As the UFC returns to Madison Square Garden Saturday night, UFC ring announcer Bruce Buffer is trading the octagon for a steakhouse in a new Bud Light spot.
The campaign sees Buffer swap places with a steakhouse server so they can watch the big UFC fight, leaving him to serve the customers.
“I love when I perform or even when I’m doing commercials to be self-deprecating,” Buffer tells The Hollywood Reporter about the spot. “I like making fun of myself and just having fun for comedy purposes, and the creative people at Bud Light, you know, when they send me the storyboards, I go, ‘This is going to be awesome.’ So I totally dug my teeth into it. I loved it.”
The Bud Light spot was released ahead of UFC 334, which will take place tonight at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Bud Light is an official sponsor of UFC, with its spots typically running during the broadcast both for viewers and those in the arena.
“Bud Light’s creative team is just really fantastic at what they do, and looking at that, I trust them to come up with what they came up with, and they also give me the freedom to give feedback,” says Buffer. “It’s really, really cool, and it’s great when you work with people that are that comfortable to work with and respect the fact that they’re not damaging your brand, but yet enhancing it.”
In addition to the spot, Bud Light is partnering with UFC and Omaha Steaks on a “Fight Night Feast” package, which will bundle tomahawk steaks, Bud Light beer money, a Paramount+ gift card and UFC training gloves for $99.
“We know the best part of fight night is getting together with friends over an ice-cold Bud Light and some great food,” said Todd Allen, senior VP of marketing for Bud Light at Anheuser-Busch. “And with UFC 335 set to close out the year, we wanted to create something for UFC fans that makes fight night easy to enjoy. Fight Night Feast delivers everything needed for an unforgettable night of UFC action directly to fans’ doorsteps.”
But it’s also a testament to how far UFC has come. What was once an outcast sport now counts America’s biggest beer brand as a sponsor.
“When I started with the UFC 30 years ago, we were a spectacle. We weren’t what I would consider a sport,” Buffer recalls. “It was like a blood sport, like the movie. It was what style is the best? It grew with the rules and became mixed martial arts seven or eight years into its evolutionary process, to now where it’s a mainstream sport, to where we’re accepted by the Paramount networks and all the other big networks of this world, and to get to the point now where we’re working with Bud Light and mainstream sponsors that work with the other major sports in the world, it shows that UFC is truly the biggest fighting event in the world and is a mainstream sport. It’s like we made it. It’s a clarification that we’re there.”
