Three years after its sister brand, Bud Light, faced a rightwing boycott over a transgender spokesperson, Budweiser’s new Super Bowl ad, American Icons, contains absolutely nothing that could be mistaken for social progress. Instead, it features an unlikely friendship between two animals whose blood runs red, white and blue: a bald eagle and a Clydesdale horse, the Budweiser icon. An adorable foal trots out of a barn, and the viewer is injected with a single minute of American iconography so pure that it would make Lee Greenwood nauseous.
The horse meets a struggling baby bird who gets caught in the rain, prompting the horse to stand over the bird as a roof. The pair become pals and grow up together, the bird riding on the horse’s back as it grows larger. It falls off a few times, but, like George Washington at Valley Forge, it never gives up. Finally, the horse jumps over a log while the bird spreads its wings above, and we get a slow-motion image of something like Pegasus. We realize the bird, now fully grown, is a majestic bald eagle, taking to the sky as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird reaches its climax. Two farmers look on while drinking Budweiser, as the words “Made of America” appear on the screen. “You crying?” one asks. “The sun’s in my eyes,” says the other.
Budweiser are hoping it will cause a similarly teary reaction in viewers. They might be right: animals and nostalgia are key elements of a winning Super Bowl ad, according to an analysis of 500 ads at the University of Virginia, and Forbes’s Pamela N Danziger expects the Pegasus ad – officially titled American Icons – to be the Super Bowl’s most popular.
The focus on a universally beloved phenomenon – unlikely animal friendships – comes after a Bud Light promotion in 2023 led to one of American history’s biggest brand boycotts. Dylan Mulvaney, a social media star who is trans, talked up the beer in a 60-second video posted only to social media. Afterwards, rightwing personalities including Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene lashed out; Kid Rock fired a gun at cans of Bud Light. In the four weeks ending on 3 June, sales of both Bud Light and Budweiser plummeted 24.6% and 9.2% respectively; to add insult to injury, Modelo, Bud Light’s Mexican rival, took over as America’s bestselling beer, with 8.4% of the US market share to Bud Light’s 7.3%. Within weeks, Budweiser returned to horse-forward, aggressively American marketing, releasing an ad featuring a Clydesdale visiting the Lincoln Memorial.
Since then, Budweiser’s Super Bowl commercials have stuck with the equine theme. A 2024 spot also plays the hits, with a dog-horse alliance and several hardworking white men in baseball caps. In 2025, a horse who understands beer’s symbolic value delivered a forgotten keg to hardworking white men in baseball caps.
The Clydesdales are nothing new, of course; they’ve been part of the Super Bowl for decades and associated with Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser’s manufacturer, for even longer. But a look through recent Super Bowl ads pre- and post-boycott does suggest a shift: a 2019 ad celebrates wind power, while ads from 2021 and 2023, before the controversy, want us to know that diverse people from all walks of life love a Budweiser. Bud Light, meanwhile, followed the Mulvaney backlash with an ad featuring a bunch of men grunting. One of them was Travis Kelce, and another NFL star, Peyton Manning, returns to advertise the brand for this year’s Super Bowl. He’s joined by the comedian Shane Gillis, “who’s about the opposite of Dylan Mulvaney”, as Anson Frericks, a former Anheuser-Busch executive, told Fox Business last year. (Gillis came to national attention in 2019 after he was dropped from Saturday Night Live over racist remarks on a podcast.)
As the US is torn apart, the year’s ad reads like a parody of patriotic imagery: the bird, the beer, the great American song that has become the butt of classic-rock jokes. The mythical vision of America so many of us were raised on feels like a surreal relic in 2026.
Perhaps it’s brilliant marketing: America’s hardcore fans can take it literally, while those dismayed at what’s happening all around us can take it as satire. And then we can all have a beer.
