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Budweiser's top dog? Bode story is bogus
By ERIC BERNSEE
Editor
Here's one straight from the don't-believe-everything-you-read department ...
On the eve of the Super Bowl, former DePauw University Media Center Director Ken Bode thought he'd have a little fun with friends and family and drafted an email purporting to be the proud owner of a celebrity dog.
Not just any dog, mind you, but the lost yellow lab puppy in the Anheuser-Busch Budweiser Super Bowl commercial that tugged at TV viewers' heart strings and ultimately was voted America's favorite ad from Sunday's big game.
Asked about it, Bode couldn't keep from laughing.
"That is a classic April Fool's story that I concocted for family members and a few good friends, and it's gone viral," Bode told the Banner Graphic via phone from Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he and wife Margo now reside and enjoy riding miles of nearby off-road biking trails.
Hell-o-o-o-o, even the dog's name is Bogus.
"This is a story of how things can go sideways," the former NBC newsman and noted political reporter said. "I never expected that."
The only truth to the whole email saga, Bode said, "is that we do have a puppy named Bogus."
And the puppy looks enough like little "Whitey" in the Budweiser ad campaigns over the past two Super Bowls that "when Margo sees the ads, she cries."
Apparently Bode emailed his bogus Budweiser story to a couple friends still at DePauw, one of whom forwarded it to his granddaughter. Ultimately it ended up at Fox 59, the Indianapolis TV station, where a DePauw graduate happily reported on it. CBS4 also posted the bogus story on its website.
Neither TV station contacted Bode to verify the information was true, he said, relying only on the email and that carrier of much misinformation, the Internet.
The email was "strewn with clues" that his friends and family should have recognized enough to know the whole story was bogus, the former "Washington Week in Review" host said.
The explanation for Bogus' return as the 2015 Budweiser commercial star was that so much video was shot of the dog interacting with the Clydesdale horses and other animals that Budweiser was able to put a second commercial together without shooting anything new.
Bode begins his correspondence by talking about someone named Bob McFarland, a Chicago acquaintance who supposedly initially urged Bode to put his puppy in auditions for the 2014 commercial.
"McFarland was never an ad man," Bode said, adding that the man was also dead long before Bogus was even born.
Another hint: Bode notes that McFarland picked up Bogus for his commercial debut on the first of April in 2013.
And he cleverly ends his email letter with "around here -- Super Bowl star or not -- he's still known as Bogus."
In a follow-up email, Bode apparently told friends that Bogus earned good money for his commercial work but that all the proceeds would be going to the puppy's college fund.
"I thought someone would have picked up on that," Bode added.