Budweiser's Super Bowl Ad Touches Chord on Immigration

Spot highlights journey of Anheuser-Busch co-founder Adolphus Busch
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 31, 2017 2:01 PM CST

If you're hoping to watch the Super Bowl to escape from politics, at least one commercial will bring you right back to current events. Budweiser's homage to its co-founder, Adolphus Busch, is certainly "relevant," as Ad Age notes. The 60-second spot, called "Born the Hard Way," details Busch's hardscrabble migration from his homeland of Germany to St. Louis, where the ad shows the hostility he faced when he arrived in America in 1857. As an actor playing the sharply dressed Busch wanders through the crowd, a man yells, "You're not wanted here, go back home." Busch escapes a boat inferno and treks through mud to get to his final destination, and he's seen at the end of the ad having a beer with co-founder Eberhard Anheuser.

The chief creative officer of Anomaly, the ad agency that created the spot, said his team had been tasked with celebrating "those who embody the American spirit"—and realized Budweiser's own origin story was the fodder for their commercial. "While it is set in the 1800s, it's a story we believe will resonate with today's entrepreneurial generation," Ricardo Marques, the beer brand's VP of marketing, says in an Anheuser-Busch InBev press release. The ad, which the Independent calls "perfectly timed," ends with an Anheuser-Busch logo over the tagline "When nothing stops your dream." (Budweiser renamed itself "America" last summer.)

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