Budweiser’s “Whassup?” advertising campaign began in 1999 and featured friends greeting one another with the exaggerated phrase.
The commercials were based on the short film “True,” created by Charles Stone III. The campaign showed men watching sports, drinking Budweiser, and repeatedly shouting the greeting over the telephone. Its deliberately repetitive humor made the phrase a recognizable part of late-1990s popular culture.
The campaign was created by DDB Chicago for Anheuser-Busch. It won major advertising awards, including the 2000 Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, and became widely parodied.
People sometimes remember the line as “Wassup” without the opening “h.” The spelling used in the campaign title was “Whassup?” The advertisements were not simply ordinary beer commercials: their catchphrase spread into everyday speech and demonstrated how advertising language can escape its original product context.