietly says to herself: “I’ll show them.”

Fast forward 23 years and now Alissa is the Vice President in charge of marketing for Bud Light and standing in the smoldering ruins of a brand that was previously thought to be nearly indestructible. It’s Bud Light, for Pete sakes. What could one woman do that destroyed this staple of American life?

For decades the brand had done nothing but promote good times with friends. They sold to gays and straights and men and women. It was in every ball park and every concert. It somehow found its way into every high end restaurant and country club, and at the same time was in every Igloo fishing cooler and trailer park. They made rivers of the stuff… and sold it all too.

To top it off, it wasn’t even very good! It is objectively bad beer. But somehow that didn’t matter. It was an American staple. Honestly, if a venue was selling alcohol, you can bet it was selling Bud Light.

Enter Alissa.

See Alissa doesn’t really like men very much. She’s a deeply unattractive person and it’s likely that men don’t pay much attention to her. While she is very physically unattractive, unhealthily skinny with deep lines in her flawed face, her personality is much worse.

Somehow both narcissistic and incredibly insecure at the same time, she decided that “good times for everyone” was a bad way to go for Bud Light’s marketing. Instead she decided a better focus would be “good times for transexuals and women of color and screw everyone else.”

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them. (Spoiler: It doesn’t)

Well done, Alissa!

Or as the boys used to say:

Bud Light Presents!

Today we salute you, Ms. destructive aggrieved devil woman. You blasted into this world like the Tasmanian Devil leaving a trail of destruction behind you.

🎼Like a skinny lady wrecking ball 🎼

You managed to ruin decades of hard work and careful brand cultivation with a single can of beer and a half-hour podcast.

🎼 Incredible!!! 🎼

And on top of it all, you don’t even realize it was all your fault. So, here’s to you…

🎼 Ms. destructive aggrieved devil woman 🎼

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Mike Lindell - The My Pillow guy

Here’s a question for you. If you were a recovering crack addict whose house was foreclosed on just about the time your wife left you and you somehow managed to claw your way back by finding God, getting sober, and starting a thriving company… would you then think it was a good idea to spend the last several years screaming unhinged conspiracy theories about an election you had literally nothing to do with for a lying billionaire ex-President and alienating anyone with enough money to actually purchase one of your overpriced pillows?

If you answered no, then my friend… you aren’t Mike Lindell.

For those of you who don’t remember, Mike wasn’t a political guy, or at least he didn’t seem that way. He was sort of an evangelical Billy Mays style pitchman who bet on himself and started this little pillow company. His commercials were all over TV and they sold pretty well.

Here’s one of his commercials from before Trump. I mean, the cross necklace is a bit much, but whatever. It’s a fine commercial for a fine product. Frankly finding a good pillow is kind of hard, so it filled a gap in the market.

So what did this crackhead do? He decided to take everything he built, and all the brand recognition he earned, and the fine product he invented and shove it into a glass pipe and set a butane torch to it.

There are tons of these videos. The guy went full Q-tard, encouraged by Donald Trump himself. Now, he’s been sued, retailers have virtually all decided against carrying his products, and most media companies won’t even play his advertisements anymore.

Hey, I've got an idea! Maybe Bud Light can hire him as a consultant. I hear they have a vacancy in the marketing department.

What can we learn

I could go on and on about silly conservatives and out of touch liberals ruining their brands over idiotic DE&I and ESG initiatives, or caterwauling about elections, or being too pro-LGBTQIA+, or going the other way and being bigoted. There are a million examples of all of it.

That said, here’s an idea. If you’re a beer company, maybe sell beer and leave fixing sexism to someone else. If you are a crackhead who managed to build a pillow company, maybe realize Democrats like pillows too, and shut the hell up. If you are a retailer like Target… whose customers are all over middle America, maybe leave the “rainbow tuck your she-penis” swimsuit for a specialty shop, and figure the overall wellbeing of the company isn’t going to depend on that particular product.

There was a time when it would have dawned on an actress, who has been given the opportunity of a lifetime to play an iconic character for an iconic company, that maybe she shouldn’t go on a feminist tear against both the character and the company…

Nobody cares what you think Rachel Zegler. Try being grateful. There are more talented actresses waiting tables just around the corner who would love to have your job. Hell, give me one of those tuck-it swimsuits from Target and I’d give it a try. I’d do it with a song in my heart and a smile on my face too.

I’m not really all that political about this stuff either. For every bobble headed starlet without an original thought under her idiotic hairdo, there’s a Kanye West sitting next to a neo-Nazi on Alex Jones talking about Hitler. For every eye rolling pandering left wing propaganda film, there’s a corporate backed country song speaking directly to a dude using Break Free® to lube up more than his sidearm and dreaming about BLM breaking into his trailer park.

The fact is that we live in a silly world, and as long as I’m still around, I retain the right to laugh at ridiculous people and their idiotic initiatives. If we allow ourselves to be so silenced that we lose that, we really will have lost something valuable.

Happy Saturday all!

—Virgil