Bud Drops Back, But Super Bowl Offers No Safety

The field for the NFL title game was dry, yet surprisingly slick in a way that threatened injury.

And so was Heineken.

The international beer giant ran an ad for Heineken 0.0, a non-alcoholic version of their signature green-bottled brew. That in itself was unsurprising. The rising popularity of Dry January, the growing recognition of the accumulative harms of drinking day in and day out and the surge of nonalcoholic bars and cocktails has sent a message that Heineken has received—and its rivals may be slow to accept.

Or perhaps not. Anheuser-Busch, the American face of megaproducer AB InBev, relinquished its exclusive beer sponsorship of the Super Bowl for the first time in 30 years. This backing down from the primacy of a beer-and-football Sunday may suggest the brewer is keeping a lower profile and recuperating from the PR nightmare arising from its soccer World Cup sponsorship.

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