After Pepsi, Coca-Cola has announced that it will not run ads during the annual championship game of the National Football League, Super Bowl, this year.
On Friday, the beverage giant released an official statement and said that the decision was to 'ensure we are investing in the right resources during these unprecedented times,' reported Variety.
This comes days after their rival Pepsi announced that they will not run the ads during Super Bowl LIV and will instead focus on their annual halftime show, which features The Weekend.
The decade-long battle between the two beverage giants is usually noticeable through their ads during the annual Super Bowl games. However, both Pepsi and Coca-Cola have decided to opt out this year.
Coca-Cola ended its 11-year streak of making Super Bowl ad appearances in 2019 by opting to run a commercial before the kickoff rather than during. According to reports, in 2020, Coke spent about $10 million on commercials for Super Bowl LIV.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, its revenue fell to USD 7.2 billion.
Last year, Coca-Cola's revenue plunged 28 per cent in the second quarter, but the company said sales had begun to improve in June as lockdowns eased globally.
Half of Coke's sales come from stadiums, movie theatres and other places where people gather in large numbers, venues that have blinked out in the pandemic. April case volumes fell 25 per cent worldwide, the had company said. But by June, that decline narrowed to 10 per cent.
In 2020, Coke reported net income of USD 1.8 billion for the April-June period, down 32 per cent from the same period in 2019. Excluding one-time items, the Atlanta company earned 42 cents per share. That tops Wall Street's per-share expectations by 2 cents, according to analysts polled by FactSet.
(With inputs from PTI)
