Original subtitles

Today, the global beer market

is a growing 600 billion dollar industry.

And a colossal 300 billion of that

is for a beer that just 50 years ago didn't exist.

Diet beer.

Apparently tasted a lot like wet metal.

Until a visionary who doesn't know

the first thing about beer changes the industry forever.

It's not diet beer, it's light beer.

That was really the moment culture

and marketing came together.

Armies of men chanting-

Less filling, tastes great!

It's fearsome, and bloodthirsty, and it's incredible.

It ignites a battle with the biggest beer brand

on the planet.

The rivalry wasn't something that started off playfully

and then eventually got ugly.

It got ugly off the rip.

His big goal was to just annihilate Anheuser-Busch.

He is ready to go to war.

Forcing the king of beers

to risk reinventing a classic.

If you poke a bear, expect him to bite back.

Okay?

All he wants to do at this point is crush Miller.

But it will take trailblazing innovations.

He becomes the official sponsor

of an upstart new network

Da-da-net, da-da-net, heard of them?

The amount of money pouring into this was money at a level

that it just never been seen before.

Bud really paved the way

for what we think of as Super Bowl commercials.

To introduce a new beer to the world.

It's one of the pivotal moments

in the history of American beer.

Light beer did nothing short of revitalizing

the American beer industry.

It just blew everything else out of the water.

And come out on top.

There are more than 9,000 breweries in the US today,

selling hundreds of styles from IPA to pale ale,

pilsner, stout, porter, and wheat,

but the thriving industry is a far cry

from what it looked like just over 50 years ago,

at the dawn of the 1970s.

There just weren't that many breweries.

Small breweries had gone out of business,

because there just weren't many people drinking beer.

And those who did stay afloat

tended to be the larger breweries.

And four really big breweries

kind of took charge of the market.

The country's four biggest breweries

are Coors, Pabst, Schlitz,

and at the top by a landslide Anheuser-Busch.

Anheuser-Busch had a stronghold on the

number one position in the United States

producing beer roughly at a rate

of two to one versus its next closest competitor.

One of the reasons that large brew companies

became so popular mirrored what was happening in food.

People were very interested

in large industrial scale products.

So you've got your Wonder Bread

and you've got your Velveeta Cheese,

and you've got your Anheuser-Busch Budweiser beer.

People liked the kind of space age modernity

of these packages and the consistency of the products.

The beer landscape becomes focused

on this lightly flavored golden sparkling lager style beer.

There was no double IPA, no sour beer,

no oatmeal stouts, no light beer.

Americans had a choice of brands

from the handful of large companies

of essentially the same kind of very light lager.

The word L-I-G-H-T when applied to beer at that time

meant a beer that was yellow, had a very light body,

not much hops, not much malt.

It didn't have any connotation with calories.

Meanwhile, other realms of the booze industry

have evolved.

We start to see a real shift in the fifties and sixties.

We started seeing the introduction of cocktails,

with the martini, the margarita.

James Bond said he wanted a martini shaken, but not stirred,

and that changed everything.

The liquor industry has found inventive new ways

to increase their profits through cocktail culture,

but the beer industry is kind of lacking in innovation.

But nobody is even trying to take on

the beer goliaths and revitalize the stagnant market,

until now.

It's not a brewery that starts the sea change,

but a company that has no experience selling beer at all.

In 1969, Philip Morris is an international powerhouse

of the tobacco industry

whose recent Marlborough Man campaign has skyrocketed them

to a record breaking 1 billion dollars in sales.

But now the government threatens to stop their growth.

In 1969 Congress passes a law

that eliminates advertising for cigarettes on radio and TV.

And so companies like Philip Morris

realize that they might be sitting on a industry

that's shrinking and begins to diversify

into other realms of the economy,

and they settle on another vice, so to speak.

And to lead the new venture,

Philip Morris calls on one of their own rising stars.

You wanted to see me?

John Murphy started at Phillip Morris as a tax attorney

and has worked his way

out to the upper ranks of the business.

John Murphy is a bit mischievous.

He likes a good drink, a good joke, a bit of a banter,

and he's also deeply ambitious.

We're gonna need you in Milwaukee.

Wisconsin, what's in Wisconsin?

Miller.

In 1969, Philip Morris buys out Miller Brewing,

which at the time only has about 4% of the beer market.

