If this year’s Super Bowl ads seem tamer than usual, that’s because they are. Advertisers who spent about $7 million for 30 seconds of ad space during Sunday’s big game are trying to avoid becoming the next Bud Light.
Last year, backlash to a Bud Light marketing campaign featuring a transgender influencer resulted in sales of the beer brand losing fizz. The brand has still not fully recovered—Bud Light parent Anheuser-Busch reported that its sales in the US fell 13.5% (pdf) in its most recently quarterly earnings report, “primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light.”
Despite this cautionary tale, at least one brand’s ad has already sparked some backlash. Food allergy advocates are calling for Uber Eats to edit its commercial for the Super Bowl and remove a peanut allergy joke.
The star-studded commercial plays on the idea that in order for customers to remember all the services and products Uber Eats can deliver they must forget something else. For example, a man eating peanut butter in the commercial forgets there is peanuts in it and is shown having a serious allergic reaction.
“While the commercial alienates individuals with food allergy, the real harm is reducing the perception of its seriousness in the broader community and reinforcing that it’s okay to make fun of this potentially life-threatening condition,” the advocacy group Food Allergy Canada wrote in a letter to Uber Eats. The group called for Uber Eats to either edit the commercial or not air it at all.
The US-based advocacy group Food Allergy Research & Education also released a statement about the commercial.
“We were surprised and disappointed to see that Uber Eats would use the disease of life-threatening food allergy as humor,” the group said. “The suffering of over 33 million Americans who live with life-threatening food allergy is no joke.”
Many replies on the company’s post of the ad on X, formerly known as Twitter, are also calling for the ad to be edited.
Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post Bud Light era
The controversy comes as brands this year have been more careful to avoid any controversy following the backlash one of Bud Light’s social media campaigns received last year.
In April 2023, Bud Light launched a campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The campaign quickly sparked a conservative backlash that resulted in Bud Light losing its spot as the best selling beer in the US.
“The Bud Light situation has been so different because the brand has been hit very hard and it hasn’t really bounced back,” Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, told the Wall Street Journal about the backlash’s impact on the industry.
He added,“Nobody’s pushing the edge on these jokes and nobody’s hinting at anything remotely controversial.”