Advertising Is Content: The Threat To Streaming Sports Posed By A Tiny Advertisement Inventory
from the jingle-this dept
I've talked about the coming and evolving world of wider streaming in professional and major college sports for quite a while now. Even measuring only the past few years, streaming of sporting events has seen immense progress, from the leagues themselves getting on board and expanding options, to broadcast partners opening up their product online, to forward-looking team owners recognizing that the future is in streaming. Wide-spread streaming sports is going to happen, due to all of the above and the fact that cord-cutting is simply not going to go away.
Which isn't to say there aren't barriers to hurdle as progress is made. Today, I want to talk about one of them: the horrifically small advertising inventory too many sports streams have. Ads that become annoying due to repetition isn't a new concept. There is even a TV Tropes page for it. But what for television is repeated ads as a mild annoyance due to poor scheduling or the notion that repetition makes ads more effective is something entirely different for the current crop of online stream ads. What we're dealing with today is repetition of the same ads or ads for the same products/services over and over and over again, in break after break, often times repeated within breaks, all because the inventory is too low.
Contrary to what you might think, this isn't a small problem. Not every person needs to use the bathroom at every commercial break. For sporting events in particular, this becomes a greater issue because the natural breaks in game action often times mean that commercial breaks will occasionally occur in near proximity to one another. Repeated ads in this case over the course of an entire event aren't just annoying, they're absolutely jarring to the viewer.
An anecdote: most of my NFL viewing occurs in my kitchen, typically using one of the streaming services, while I cook my family's Sunday dinner. It's a tradition in my house that I do dinners on Sunday. Having the NFL Foxsports.com stream on my tablet in the kitchen made my wife angrily leave the room entirely and refuse to come back. I'm not exaggerating. There was a particular commercial featuring a certain quarterback saying random things in the sing-song of a particular company's jingle that, over the course of roughly fifteen minutes, was played no less than ten times. It made her hate the stream, the advertiser, and probably me for having it on in the first place. Whatever advertising is hoping to achieve, the broadcaster cannot accept it causing viewers to literally leave the room in annoyance.
Television doesn't have this problem currently, because the ad inventory is much higher. If you see an ad repeated two or three times during a single game, it's no big deal. I'd guess that I saw three or four total ads on Fox's stream something like thirty times each during the course of one game. That can't go on. It makes the streaming product less valuable and less desirable. If advertising is content, and it is, then that content must never cause us to turn away and hide from it.
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Filed Under: ads, advertising, content, oversaturation, repeats, sports, streaming
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How is this different from broadcast TV?
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Re: How is this different from broadcast TV?
At what point does "brand awareness" turn into "brand annoyance", as in "I remember that commercial! I hated it! I'll buy something else!"
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Because those advertisers didn't pay for online ads, only the 3 to 5 you see did. They don't want to give away ad spots for free.
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Congratulations
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Re: Congratulations
(actually, the amusement is lost after the first 3-4 showings, the other million are what induces the brain to be one neuron away from going postal...)
2. on point of your boring commentators: i have always wished a couple regular guys/gals who are semi-knowledgeable of the sport would provide their own irreverent commentary of the games, AND poke the NFL in the eye for their bullshit "retransmission is illegal and we'll kill you, blah blah blah"...
with the right guys/gals providing off-the-wall comments, it might make pro football fun again...
3. "It made her hate the stream, the advertiser, and probably me for having it on in the first place."
how long have you been married ? ? ? the order would be: hates YOU for having it on in the first place, and MAYBE thinks about the original offenders being semi-responsible...
'chicken parm you taste so gooooooood...'
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Wrong audience.
You know who doesn't though? YouTube. It has its own problems, but a lack of streaming ad catalog is not one of them. Just putting that out there.
As in politics, when you do not agree with how things are being run, write someone. Write to the people behind Fox Sports and let them know how disappointed you are by having your viewing experience ruined by such high repetition. Write to the companies displaying their ads on those streams. They pay for a certain value and understand that they are not getting what they paid for (or are being fleeced for additional revenue) when their ads are overplayed to such a ridiculous extent.
Do something. Be the change you want to see in others. :)
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Re: Wrong audience.
You should probably pay more attention.
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Re: Wrong audience.
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Re: Wrong audience.
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Unfortunately I have the added issue of some whohaa creating massive interference to the broadcast signals during prime time.
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Advertisers are like whining children in a supermarket
The difference is that children stop whining.
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Re: Advertisers are like whining children in a supermarket
On your second point, no they don't. They just grow up to be adult whiners, as this story demonstrates. FFS, NFL is crap any way you get it. The ads just make it even crappier. Complaining about how the NFL chooses (deigns) to feed your foolish addiction is the worst sort of whining. Kick the habit already. Find something better to do, whether that's play a cd or dvd, read a book, or chat with the wife and kids. All would be a far better thing to spend your time on than professional sports programming. They all suck all over in multitudinous ways.
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It isn't just sports streams
Particularly ironic was this was after I defended my PhD, part of which was paid for by grants from the ONR (http://www.onr.navy.mil/).
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Please don't try to convince me we need more commercials because people can't keep their programming interesting enough whenever the nfl needs to stop the clock.
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Twitch tv
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Most times, most places.
I have regularly seen ads repeated during the play of a movie on over-the-air TV. I've sometimes even seen an ad repeated during a single break.
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rosie.wong@energizer.com
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Adblock or Ublock Origin?
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