Here's the latest on what's happening with ads during the Super Bowl. All times EST.
9:30 p.m.
Another Super Bowl, another head-scratching ad about beer and agriculture.
Last year, it was Bud Light insulting U.S. corn farmers when it made fun of rival brands that use corn syrup in their beers. One of those 2019 ads showed a medieval caravan schlepping a huge barrel of corn syrup to castles owned by Miller and Coors and then boasted that Bud Light doesn’t use the ingredient. That led to a rebuke from the National Corn Growers Association.
This year, it was Michelob’s turn to make its customers think about beer ingredients. “If every football fan picks up a 6-pack, we can change America's organic farmland forever,” says the ad that starts out in a wheat field and pledges that each purchased six-pack of Michelob Ultra Gold will help convert six square feet into organic farmland.
Among the many skeptics who started doing the math after watching that ad was Julie Kenney, Iowa’s deputy secretary of agriculture.
“So for Michelob to transition a single acre of crop land to organic, they will have to sell 7260 six packs of beer? Glad beer companies continue to look out for us,” she said on Twitter, with her comments followed by a skeptical "thinking face" emoji.
She added: “It would take 2.5 million six packs of Michelob Ultra to convert the average Iowa farm to organic.”
Bud Light, for its part, took a break from beer agriculture messages this year to market its hard seltzer. And Michelob hedged its bets with a second, more conventional ad featuring Jimmy Fallon.
