Coke, Pepsi and Budweiser are skipping super bowl ads this year

The Super Bowl isn't known just for being the most important sporting event of the year that for the most part only Americans care about, but it is also known as the time of year when companies pay sick money for advertising space and the people who make the best ones are sitting this year's Super Bowl out.


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The "Bud Bowl" games were sometimes better than the actual game that was being played in the Super Bowl.

Aside from this commercial time being extremely lucrative for the network, it also seems like a competition among the various advertisers to see who can have the "best" commercial of the entire mix. Tons of money is spent not just on the advertisement time, but in the creation of the advert in the first place. This is probably most evident on the part of the big 3, all of which are sitting the Super Bowl out this year.


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Budweiser came out and said that they are not interested in advertising because this year is not a time for celebration due to Covid and instead will donate the advertising money that they would normally spend on the commercials to Covid - call me a skeptic but I doubt they donate as much as the commercials would normally cost them. They are also getting a ton of free publicity from this move, quite possibly more than they would get from the commercials themselves.

Pepsi is not advertising but has made no promise of donating money, they are focusing their efforts on the halftime show, which is sponsored by Pepsi.

Coke has also made no announcement about donating anything to anyone - the company has been hit hard by restaurant, stadium, and movie theater closures worldwide and are simply making a wise financial move.

At the end of the day I disagree with people about this not being a time to celebrate and I think to a certain degree that Budweiser is lying. One factor that all 3 companies are not acknowledging is that even though NFL did it to a lessor degree, the BLM factor and taking a knee during the national anthem has taken its toll on viewership in a big way, with many fans refusing to watch anything that the NFL has anything to do with.

There is also going to be a very limited amount of people in the stands this year, so the "big game" might not be as big as these advertisers would like.

For me, the commercials during the Super Bowl were always a lot of fun and companies really went out of their way to make the best ones just for this time. It's a shame that some of the best companies are sitting it out, but it never made much sense to me that someone would pay a million dollars for a 30 second advertisement slot anyway.



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The adverts are the best thing about the Super bowl for me and the big 3 not being there does put a downer on things. The loss of viewership is probably the reason like you mentioned as the cost is not worth the reward and better spent elsewhere.

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I wonder if they have been forced to lower their prices for advertising space this year. I haven't heard anyone talking about that but it wouldn't surprise me since there has been a dramatic drop in people watching all sports in USA in the past year - especially once some of the leagues embraced players making things political.

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I find it funny that pepsi is skipping due to the being the main sponsor of the superbowl halftime this year

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Yeah, i suspect that contract was secured a long time ago. There are still going to be quite a few people watching, I know I will be... but I hate to be out of it as far as music is concerned but I don't even know what "The Weekend" even is.

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One of the few sporting events that I wake up super early to watch. For some reason the commercials were always blocked in Thailand anyway so we never got to see them, which is a shame since like you said, sometimes they were better than the games themselves

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You don't get the commercials at all? hmmmm, i would have thought that as much money as these guys have to spend that this would be worldwide.

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We get commercials, not many of them, and they are always in Thai and unfortunately they are normally very repetitive. This time around it was a Toyota commercial every commercial break and it was really annoying after a while. I will avoid buying Toyotas in the future because of this.

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Not shocking, I wonder if companies are going to use the 'Rona excuse like everyone else is, to change what they do for the super bowl. I'm not a football person myself but this year nobody is really too interested in it.

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and the ratings after the fact reflected exactly what you said above. I guess people aren't as interested as they used to be. I still watched every snap, but many folks just skipped the entire ordeal altogether.

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