Coors Light Ditches Bro Marketing Strategy for Gender-Neutral Campaign

It's all about the money.

The mass-market beer industry has often been associated with sexist advertising, but companies are finally wising up. On Super Bowl Sunday Coors Light will unleash a new series of "more inclusive" ads intended to appeal to women, The New York Times reports.

The new beer campaign features black and white images of men and women scaling mountains, boxing, running, and cracking beers together. The tagline — "What would we be without our mountains?" — is designed to appeal to a sense of female empowerment (or so Coors' marketing team has imagined).

The change comes as major labels are losing market share to wine, spirits, and craft beer, and a changing demographic is becoming increasingly resistant to ads appealing to bro-y, macho antics. "It was fine to show a frat party making fun of girls five or eight years ago," says a former brand consultant for Landor Associates. "But it's ineffective and potentially damaging to do today."

According to a study by market research firm Ipsos, women represent and increasing portion of the market share for beer, consuming 25 percent of the total volume in 2014. It's "disappointing that we weren't speaking to women," MillerCoors CFO David Kroll tells the Times.

Coors isn't the only brand that sees dollar signs in gender-neutral and woman-focused marketing. Anheuser-Busch InBev, the maker of Budweiser, is expected to release a "gender-friendly" ad during the Super Bowl "built around the idea that coming together over a frosty Bud Light can help solve the world's problems, including unequal pay." (How ambitious.) And while the major beer makers don't necessarily deserve a pat on the back for finally recognizing the other 50 percent of the human race, at least they're not ham-fisted enough to sell "Chick Beer."

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