Drinkers Visit Weather.com

I just visited weather.com to see what it’ll do today. First, the front page was interrupted by an enormous ad for Smirnoff Ice that expanded over the entire screen. When it finally disappeared, I was able to plug my address in, which said it was, “sponsored by Bud Light.” I got to my location and upon reading the forcast, saw a skyscraper banner ad for Jose Cuervo. I know it’s the 4th of July weekend, but I certainly wasn’t expecting so many ads for alcohol.  However, I think I’m craving a drink.  Have a happy 4th!

Say No to Bud InBev Deal

I’m not sure if you’ve been following the news lately regarding Anheuser-Busch, but they could be taken over by InBev. Here’s the story…

Why discuss this in my media, marketing, advertising, online marketing, homebrewing blog?

Anheuser-Busch has been a pioneer within the digital media space. Despite the fact that Bud.tv failed, both AB and the online marketing community learned quite a bit from its branded online video effort. You can’t have continued success without a few failures, and AB took the failure in stride and appears to have grown to be better online marketers because of it.

From all accounts I’ve heard, InBev is good at making these types of companies work more efficiently. Most analysts are pretty sure that InBeb will implement its cost-cutting measures at AB if it purchases it. Most of the time, cost-cutting measures start with marketing budgets. You can be sure that if this is the case, you won’t see nearly as much experimentation coming from AB in terms of online marketing (and certainly not to the level of investment as Bud.tv). While it’s obvious that larger companies have still not completely jumped into online marketing, it will be disappointing if experiments like Bud.tv no longer allowed to take place.