Wow, I had no idea that broadcasting corporations hired militant school administrators to run their advertising department. No wonder you’re so pissed.
Oh, dear God, you’ve been exposed to more advertising! Yup, that’s comparable to being ass-fucked (for those who are very much opposed to such things).
I’m with Phil here, what the hell does it matter? Do you expect ABC to show you a football game you want to see purely out of the goodness of their hearts? Do you expect them to be concerned with the eternal enmity of people irrational enough to be seriously object to CGI billboards? Get a fucking sense of perspective.
do they have to show a game at all, with all of the football, my monday night ABC viewing got trashed. at least there was the Iron Cheif marathon on food network
Alibey formaly of Arabia and now in the great white north
I suppose you’d prefer a pay-per-view game? or perhaps we should pay more taxes so ABC can get a subsidy from the government?
You’re getting to watch a game on TV and you don’t have to pay any money to do so but you have to look at an advertisement so you’re pissed off?
You’re one of those people who bitches about the Olympics when they’re held in the U.S. because “they’re too commercial” aren’t you? I guess in your mind it’d be better for everyone in the whole country to pay for sporting events even if they have no interest in them.
As much as I sympathisize with your annoyance, I can’t help admiring the evil genius of it. It sounds like something Dr. Evil or the Brain of Pinky and the Brain would come up with.
Errr… before everyone goes jumping on Diet (too late), I have a question. Were there commercials during the game (during time outs/in between quarters, etc)?
If so, the I also give a hearty ‘fuck you’ to ABC. This means they either paid to much to get the thing on their network or they are shamefully greedy.
Of course, if it was a trade-off for a commercial free game, then let the billboard stay. Hell, for commercial-free, let them stick a Pringle can on the football itself.
I also got pissed at the Discover card plastering itself all over the big ball in Times Square, but I guess I’m old fashioned.
My advertising/bowl game question is, do these insignificant companies not realize that naming the bowl after themselves is not only annoying, it detracts from the bowl’s significance?
Show of hands on how many of you watched the furniture.com bowl or the Insight.com bowl. That’s what I thought.
If it was the Sun Bowl or the Liberty Bowl, you might have had some recognition of it, and taken a peek.
100 years from now, college students will look in some trophy case on their campus and laugh.
“Hey! We won the vinylsiding.com Bowl back in 2000! How impressive!”
I first noticed the fake billboard during a screw-up: they were flashed over the sky just before a shot was shown of the crowd. I thought “what the?” and then realised, “oh, they’re fake ads. Neat.”
Face it: commercial TV is a profit-making effort by the networks. It costs ABC jillions of dollars to broadcast the Rose Bowl and they’re lucky when they get a good game. They have to make money, and if virtual ads are the way to go, then that’s what they’re going to do.
Personally, I’m a proponent of public broadcasting, but I doubt you’ll ever see the Rose Bowl on PBS.
TV doesn’t consist of programs with commercials thrown in during the breaks. TV consists of comercials and advertising with programming to try to lure you to watch them. Advertising is the whole point of the medium. If not for that, then no TV. Then we may be forced to read or talk with our families… the horror.
That’s the genius of The Super Bowl. We talk more about the commercials then the game itself
Hey, I watched the Insight.com Bowl… Of course, one of the schools that played is my alma mater, so I am a bit biased. But yeah, I wonder how effective renaming the Copper Bowl to the Insight.com Bowl has been in generating business. It certainly hasn’t prompted me to go their site.
Or in the case of my school: “We lost the vinylsiding.com Bowl”.
As for the fake adds, I’m fairly ambivelent. Sports broadcasting is journalisim of a sort, and the adds distort the truth of what happened at the event. However, their effect practically is quite trivial. Their not my favorite thing, but I can certainly live with them.
Uh, I don’t think that was what the OP was getting at at all. There’s a big difference between paying for the game and reaping profits at every fucking opportunity possible.
Ten or fifteen years ago, there were no CGI billboards. There was no Doritos halftime report, Preperation H Play of the Game, Aflac trivia question, Quaker State MVP, Tostitos score ticker, or, god forbid, a Blockbuster All-Madden Team. No Poulan/Weedeater Independence Bowl, either. There was a Goodyear blimp and that was it. But somehow the networks managed to reap mighty profits.
If you look at advertising rates for back then compared to the rates today, you can see that they’ve kept pace. In fact, from what I’ve heard, the dot com ads raised the bar even more. This isn’t good enough for the networks. They want more, more, MORE! You may call it good business sense. I call it pure fucking greed.
So yes, I think seeing a product logo every twenty seconds, in addition to the HUGE glut of regular commercials, does detract from the experience. It feels like I’m watching three and a half hours (Hey! Where did that extra half hour come from? Football games usually only lasted three hours ten years ago! Oh yeah, extra commercials…) of advertisements with a few minutes football thrown in. I’m taking bets on how long it will be before the teams actually start naming themselves after corporations. I say three years. Any takers?