Tastes weird, more filling, sells like crazy.
"Man has long dreamed of turning lead into gold,” a gravel-voiced man told us. An otherworldly assembly line rolled out endless blue bottles while the stark plinks from Kanye West’s “Runaway” underlined the narrator's gravitas. “We dreamed of turning gold into platinum.” Weighty pause. “Triple-filtered. Smooth-finished. Top-shelf taste. Introducing...Bud Light Platinum.” And, via this grand ad — aired during first spot of the first commercial break of the 2012 Super Bowl — Bud Light's new sibling said hello.
Let's say that, after seeing the spot, you poked around and found the particulars of what makes this kind of Bud Light (which was in stores on the Monday before that Super Bowl Sunday) special. You’d have read about the higher alcohol content: 6% to Bud Light’s 4.2%. You’d have read about the sweeter taste, and about the space-age bottle (officially, a “cobalt blue”). And you would have been forgiven some skepticism. So this is Bud Light, a beer whose entire purpose is to be cheap, unpretentious, and easy to drink, you might have thought. But it's more expensive, has a heavier taste, and is for fancy people.
At the time, industry analyst Bump Williams was one of those who weren't buying. “I'm expecting a lot of product on the shelves with very little repeat purchases at the super-premium price point,” he told the Washington Post when the product launched. “It's better than Bud Light Golden Wheat” — Platinum’s predecessor in the Bud Light spin-off game, and an industry cautionary tale; it lived for just over two years — “but that's a very low [bar].” Corporate overlord InBev — which took over Anheuser-Busch in 2008 — isn’t known for its skill launching new products. As Bloomberg Businessweek’s recent cover story “The Plot to Destroy America’s Beer” details, InBev’s success has largely come through cost-cutting, and consumers have been complaining about the futzing it’s been doing with the legacy brands it's acquired.
Civilian reviews of Platinum were unpromising. “Reminiscent of a malt liquor mixed with the dregs of a Bud Light”; “the smell is honestly horrific”; “tastes like stale raisins,” said the commenters at BeerAdvocate.com. “I can’t beat around the bush: this is a foul fucking beer,” added YouTube’s Hoggies Beer Review. For DadBoner, the popular Twitter account of fictional Michigan divorcee Karl Welzein, Bud Light Platinum became an instant punch line. Karl was an immediate fan of “‘Nums,” he says, because they get you “homeless drunk, but with a touch of class.”
With both snooty tastemakers and bottom-line-oriented industry observers aligned against it, Platinum seemed destined to go the way of the Golden Wheat and so many other Bud products (remember Bud Extra, the “alcopop” packed with coffee and guarana?) that got the splashy rollout and then disappeared. But InBev and Anheuser-Busch can now shrug off all the criticism. Third-quarter numbers show that Platinum already has a nearly 1% market share in the U.S., comparable to Sam Adams. Over a million barrels of Bud Light Platinum have been shipped. Anheuser-Busch sees it as its most successful launch this decade. Platinum is a big fat hit.