Miller Brewing looked at Bud Light and said “Hold my beer.”

Miller Lite’s foray into woke advertising is hardly as bad as Bud Light’s. This time the company has decided that insulting men should be done by “chestfeeders,” “people who menstruate,” or “people with vaginas.” Insert whatever woke term you like for women.

It seems Miller Lite doesn’t understand their audience either. pic.twitter.com/TXGoEPYzbw

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) May 15, 2023

During Women’s History Month, the company announced a project to collect older, sexist beer ads and turn them into fertilizer to be used to grow hops. The hops would be shipped off to female brewers.

Their project was to turn “bad sh!t into good sh!t.”

Nice.

This campaign apparently went under the radar screen for most people, likely because of the Dylan Mulvaney controversy. And to be fair it is hardly as offensive as hiring a man to play a woman who clearly knows nothing about either beer or sports.

On the one hand, Miller is certainly correct in pointing out that women played a major role in the production of beer in history, although I am not certain that their version of history is entirely accurate. Women did brew beer, of course, but so did men, and given that beer was often produced at monasteries that even had monopolies in some cases, it seems unlikely that women were the primary producers of beer throughout history.

Yet celebrating the connection between women and beer during Women’s History Month is hardly a bad idea, and even playing a bit fast and loose with history is hardly unusual in advertising.

What is stupid, though, is denigrating the long and glorious history of beer advertising that ties having good times with beer and sexy women. There is a reason that beer companies do that–their customer base likes it, and calling things that their customer base likes “bad sh!t” is really stupid.

Miller Lite has had some pretty sexist advertisements over the course of its nearly 50 years of existence.

So, in honor of Women’s History Month, they’ve committed to not only cleaning up their past, but also turning it into something good in their new campaign, “Bad $#!T to Good $#!T,” to collect sexist advertisements and turn it into compost to grow hops for women brewers.

Elizabeth Hitch, senior director of marketing for Miller Lite, says the brand’s position in the industry gives them a chance to create real change and to turn some “bad $#!t, old objectifying beer advertising into good $#!t, literal fertilizer to grow hops that will be donated to female brewers.” “We recognize that Miller Lite played a contributing role in this in the past,” she says. “We’ve been collecting our and other brands outdated, old sexist ads, displays and posters for months. We have been buying and removing any pieces we could find on the internet.”

The demographics of beer drinkers are 60% male and 40% female. And given the success of some pretty sh!tty beers in the marketplace, one has to believe that all those “sexist” advertisements have been pretty successful at bolstering the brands that are now rejecting their traditional customers.

If you look at where beers are advertised, it’s pretty clear that beer companies aim their advertisements at male customers, who likely are the people who make buying decisions.

Hence the chicks in bikinis. Hate to tell you this, but chicks in bikinis do a fine job of grabbing the attention of those men.

Expanding the types of advertising in order to attract more female customers makes perfect sense. Insulting your current customer base in order to placate a nonexistent female customer base who are itching to drink Miller Lite if only they compost sexist ads is stupid.

“We can’t change the past, but we can help rectify the damage that was done alienating women from beer. We’re on a mission to clean up not only our mistakes but those of the whole beer industry by finding these bad ads and turning them into something that will have a positive impact.”

They’re inviting consumers to ship them their old, sexist ads, too, and the brand has teamed up with Ilana Glazer, noted comedian and actor, to promote this campaign.

To create the good stuff, they’re taking the objectifying advertisements, and they’re putting them into a large compost pile, which after several months of composting, the compost gets fed to worms, which then create castings (worm poop) that then become a compost fertilizer that will be added to hops crops to help them grow. Right now, they’re aiming to grow more than 1,000 pounds of hops.

The effort is purely symbolic. Growing 1000 pounds of hops to be used exclusively by female brewers is hardly likely to change the market dynamics.

Miller isn’t doing any of this for their customers; it’s all about satisfying the ESG mavens who want more social justice and less consumer appeal in advertising.

Will this hurt Miller Lite’s bottom line? Almost certainly not. Clearly, the whole program was something of a dud, since almost nobody heard of it or complained. It is, though, another indication of how major corporations are now catering to the DEI crowd and not the people who actually keep them in business.