Never heard of it.

Every large brewery in the country was run by a family.

Philip Morris would be the first company coming in

running a brewery that was not a family of brewers.

Miller Brewing was founded in Milwaukee

in the middle of the 19th century,

owned by the Miller family.

Miller's future looked incredibly bright

in the early 1950s,

it was becoming known as a national beer.

And in late 1954, Fred Miller,

the wonder kid who had done all this,

and his son died in a plane crash.

After that, the company just lost its way.

And Miller was turned over to Philip Morris.

While Anheuser-Busch

offers brands like Michelob and Busch Bavarian,

along with their flagship brand, Budweiser,

Miller is scraping by with a single product offering.

Miller High Life was introduced by the family in

1903, and their advertising anchor for it

was that this was a champagne like beer.

When prohibition ended, that was the only beer they made,

which was a very unusual decision

for any brewery to make.

They just threw all their eggs into this one basket.

Philip Morris sees how much room there is for growth

in the beer market.

They see these breweries just kind of making

and selling all the same lager product.

Beer and cigarettes are both agricultural products,

and they can be mass produced,

and they're usually consumed by the same people.

So having a brewery struck them as a great idea.

So they sent John Murphy to Milwaukee

to figure out how to run a beer company.

When John Murphy arrives in Milwaukee,

Miller High Life is fading.

John Murphy didn't have any brewing experience at all.

Here he is, he's gonna build up this brewing company,

and all he's gotta do is figure out how to do it.

The champagne of beers.

What John Murphy puts into action

will lead to the creation of a groundbreaking new product

that will bring in over 2 billion dollars annually,

and spearhead an entirely new global market

worth over 300 billion dollars,

forever changing the beer industry.

But in 1970, the rookie brand fixer

doesn't have a clue where to begin.

Day's done, boys, it's time for beer.

John Murphy really doesn't know very much about beer.

What he does know is that he wants to eventually become

president of Philip Morris,

and he knows that if he succeeds in growing Miller

into this juggernaut of a brand,

the likelihood that he will become president

of Philip Morris is exponentially greater.

Gussie Bush has led the family operated

Anheuser-Busch empire since the end of World War II,

and has grown the business from one St. Louis brewery

to nine nationwide.

Gussie embodied the idea of being number one

at everything he did.

It was very important for him to have the aura of someone

who has a number one brewery and a personality

that people look to as someone

who is successful and important.

But Gussie was so focused on the beer of yesterday.

Gussie has grown sales by over 400%

without producing a new product in 15 years.

And while their century old flagship,

Budweiser, remains number one,

profits are on the decline industry wide.

Anheuser-Busch was struggling

partly because every brewer was struggling.

Breweries were all basically selling the same beer.

And years of stagnation

have stifled the industry's growth.

We need to trim the fat.

Fire the marketing department.

No, no, our advertising's what's going to grow our brand,

Please, our beer sells itself.

His son August III is a relentless workaholic,

hard-nosed man of the people kind of approach,

but he also sees where the company can go.

August III saw things happening in the market

that Gussie wasn't paying attention to.

He's still kind of in that older mindset.

Technology was growing at a rapid speed

at the start of the 1970s,

and automation promises to improve not only manufacturing,

but also to cut costs.

August wants Anheuser-Busch to evolve with the times

by modernizing with the latest technology

to develop new products.

Rather than looking behind him at tradition,

he was thinking about how will the company grow?

How will the country grow and where will he sit in that?

That'll be all.

August is very forward thinking values

really rubbed Gussie's traditional quality standard,

family values the wrong way.

Gussie says that beer isn't a computer business,

that beer is about people.

August will one day bring the company into the future

with a legendary new product that will surpass

even his family's own Budweiser

to become America's favorite beer,

recognized around the globe and leading the way

for dozens of new varieties of beer beyond lager.

But first, he'll have to defeat an aggressive rival

coming for him, even if it means going to war

with his own father.

August, don't ever question me again.

John Murphy, a rising star

of the Philip Morris company,

has been sent to Milwaukee to try and save

a struggling brewery called Miller.

Philip Morris has charged John Murphy

with creating a success with a product

he really doesn't know very much about

in a highly competitive market

with one of the most fearsome,

ruthless competitors out there.

