Known for his outspoken anti-woke stance, Gillis is now the face of Bud Light's latest advertising campaign. It's a clear indication that the beverage giant is scrambling to rekindle its connection with the conservative customer base it lost.
The burning question remains: will the conservative patrons buy into this overt attempt at winning them back and start stocking up on Bud Light again?
From Them:
The beverage corporation announced the partnership with Gillis in an Instagram post on Tuesday, with a photo of Gillis at a Budweiser brewery. “Welcome to the team,” the caption read. “excited to be a part of your 2024 tour.” Gillis posted additional photos of his apparent brewery tour in a post of his own the same day.
Gillis rose to notoriety in 2019, when he was announced as a new Saturday Night Live cast member, then immediately lost the job when clips from his podcast including racial and homophobic slurs became public knowledge. In several (now-deleted) segments from Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast with cohost Matt McCusker, Gillis referred to comedian Chris Gethard and director Judd Apatow as “white faggot comics,” and used an anti-Chinese slur repeatedly, including in an extended segment with McCusker about reasons to dislike Chinese people. Gillis later referred to himself as a “comedian who pushes boundaries” in a statement defending the jokes.
Since then, Gillis has parlayed that infamy into a Netflix special, a string of appearances on The Joe Rogan Show, and now an official deal with Bud Light. Though he eschews the label of “conservative comedian,” his jokes have still endeared him to the right, boosting him to prominence as a survivor of “cancel culture.”
That reactionary cachet may also be why Gillis was tapped for Bud Light money. Following an innocuous partnership last April with trans TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, U.S. conservatives exploded with anger, lashing out against Mulvaney and Bud Light itself in a combination harassment campaign/consumer boycott — from which Mulvaney says the company did nothing to protect her, though she was afraid to even leave her house.
