LIV Golf hires v-p who ran disaster Bud Light trans campaign

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The marketing executive that was behind the ad campaign that tanked the No. 1 beer in America seemingly got a mulligan.

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Former Anheuser-Busch vice-president Alissa Heinerscheid reportedly has been working with LIV Golf since September 2024.

According to Heinerscheid’s LinkedIn page, the ex-InBev exec has resurfaced with the Saudi-backed breakaway golf tour in a “Team Business Operations” role.

Heinerscheid was behind Bud Light’s controversial ad campaign that aimed to rebrand the beer as more inclusive, including a widely panned partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney that launched in 2023.

To say that the rebranding efforts weren’t well-received would be a massive understatement, with the company losing an estimated US$1.4 billion in sales and billions more in market cap.

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Once America’s top-selling beer, Bud Light dropped to third place, behind Modelo and Michelob Ultra.

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The campaign’s fallout led to losses of up to 30% in profit, company layoffs, and permanent damage to a mainstay beer brand.

When reached by the New York Post, Heinerscheid and LIV’s chief communications officer Ilana Finley declined to comment.

However, a former Anheuser-Busch executive told the outlet that it’s likely LIV took the opportunity to hire Heinerscheid on the cheap.

“My guess is that LIV was probably able to get somebody relatively inexpensively to come join them and take some of her experience working at the biggest beer company,” Anson Frericks, a former colleague of Heinerscheid who has since founded a venture capital company, told the Post.

Frericks added that the hire isn’t necessarily a sign that LIV Golf wants to steer into woke-ness and it’s more likely that both sides saw this situation as a win-win.

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“LIV is already inherently controversial, and that probably makes it difficult in some cases to recruit top talent,” Frericks said. “So, she gets an opportunity to redeem herself, and LIV gets the opportunity to have somebody who has experience managing billion-dollar brands. Alissa obviously made a mistake, but, frankly, I believe in second chances and am rooting for her,” the ex-colleague added.

Frericks, author of the book “Last Call for Bud Light,” wrote that Heinerscheid was “one of DEI’s chief proponents” at the company, and “never made a secret of her progressive politics” in the years they worked together. This seemingly makes for an odd fit for Heinerscheid and LIV Golf, considering Saudi Arabia’s restrictive laws regarding the LGBTQ community.

As the Bud Light campaign blew up, Heinerscheid also received backlash for comments made about the beer brand’s reputation as “fratty” and “out of touch,” and touted “inclusivity” and “representation” as the keys to transforming its image.

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