"Too large and profit-driven to be 'Corporate'"

Perhaps there are levels of intended irony at work here that are far beyond my poor power to appreciate. But I think it's more likely that the folks at Budweiser are just idiots.

If you listen to any moderately alternative radio station, and by moderately alternative, I mean "owned and operated by a giant media company playing music for the 13-30 crowd with piercings", you may have heard a Budweiser commercial that goes something like this:

Bored/ stoned young male on the verge of saying "whatever": Yeah, I have this job for a giant dumb company, and they make me wear a tie, and my friends all have jobs for giant dumb companies that have procedures and forms and bureaucracy and shit, but we're not sellouts, because we all get together in a bar after work and say surly passive aggressive things about our employers. And we drink Bud while doing it.

The key line is something like "and we mock all things corporate" over a Budweiser.

Now I hope the irony need not be spelled out. But in case you are the marketing genius from Budweiser and not one of my clever regular readers (whom I have unforgivably neglected since starting my new job), I'll spell it out:

Dissing corporate evil over a Bud is not merely ironic, it's hypocritical. Read this and tell me Bud's not corporate. Anheuser-Busch has nearly half (47%) of the world wide beer sales. Not corporate at all. Hardly establishment. Very edgy.

So now the key question: Who's dumberrer? The bud marketers who actually thought they could align their brand with the anti-big company feeling of the alt rock crowd, or the Gen X/Y types who don't see the irony/ insult in the ads and actually start to think "I reject corporate life! I unplug from the matrix!, Bud is my beer!"

Given Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and "Jackass", I fear I must bet on the marketers.