Which Coca-Cola billboards will be at today's matches?

 by Martin Belam, 30 June 2006

The companies sponsoring the FIFA World Cup pay huge sums of money to get exclusive billboard placement at the matches. In order to maintain the exclusivity of the contracts, stadiums have been renamed, fans have had their clothing removed before they can be admitted to matches, and Germany, home of some of the world's finest beers, has been reduced at matches to only selling the USA version of Budweiser.

Yet, with the world's television viewers glued to the games, and consequently the perimieter advertising, only Coca-Cola have done anything like a "campaign" within the stadia themselves. For the first round of group matches, their billboards (which are between McDonalds and MasterCard in the left-half of the pitch as you are watching on TV, and behind the goal) had the Coca-Cola logo picked out in two different colour schemes, matching those of the teams playing. In the second round of group matches, the advert changed to feature the sillouette of a Coca-Cola bottle with the URL of their football website.

Coca-Cola advert at the Switzerland - Togo World Cup match

For the third and final round of group games, the boards changed again, and this time the Coca-Cola Light brand was in the spotlight. And once the competition reached the knock-out phase, the 8 second round matches had adverts for 'Powerade' in the Coca-Cola spot, which didn't appear to feature any parent company branding at all.

Coca-Cola Powerade advert on TV during the Netherlands - Portugal World Cup match

Meanwhile, every other one of the World Cup's major sponsors has simply stuck up a big version of their logo in their brand colours. It has made the Coca-Cola campaign stand out so much, to the extent that I am actually intrigued to see whether they have new iterations of the campaign for the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final, or whether whatever appears today will see them through the rest of the tournament.

7 Comments

A good bet would be a promo for Coke Zero - which launches in Germany in July.

It's supposed to taste just like regular fat Coke but with no sugar.

It doesn't.

Christiano Ronaldo showed his cynicism towards the beautiful game with his little wink having provoked Rooney. It was no surprise. His legs give way week in week out as if shot by a machine gunner in the English league. Many, many people now believe Ronaldo is a cheat. Many believe there is no other word for it. That's fair enough, he is welcome to allegedly cheat in his own league, but he sucks cash out of English fans at the same time. It would be great to have fewer cheats in British football. Maximum 2 foreign players per team in the Premiership, as advocated by Sepp Blatter. Cheating should not be acceptable in Britain. If we let it be acceptable, we will raise a generation with different values from our own,

If we take the money out of British football, it will be less attractive to people like Ronaldo.

thanks
http://www.boycott-football.tk

>> A good bet would be a promo for Coke Zero - which launches in Germany in July.

In a bit of a let-down, it was Powerade again.

>> Many, many people now believe Ronaldo is a cheat.

You can see my take on Cristiano Ronaldo over on 'A lemon tree of our own'

http://lemontree.typepad.com/a_lemon_tree_of_our_own/2006/07/dear_cristiano_.html

Powerade saw them through all the games, except for the final, which went for their brand colours, dynamic ribbon logo et al, plus ".com"

At at least one of the games one of their two banners was Powerade and the other a Coke banner. I think it was a quarter final.

coke is nice

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