But even against the Anheuser-Busch behemoth,

Miller has an ace up their sleeve.

Miller had a lot of money to spend

because of Philip Morris,

far more even than Anheuser-Busch.

They had bajillions of dollars.

Now that Philip Morris can't advertise cigarettes

on TV anymore, they have a ton of ad money

sitting around and they're ready to burn it.

Murphy's first step is to tackle the marketing

that's been used since before World War I.

At the start of the 20th century,

beer was hardly sold in bottles.

It was served at saloons or maybe carried home

from the bar in a bucket, hence the luxury of bottled beer,

the champagne of bottled beer.

But by the 1970s, this is common stuff.

People have been drinking out of bottles for decades now,

and it's very affordable.

It's time for beer!

The notion of the luxury of bottled beer

no longer resonates with the drinkers of bottled beer.

Those guys drinking Miller after work.

The first thing John Murphy did was to take the beer

out of the champaign bucket

and put it into the workman's lunch bucket.

Miller time.

So he tossed out the whole thing about it

being a champagne of beer,

and they developed the ad campaign

based on working people.

It's Miller time.

Time to head for the best tasting beer you can find.

Murphy's idea to make the Miller Time advertising campaign

all about the hardworking blue collar men

is a way to distinguish Miller High Life

from the industry's biggest competitor, Budweiser,

whose marketing is all about tradition.

Launching in 1971, Murphy hasn't changed the beer itself,

but the campaign quadruples Miller High Life sales

to over 20 million barrels.

Philip Morris knew how to market.

They had already become the top of the cigarette market.

They've proven that they know how to get a brand out there

and make American people loyal to it.

So they were a huge threat to Anheuser-Busch.

At Anheuser-Busch,

there was a Shakespearean power struggle

between Auggie Bush and his father Gus Bush.

And John Murphy was a guy who understood

how to take advantage of a moment.

August III sees Miller coming for Anheuser-Busch,

and immediately saw that was a threat.

He knows that it's time to start making changes

in marketing.

Gussie doesn't care about them at all.

Miller Brewing was just this company in Milwaukee,

and Gus Bush just did not take it seriously.

He thought, "Here's a cigarette company.

They're buying a beer company, what do they know?"

In the 1970s, technology is moving fast.

August sees it as the time that he can't wait any longer.

He can't quietly wait for Gussie to either quit or die.

Behind his father's back,

August makes deals with members of the board

for their allegiance.

He was laying the grounds for a future thinking company

that would eventually exist.

Many of the board members actually agree with him,

and decide that it might be the time to have a transition

of who is at the helm of the business,

and make sure the company

stays at the top of the beer market.

Since the launch of the Miller Time campaign,

Miller's become the fifth biggest brewery in the country,

but with just 5% market share,

they still have a long way to catch up to Anheuser-Busch's

leading 21%.

John Murphy decided to conquer the brewing world

and turn Miller Brewing into the biggest brewery

in the country.

His big goal was to just annihilate Anheuser-Busch.

Let's try some.

Murphy was coming from Philip Morris

and you know they didn't just rely on one cigarette brand.

In addition to Marlboro, they had Parliaments,

they had Benson and Hedges.

They even had Philip Morris brand cigarettes.

In an attempt to diversify,

Miller buys a recently bankrupt Chicago based brewery,

Meister Br äu, which also comes with a collection

of unsuccessful brands.

What's that one?

Some low caloried beer.

Diet beer.

Low calorie beer was this very obscure product

that most Americans had never heard of.

It was launched in 1967 and was marketed

mostly towards people on a diet,

mainly women before it finally went bankrupt.

Apparently tasted a lot like wet metal.

Meister Br äu's attempt at diet beer

was a result of a growing trend

towards health consciousness.

In the 1960s, scientists begin to determine

that we have way too much sugar in the American diet ,

and it is causing all kinds of medical problems.

This increased awareness in health

absolutely spurs changes in the food industry.

This is when you have Crystal Light, and low fat,

and diet, and shakes instead of food.

Americans went crazy for diet foods and beer was seen as,

"Ugh, you're gonna diet, you can not drink this stuff."

Beer had always had a reputation of being fattening.

The real caloric impact from beer comes from sugar.

Sugar takes a lot of calories to burn,

and that's why it normally stays on your body as fat,

as a beer belly.

