9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"

If you are spending millions on ads, you can pay a couple of guys to watch TV and take notes.

Eventually, people buying ad time on TV stations could request an air check and receive a VHS tape showing a bit of the programming before/after the ad pod your ad ran. Particularly useful when buying ad time on local stations out of the market where you lived.

Not an expert on this but I don't think same kind of manual effort is required anymore.

Technology is funny, I remember when an intern project detected cats in Youtube videos and it was front page news (round here, at least).

Now it's just boring technology.

But there is a much more stringent privacy requirement here since customers walking in those stores haven't really signed up for this analysis. Hence, difficult to just setup the camera and take continuous data for analysis.

There's something to it

As for continuous play, I feel like the Americans made the very particular decision to cut out the potentially boring parts the game, so every moment is either setup or bombastic action.

It's weird but there is appeal to the idea.

It's common even at a local grassroots level where local businesses will feature on the kits.

MLB since 2023.

wouldn't have as much funding, sure, but football was massively popular long before they started putting logos on shirts & hoardings.

If there was less money involved in football, then the likes of the free-to-air stations would be in a better position to compete to show more matches, too

The sport, or the franchise?

And that’s bad because… I’m really asking. What’s the good thing about having millionaires running around a field passing a ball to each other, while billionaires are raking in even more cash by manipulating you with adverts? Not to mention all the other issues with the industry (John Oliver has multiple episodes on FIFA).

If the sport wouldn’t be as popular without marketing, maybe it isn’t that interesting to being with.

Those do get gamed and might cheat since they'd get kickbacks, but that should result in a reputation loss as other journalists point it out. There are also various cooperative models that work here well as members can just vote kickback-taking staff out.

People used to actually subscribe to magazines (and some still do) in areas they are interested in. And they still go and visit the shops to see if anything interesting pops up and there is word of mouth.

So I believe discoverability is not really a problem. The fact is that polished advertisements take up bandwidth that would be more productively utilized by a benchmark comparison chart with a commentary on differentiators. People would get more performant and/or better fitting products and services and the overall productivity and happiness would increase.

The problem with the steelman argument for marketing is that the scenarios people end up defending can be likened to a medieval shop owner putting a sign in fron of their establishment or a customer browsing a shopping aisle of items with packaging that perfectly represents the function of each item. But that argument must inevitably hit reality, where the industry spiraled into insanity and utter corruption of everything it touches. Lies, abuse, manipulation, FOMO, misrepresentation, scams. These are the primary values of that industry today. Maybe it was sane once upon a time, but that was centuries ago. Now they're unstoppable.

We do not need to endure modern marketing to have product discovery. Imagine if we had a universal service that acted as containment for advertising, where anyone could list their good or service, provide a standardized and fairly objective summary of what makes it good (no mind trickery) and post it to be displayed alonside everyone else's, without even favoring the richest with the most ads or the biggest ads. Then you could find as many mousetraps as you could ever need, while the rest of the world would be spared from the concentrated stream of garbage in the form of advertising that it's currently being firehosed with.

Now, we see huge panels (double the height) for ads in stadiums which become very intrusive when watching on TV (20–30% of the screen ends up being used for ads). Added the hydratation->ADs breaks, and increased World Cup tickets insanely.

Football used to be for everyone, now they're are killing it for almost everyone.

Like, what-on-earth was Visa thinking when their sponsorship of the Olympics had all the food-vendors and merch sellers boasting how they were "Proud" to decline payments from customers unless they're using Visa-networked cards[1] - which demonstrates they just can't exercise restraint.

[1]: https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2012/07... - Visa's official slogan really was “We are proud to accept only Visa.”

Do I go to McDonalds because I saw an ad, or because it 3 minutes away and the kid wants nuggets? Do I shop at my local supermarket because they buy every third ad on YouTube, or because it's the closest? There are a ton of details that influence our daily choices, and I'm not suggesting that ads aren't one of them, but I'm starting to doubt that it's the defining one. When I look at what I buy it's: availability, cost, and specification. There's not a hold lot advertising can do about any of those three.

If we could truly measure which ads works and which doesn't the entire ad based economy would crash over night.

However, I have to presume that the effect is different for at least some other people.

I read it as "6-point-7" in English, I just used our local version-of-writing with the comma :)