Whassup?
advertising campaign for Anheuser-Busch Budwiser beer
Whassup? (also known as Wazzup) was a commercial campaign for Budweiser beer from 1999 to 2002. The first spot aired during Monday Night Football on December 20, 1999 and then in 2000 just after the Super Bowl XXXIV halftime show. The ad campaign ran in much of the world and became a pop culture catchphrase, comically slurring "what's up?".
Origins
The commercials were based on the short film True written and directed by Charles Stone III, featuring Stone and several of his childhood friends: Fred Thomas, Paul Williams, Terry Williams, Jimmy "Puerto Rock" Perez, and Kevin Lofton. The characters sat around talking on the phone and saying "whassup?" to one another in a comical way. Vinny Warren, a creative working on the Budweiser brand at advertising agency DDB Chicago randomly came across the short film TRUE. He liked it and noticed that everyone he showed it to would invariably shout "Wassup!" to him when he met them later. This led him to think that perhaps everyone would have this reaction. He pitched the idea to his boss Don Pogany who presented the concept to August Busch IV, vice president of Anheuser-Busch. Impressed, Busch licensed the idea from C&C Storm films and enlisted Stone as the director for Budweiser TV commercials inspired by the film.
“Whassup?” enters the record as advertising campaign for Anheuser-Busch Budwiser beer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Whassup, advertising and campaign can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Whassup?” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Whassup, advertising and campaign provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7990732. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2002 and 2000.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Whassup?” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.