In 1967, the recipe for Meister Br äu's

low calorie beer was invented by scientist,

Dr. Joseph Owades.

Dr. Joseph Owades process in developing

a light caloried beer involved the use of enzymes

known as glucoamylase in the brewing process.

This enzyme breaks down a lot of the sugars

that are in the beer that contribute to body, mouth feel.

Certainly a little bit of flavor and definitely calories.

Meister Br äu is inherently less fattening,

but the flavor is not like a real beer,

and it failed miserably.

And the taste wasn't the only problem.

Diet beer was basically a poisonous concept

to many American males because diet, that's for women.

Despite its failure on the regional level,

Murphy sees potential in taking diet beer national

for the first time.

It's something Anheuser-Busch doesn't have.

The nation's top brewers believe

diet beer could alienate their core market.

The other top breweries,

they're too nervous to put their brand's name

onto diet beer.

Brewing companies objected to diet beers,

because if you're trying to sell a diet beer,

then you're conceding the point that beer is fattening.

And if this beer bond it was just better

to not be associated with it.

But Murphy sees it as an opportunity

to expand Miller's market.

John Murphy was a company guy

and he absorbed the Philip Morris ethos.

He understood that you need to find markets.

From Murphy's point of view,

there's an entire audience out there for diet beer

that no one's even coming near.

But first, he'll need to improve the flavor.

It's a massive risk.

You stop and you think about, my gosh,

you know that is your life, your career on the line.

You only took the Miller job

to become president of Philip Morris, and if you blow this,

I mean they gonna bury you under the conveyor belt, buddy.

The team at Miller has been working

for nearly a year trying to improve the taste

of their new diet beer.

They fiddled around with it,

trying to come up with the right formula,

'cause they wanted to taste like beer.

They definitely wanted to taste like beer,

and that's not something you can do in a week.

Up to 80% of a beer's flavor

comes from the strain of yeast that's used.

So in order to improve the flavor,

they decided to use the exact strain of yeast

that the founder of Miller, Frederick Miller,

brought with him from Germany in the 1850s.

The unique yeast provides the beer

with an aroma and taste that maintains a lager's flavor.

Now they've got a diet beer

that's reminiscent of a beer people know and love.

It's not dissimilar to what Coke will do

a few years later with Diet Coke.

Maybe not the same flavor exactly,

but it gives you the same satisfaction.

To John Murphy, the new formula

tastes just as good, if not better than the original Miller.

The fact that they were able to make it taste

like regular beer, it was a big innovation.

The other breweries,

they didn't know quite how they pulled it off.

Now he needs to find a way

to convince customers to try it.

What they're trying to do is with low calorie beer

was to come up with the perfect advertising campaign.

He commissions a comprehensive study of beer drinkers,

and the results narrow down the demographic

drinking the most beer.

Sports fans are beer drinkers.

Sports reflect this uber macho male culture,

and beer has just always been an integral part

to the gathering of guys.

And this notion of beer being unhealthy,

or beer leading to a perhaps

less than aesthetically pleasing physique,

that wasn't what guys really thought about.

So it wasn't about being healthy.

Miller realized we need to sell this to the same people

who are drinking our regular beer.

What they did was they set out

to make this thing seem macho.

Philip Morris had been one of the leaders

in making low tar, low nicotine cigarettes,

because during the health craze,

cigarette manufacturers are trying to figure out

ways to convince the public that they can smoke a cigarette

that's light in tobacco.

So this was an idea that John Murphy grasped.

Murphy needs the perfect message

to sell lower calories to a wider audience,

and make sure that everyone in his target demo will hear it.

John Murphy realizes that it's gonna require him

being very creative and spending more money

than Philip Morris has ever spent before.

400 Miles south of Miller

seismic shifts are in motion at Anheuser-Busch.

What is this?

Gussie has to watch as board members say that they think

Gussie should be replaced as the head of the company.

With who?

Me.

Gussie was blindsided.

He saw himself as the person who took Anheuser-Busch

to number one, and he couldn't believe that people

would not be loyal to him and respect

all he had done for this company.

August III was in charge now.

It was time to automate whatever they could

and you know, do what the computer model

said to cut costs,

and that would be this new modern bottling machinery.

