Corngate, corntroversy, or whatever you want to call the ongoing food-fueled fued between Bud Light and MillerCorn — sorry, MillerCoors — just got serious. MillerCoors is suing Anheuser-Busch for its “false and misleading advertising campaign,” AdAge reports.
The Thursday filing comes one day after MillerCoors announced a rebuttal campaign that mimics Bud Light’s ads, which originally aired during the Super Bowl, and call out Miller Lite and Coors Light for using corn syrup in their recipes.
In the filing, MillerCoors writes, “AB’s purported rationale for this campaign, ‘transparency,’ is a classic example of corporate double-speak.” That double-speak more than quintupled in a recent interview with Bud Light VP of Marketing Andy Goeler, who used the word “transparent” or “transparency” 11 times while speaking with Food & Wine.
Whether Bud Light’s aggressive advertising tactics are illegal is up to the courts, but they are certainly hypocritical: AB InBev uses corn syrup in several of its products, including in Bon & Viv Spiked Seltzer, a brand the brewery also advertised during the Super Bowl.
Since Bud Light’s original corn-hating ad aired, we’ve learned that corn syrup isn’t that bad for you; that it doesn’t actually end up in Miller Lite beer; that Bud Light is ruining the beer industry, and is happy about it; and finally, Milly, Milly is cleverer than Dilly, Dilly.
It’s all jousts and games until someone gets sued. Corn’t we all just get along?
