Written by Will Novosedlik

What kind of imagery pops into your head when you hear the words “beer” and “advertising”?

While we’ve seen some variety in beer marketing in recent years, from Michelob Ultra’s “fitness” beer to Heineken’s “work/life balance” beer, we’d bet that your thoughts still land on concepts that have more to do with sex than suds.

Miller Lite has launched a campaign that hopes to reverse the sexism that beer ads are famous for. It has partnered with the Pink Boots Society , a group that aims to assist, inspire and encourage women and non-binary individuals to advance their careers in the fermented/alcoholic beverage industry through education, and actor and comedian Ilana Glazer, known for the web-turned-TV series Broad City.

The most visible asset to date is a 91-second video starring Glazer, who points out that since Mesopotamian times, brewing fell to women, since it was considered a household chore. The punch line? After all those centuries of women “brewsters (the name for female brewmasters),” how did men reward them? “They put them in bikinis,” says Glazer.

“There’s no doubt that women have countless incredible achievements in history, and yet I was both surprised and delighted to learn that they were among the first beer brewers in history,” says Glazer. “After years of treating women like objects, the beer industry at large has an opportunity to shed more light on just how powerful women can be.”

The idea of the campaign, called Bad $#!T to Good $#!T, is to create fertilizer upcycled from old sexist beer advertising that will be used to grow hops for female brewers. Hence the campaign title – turning the “bad $#!T” (sexist ads) into “good $#!T” (compost). Miller Lite has been collecting its (and all of the beer industry’s) outdated sexist ads, displays and posters for months. Hundreds of pieces have already been bought and removed from the internet.

The initial target is 1,000 pounds of hops. These hops will then be donated to over 200 female brewers to make approximately 330,000 beers. Miller Lite will also donate over five times the amount it spends to buy back these ads to the Pink Boots Society, including the Canadian chapter, to support women in advancing their careers through brewing education.

So Miller Lite is scouring the internet for any sexist beer collateral they can find in places like eBay, Kijiji, and Pinterest and literally buying it back for composting. It’s even asking people to dig through their garages and basements for more.

But why this push to support women brewers and hops farmers? For one thing, the more women in the industry, the less sexism we’re likely to see in beer promotions in the future. But numbers are hard to come by, it seems. While the Canadian Craft Brewers Association conducted a DEI survey in 2021, only 22.7% of brewers responded, rendering the results inconclusive. And when asked, Miller Lite was not able to provide up to date statistics on the number of women in the industry. What we do know is that the board of directors of the CCBA is 25% women, which is a good sign.

Strategically, Miller Lite’s campaign may also be about building brand affinity with women – a response to trends in beer consumption. For some time now, beer consumption among males has been declining while for women it has been on the rise.

There are no real tactical or financial objectives for a campaign like this, which is in its second year. Last year, it piloted in the U.S., and this year, the campaign has expanded to include Canada. “This is not a one-and-done,” asserts Miller Lite brand manager Lyndsey Macdonald. “Should this be successful, we see this unfolding over a number of years.

“The process takes time, from collecting the raw material, composting it, fertilizing the soil, cultivating it, then shipping it to individual brewsters, so we are not going to see results for several months. But it promises to provide a rich crop of stories that we can use as ‘fertilizer’ for future content creation,” says Macdonald.

Will that content and its impact on beer advertising create real change for sexism in the industry? Only time will tell.

Aside from the YouTube video starring Ilana Glazer, the campaign will rely chiefly on social media channels to get the message out. Social is being handled by Volt, PR by Citizen and the lead agency on the project is ICF NEXT.