He is going to be the first person

with the most forward thinking,

most futuristic tools on his bottling line.

But for all his focus on the future,

August is unaware of the innovations

underway by his newest competition.

Miller is mounting a light beer revolution.

August was definitely missing the boat as it's taking off.

Meanwhile, John Murphy

needs Philip Morris's buy-in to get funding

to market his new diet beer concept.

It's not about being healthy or counting calories.

It's not diet beer.

It's light beer.

Introducing Lite Beer by Miller.

The genius of the new ad campaign

was that they just side stepped the whole diet thing.

It's more you can drink more of this,

because you're not going get as full.

Same great taste, less filling.

Murphy's asking for enough to fund

one of the biggest ad campaigns in history.

The ad spend on this will cost us a billion dollars.

It's gonna make us number one.

Now John Murphy will have to make good on the promise

that Miller's Lite Beer can take down the king of beers.

We're gonna be bigger than Anheuser-Busch.

August Busch's rise to power in 1975

sends a shockwave through Anheuser-Busch.

August immediately begins modernizing the company,

replacing many workers for automated machines.

The union workers are infuriated.

The company were starting to eliminate people

who are hand bottling things for machines

that are bottling things.

The people who are managing the bottling lines

asked to have full approval of any new automation

within the bottling processes in the company.

But August is not going to budge on modernizing his company.

But when the teamsters call a strike,

it forces Anheuser-Busch's production to stop down

and their stock to plummet.

Meanwhile, John Murphy prepares to launch

Lite Beer by Miller with Philip Morris

supplying hundreds of millions of dollars

for an advertising onslaught.

The amount of money that Philip Morris

was pouring into this was money at a level

that it just never been seen before.

He decides to create a campaign

that will hit Americans,

specifically American men, right in the feels.

So he recruits people they'll listen to.

Sports heroes, New York Jets player Matt Snell,

the Yankee icon, the Mick himself, Mickey Mantle.

He brings in smoking Joe Frazier,

and of course former coach John Madden.

He dubs them all the Lite All Stars.

In 1975, Miller launches Lite Beer nationwide

with an advertising blitz featuring their All Stars.

The best thing about it, it tastes great.

No, Horny, it's less filling.

Says who?

They had this great marketing idea

to create the great debate.

Is Miller Lite less filling or does it taste great?

That was kind of the mantra.

- Tastes great! - Less filling!

Tastes great!

Armies of men chanting, not like it's a slogan,

but like it's almost a battle cry.

It's fearsome, and it's blood thirsty and it's incredible.

Less filling is a great way to put a spin

on something being diet,

'cause that could turn a lot of guys off.

The idea of being, it's not gonna fill you up

because of low calories, so man,

when you're in at the bar after work,

you can drink a whole bunch of these if you want to.

It was genius.

Veteran beer marketers are just,

their jaws are hanging open.

That was really the moment culture and marketing

came together and light beer just took off like a rocket.

Over the next decade,

Miller will shoot more than 80 commercials

with dozens of celebrities and sports icons.

It goes back to the old saying,

people don't know what they want until you show them.

And that's exactly what they did.

Almost every commercial in every game

was a Lite Beer commercial.

Is still regarded 50 years later

as one of the pivotal moments

in the history of American beer.

Everybody in the industry was flabbergasted

that Americans really wanted a diet beer, especially men.

By 1977, just two years

since launching the only light beer on the market,

Miller is making 76 million dollars in profit,

almost three times what it made the previous year,

and has become the second largest brewer in America.

And it completely caught Anheuser-Busch off guard.

The strike at Anheuser-Busch

ends after 14 weeks.

The union finally gives into August

and ends up basically getting nothing that they asked for.

But now August finds the strike pales in comparison

to a far greater threat.

Not only does August III

truly have competition on his hands,

he's gonna start playing catch up.

John Murphy fully intended to knock AB

out of the number one spot,

which it had held for decades at that point,

not while Auggie Busch was in charge.

August tasks his brewers

with creating a low calorie beer of their own.

Miller has a year or two advantage,

but once they realized that light beer

is starting to eat away at the market,

they were able to move quickly,

because they weren't going to have any new chemicals

coming in, they didn't have to test stabilizers,

none of that.

They only used longer mashing times.

