A trainer raises a Clydesdale foal from its first wobbly steps, working with it every day until it is ready to join Budweiser’s famous hitch. Three years pass in a single cut. A truck arrives to take the fully grown horse away, and the trainer is left standing alone in the field, proud but clearly empty without the animal he raised.
He spots a newspaper headline announcing that the Budweiser Clydesdales are coming to Chicago and drives into the city to see the horse one more time. Standing at the edge of the parade route, he watches his horse pass by in formation and turns to leave, assuming he has not been noticed. Then the Clydesdale breaks from the group and gallops back to him, exactly as it used to when he called it as a foal, while Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” plays over the reunion.
The 2013 Super Bowl spot, called “Brotherhood,” was made by the agency Anomaly and directed by Jake Scott. Horse trainer Tommie Turvey worked with eight Clydesdales for two weeks before narrowing the cast down to three for the final shoot, and the production moved between Budweiser’s Warm Springs Ranch in Missouri, Thousand Oaks in California, and the streets of downtown Los Angeles standing in for Chicago.
The ad topped the USA Today Ad Meter for that year’s Super Bowl and had racked up close to 12 million YouTube views within two months. Budweiser later ran a fan contest to name the foal from the commercial, and it became known as Hope. It remains one of the clearest examples of the brand’s long-running trick: never once showing anyone drink a beer, and still making the whole audience feel something.
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