The “beer king” will not be reigning over the Super Bowl 2021 commercial space this year.
Budweiser is the latest company to give up advertising during this year’s broadcast, opting to join a public awareness campaign for the COVID-19 vaccine.
For the first time in 37 years, the company will not show its game theft commercials, Anheuser-Busch, owner of Budweiser, announced Monday.
“Like everyone, we look forward to bringing people together, reopening restaurants and bars and being able to get together to celebrate with friends and family,” said Monica Rustgi, Budweiser’s vice president of marketing. “To do this and bring consumers back to neighborhood bars and restaurants that have been hit exceptionally by the pandemic, we are intervening to support critical awareness of the COVID-19 vaccine.”
The Super Bowl’s thirty-second ads cost about $ 55 million each. Budweiser will instead direct some of that money to the Advertising Council’s efforts to raise public awareness of the vaccine, as well as to a 90-second COVID-themed “movie” called “Bigger Picture” narrated by the actress Rashida Jones. It airs digitally before the Super Bowl, which will air on February 7, 2021 on CBS.
Other Super Bowl commercial giants, such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Hyundai, will also take a step back from this year’s game, reallocating their funds in light of the pandemic. Pepsi, for example, will focus primarily on its break program, spearheaded by The Weeknd.
“Instead of buying a traditional 30-second Super Bowl ad, we decided to double the 12 minutes that Pepsi already had in the middle of the game – the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show,” said Vice President of Marketing Todd Kaplan in a statement. .
Coca-Cola executives said they will not run ads on this year’s broadcast to “ensure that we are investing in the right resources during these unprecedented times.”
Many others are struggling to figure out how to reach the right tone amid the devastation caused by the virus.
“There is trepidation around advertising in the Super Bowl this year,” Bill Oberlander, co-founder and creative executive at the advertising agency Oberlander, told the Post recently. “For the Super Bowl, you usually go to the big one or go home. I think brands are coming home instead of spending tens of millions of dollars and not getting it right. They are saying, ‘We will wait until the storm passes’ ”.
In previous years, Budweiser’s Super Bowl commercials stole the show, with ads featuring singing frogs and majestic Clydesdales. Last year, his favorite crowd ad defied the stereotypes of a “typical American” by showing the extraordinary actions of ordinary Americans.