So they were had less carbs and sugar

that can end up in the final beer.

It was a small tweak to the brewing process.

With a century of brewing experience

passed down in his family,

August plans to obliterate Miller

with an even better tasting light beer.

Okay.

August's new beer has only 97 calories,

33% less than Budweiser,

making it the lightest offering Anheuser-Busch

has produced to date, exactly one calorie more than Miller.

He calls it-

Natural Light.

Yep, Natty Light was Anheuser-Busch's

first light beer.

music]

In 1977,

Budweiser is still the most popular beer on the market,

but now with Miller's Lite Beer in second place,

Anheuser-Busch rushes to introduce

their own version of light beer.

The name Natural Light comes from Anheuser-Busch's

absolute commitment to a natural product,

both natural ingredients and natural process.

August sees that light beer has potential,

but it's still a novelty and for all he knows,

it's just a fad, so he's not willing to put the name

Budweiser on a diet beer and risk damaging the brand.

All he wants to do at this point is crush Miller.

August Busch poaches several

of the Miller All Stars for his own ad campaign.

Lite Beer, Mick?

Nah, I switched to Natural Light.

Their initial marketing campaign for Natural Light

was all about switching.

No questions about it, that they weren't just creating

this new light beer and putting it in the market.

They created it to take share from Miller.

But there is still a massive roadblock.

Miller has exclusive contracts during sporting events.

Which ones?

All of them.

Miller had bought up every single bit of airtime

at every single major sporting event.

The World Series, the Indy 500, the Moscow Olympics.

Basically everything had already been purchased

to the point that they were having a hard time

finding anything to purchase for Natural Light.

While Philip Morris has a pretty big budget,

so does Anheuser-Busch, and while they can't buy airtime,

they do something aggressive and unprecedented.

August is not giving up easily.

He is ready to go to war.

If we can't buy the ad time, we'll get the teams.

So leveraging 70% of AB's 400 million dollar

advertising budget, August decides to sponsor

all 24 US based MLB baseball teams,

20 of the 28 NFL football teams,

23 out of 24 NBA basketball teams,

and 13 or 14 domestic NHL hockey teams.

It was absolutely competitive

between August and John Murphy.

It was both a fight in the media and at the tap handles.

The rivalry between Anheuser-Busch and Miller

wasn't something that started off playfully,

and then eventually got ugly, it got ugly off the rip.

At the height of Miller's battle with Anheuser-Busch,

John Murphy was said to have a rug in his office

with the Anheuser-Busch logo,

so that he could wipe his feet on it.

He would even pull out a voodoo doll

that he called August

that bore a striking resemblance to August III himself,

and he would stick pins in it and it had the desired effect.

It pissed August III off.

And August is ready to pour as much money

as necessary to fend off Miller.

Though he was late to the game in creating a light beer,

he is way ahead of the game when he decides

to become the official sponsor of an upstart new network

out of Bristol, Connecticut,

called The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

Heard of them?

Da-da-net, da-da-net, me too.

Off the strength of Anheuser-Busch's

exclusive ad buys, this new network

grows to reach 28 million homes in just four years.

And in 1983, ESPN becomes the largest network on cable.

And the war between Anheuser-Busch and Miller

makes it clear to the rest of the industry

that there's big money in light beer.

While the light beer wars raged,

right behind them was Coors Light, released in 1978.

Schlitz made an attempt when it brought out

its light beer in the late seventies.

There were all kinds of low calorie beers to choose from.

But Lite Beer by Miller holds the number one spot.

Now, August Busch is readying a new secret weapon.

It was just obvious that Natural was apparently

only gonna get Anheuser-Busch so far.

August says to one of his confidants,

"If this doesn't go well, if people don't like this beer.

If they don't drink it,

I am out and my family is out of this company."

If he's gonna hold onto it as the head of the family,

it needs to be bulletproof.

He cannot fail on this one.

This is a company that has been making Budweiser beer

for over 100 years, it's synonymous with the brewery.

And to extend that line was a really risky thing.

It has to be better than any other light beer on the market.

If it's going to be the next great American beer,

it has to say Budweiser.

With Lite Beer by Miller

getting closer and closer to toppling the number one beer

in the world, Budweiser,

August Busch finally unleashes a light beer

emblazoned with the Budweiser name.

