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So a funny thing happened on the way to taping this week’s Saturday Night Live. Anheuser-Busch went and bought all the national commercials within the broadcast.

Yep, all of them. That means that Anheuser-Busch is going to hit viewers with four minutes of beer ads.
There will presumably be local ads for car dealers and restaurants during the broadcast. But it’s the first time in the show’s 35 seasons that a single marketer has purchased all of the show’s national advertising time.

“If you think about Saturday Night Live, it’s obviously comedic, it’s fun, it’s young,” said Keith Levy, vice president of marketing at Anheuser-Busch, a division of Anheuser-Busch InBev. “Those are the things in particular that Bud Light Golden Wheat is trying to capture.”

Buying out every piece of national advertising during the show gives the beer a “huge presence” and “ownership of a show,” said Levy. “It’s a way to make a statement.”

The sponsorship will include “Backstage with Bud Light Golden Wheat,” a series of never-before-aired clips from SNL. The 11 commercials - five 30-second spots and six 15-second ones - are aimed at building awareness for the brand among drinkers and retailers, said Levy.

About two weeks into the beer’s national launch, Anheuser-Busch is trying to build buzz among store managers, who decide which new brands to give favored shelf space.

It’s too early to know if the SNL program will have a big effect on the Golden Wheat brand, said Tom Pirko, president of consulting firm Bevmark. That’s because short attention spans and a multitude of entertainment options makes it more difficult for big companies to break through to consumers with mass-media advertising.

“When you release a product and promote it heavily, you can’t really expect the same amount of impact you once did,” said Pirko. “It’s because of this massive amount of super-saturated clutter.”

Young adults - the target market for Golden Wheat - are “very easily influenced, but only on a temporary basis,” Pirko said. One response to the fickleness of that key demographic is the idea “that you have to barrage the consumer [and] really throw a lot at them.”

Anheuser-Busch would not say how much it was spending on the SNL sponsorship. Levy said only that “it’s a solid buy.” Bud Light Golden Wheat has an approximately $30 million annual marketing budget. That’s roughly the same as Bud Light Lime’s, befitting Golden Wheat’s status as an important line extension to Bud Light, Anheuser-Busch’s bestselling beer.