The branding of Budweiser Light

was an incredibly risky move for the company,

because it was pulling from the goodwill

and brand recognition of their flagship beer,

which had pretty much been their workhouse

throughout the entire course of their history.

In 1982, Budweiser Light hits store shelves

backed by a 57 million dollar ad campaign.

Their tagline is,

"Finally a light beer worthy of the Budweiser name."

So they basically tell everyone,

this took a while because it is so good.

But in its first two years,

the lower calorie version of America's favorite beer fails

to beat out Lite Beer by Miller.

When Budweiser Light was first introduced,

the idea was to closely align that

with their flagship product,

and that was the approach that failed.

And so the company took a different approach.

In 1984, 2 years after Budweiser Light

hit the store shelves, they want to differentiate it

from the original, make it cool.

You know, something to drink at parties.

It's not just your grandfather's Budweiser,

but it's also a huge risk for them

to deviate from the brand they've

had so much success with.

Beautiful name, right to the point, Bud Light.

And so they had a series of ad campaigns

to repackage Light beer as a young person's drink.

You're trying to create an image of the kind of person

the drinker wants to be.

In 1987, Bud Light uses the Super Bowl,

the most watched sporting event of the year

to introduce a new face for the brand.

He's Spuds MacKenzie, Bud Light's original party animal.

♪ Go Spuds go

When the Spuds MacKenzie ad came out, you start to see,

Okay, we're not pitching this at middle-aged guys

with bellies with bellies anymore.

We're gonna have young people

who look really good in swimsuits,

and that's the people who should be drinking Bud Light.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Spuds MacKenzie.

I don't think the Super Bowl would be what it is

without the Anheuser-Busch ad campaigns

that it put forth for Bud Light.

We watched the Super Bowl for the commercials

as much as the game.

Bud really paved the way for what we think of

as Super Bowl commercials.

They were wackier, funnier, more irreverent,

and they are as indelible to the Super Bowl

at this point as anything, Bud Light is the Super Bowl beer.

Bud Light became the go-to party beer.

Anheuser-Busch had gotten its mojo back

and it was going full steam ahead.

In 1994, after a 17 year battle

between Anheuser-Busch and Miller,

Bud Light finally overtakes Lite Beer by Miller.

We can certainly thank Miller Lite

for introducing light beer to the mass market

in the United States, but we have Bud Light to thank

for pushing it to boundaries

that we've never seen in the past.

August III definitely deserves a lot of credit.

He saw the future coming, wasn't afraid to respond to that.

He knew the brand was strong enough to stand

splitting into light beer as well.

So without him and his foresight,

Bud Light and light beer in general

just might not be as big as it is today.

In 1998, off of Bud Light's rapid success,

Miller changes the name of its best-selling brand,

Lite Beer by Miller to the shorter catchier version

we know today, Miller Lite.

Following Miller's astronomical success,

Murphy is promoted to president of Philip Morris.

Murphy had no fear, he just plowed forward

without stopping and the momentum that

light beer created, it became a thing unto itself.

If you look at the top 10 brands today,

almost all of them are either low carb,

or low calorie, or both.

In 2001, Murphy witnessed the unimaginable.

A light beer finally beat out Budweiser

for the number one spot.

However, it wasn't Miller Lite as he hoped.

Bud light is such a force.

Nobody realizes or remembers what actually happened,

that Miller pioneered light beer.

Miller Lite might not be as big as Bud Light now,

but they're the reason that we have it

and any other light beer.

And in 2002, nearly 30 years after ushering in

the light beer craze, Murphy passes away.

Today, Bud Light remains the number one beer in America,

and 20,000 Bud Lights are sold every minute.

Bud Light may be king, but Miller Lite paved the way.

Not only is light beer

the best selling domestic beer category in America,

it's spearheaded the growth of the global beer market

to become a 600 billion dollar industry.

While there were barely 100 breweries in the US

when Murphy invented Miller Lite,

there are now more than 9,000 across America.

The rivalry between Miller and Anheuser-Busch

did nothing short of revitalizing

the American beer industry.

And it opened us up to whole new categories of beer,

things like ice beer, red beers, wheat beers, draft beers,

the embracing of foreign and craft beers.

None of that could have happened

unless John Murphy and August III

upset the apple cart for the betterment of all of us.