Why football without commerce is officially dead.
Register for the most SLATEST to obtain the most insicious analysis, criticism and advice, delivered to your inbox daily.
At the end of the 2000s, the NFL media realized that football fans loved their fantasy teams, but did not like commercial breaks and thinking too much on Sunday afternoon. Enter the NFL Redzone channel, one of the smartest things that someone has put on television. The paid complement service has moved around several houses over the years, but has had some constants. One is that every Sunday, it transmits whip coverage of all games between 1 pm and approximately 7 pm, east time, which makes it perfect to see fantasy players. (Sports bets have been another blessing to Redzone.) The other is that Since at least 2013 And probably back, the dynamic host of Redzone, Scott Hanson, has signed at 1 PM and told its viewers: “Seven hours of football without trade now begin.”
When Hanson signed this Sunday, the promise of free football of commercials had disappeared, replaced by “seven hours of Redzone football.” The NFL put four commercials of 15 seconds in Redzone in week 1. They appeared in divided screen boxes that covered half of the screen and took care of the audio feed. People were angry, or at least crazy. I would describe the tenor of my soccer group chats as “a bit annoying.” The movement to add commercials generated a lot of media coverage last week, none of that. positive. “Commercials worsen the NFL Redzone Canal” He was the headline for Talka representative of the story both in his tenor and in his lack of a threat from the writer of really Cancel Redzone in response. The uproar was enough for the people of the social networks of Gavin Newsom to put it in the fray, Publish on this on all limits.
The allies of the media and corporate partners of the NFL have recovered in their defense. Adam Schefter of ESPN, the Scoop tenacious collector and the vital arm of the Liga Public Relations Machine, wanted to make sure everyone understood: “To the certain additional clarity: the NFL Redzone is seven hours, 420 minutes. During that time, the spectators will receive 1-2 total minutes of ads in: 15 increases. This comes out between 0.25% and 0.5% of the total time, considerably less than other sports/entertainment programs.” (ESPN, where Schefter works, Only reached a pending agreement For a lot of NFL media assets, including Redzone). Hanson, the host of Redzone, He left commercials on social networkstelling people who wanted them to get the details of him. No one had put it in the coup, he said. The partner of the NFL Sportsbook, Fanduel, got into the action after Sunday’s games with this graphic certainly fun:
What should a intelligent media consumer of all this do? It has layers. On the one hand, the plaintiffs are quite annoying. In a vacuum, no person cares about both one or two minutes of ads during seven hours of television. But, on the other hand, these rules can be canaries in the media coal mine. I don’t think Redzone is on the way to the full scale envelopein which the viewer’s experience will degrade until there is a 15 second break between each incomplete pass of Russell Wilson. But the fact is that the NFL and its partners are getting worse and waiting for people to swallow it. The problem is less about the commercials of Redzone and more about the most visible cultural institution in the country he experiences with a new border of taking from his fans, without consequences.
Not being too naive about the cursed NFL Being motivated with profits, but commercials in Redzone are a betrayal. They are a betrayal not only of the general dynamics of the client -Negocio in the media but also of the specific value proposal of Redzone to her clients. Newspapers and magazines have ads in them, but the TV and video premium services historically have not done so. Different media companies have different levels of Firewall in their place, but mostly have something: Slate Plus members do not get ads in their slate podcasts, for example. My own football podcast has many ads, but not in the episodes of accessories for paid subscribers. My Spotify premium account escapes my ads when I listen to music. Redzone is an additional channel that costs $ 15 per month as independent or much more as part of a larger visualization package of “Ticket Sunday”. According to the karmic laws of the media universe, there should be no commercial in it. And that is before reaching more than a decade of promotion of Redzone for its “commercial football”.
It is not necessary to have been born yesterday to be frustrated. Everything about the NFL moves in this direction all the time. Philadelphia Eagles have just received a play sponsored (Tush’s thrust, Now brought to you by type wipes.) Very few square feet in any NFL stadium have not sold someone or something. But Redzone ads are an affront due to how people use the service. The old joke about Redzone is that on a football Sunday, he does everything for the spectator, but becomes a sandwich and take it to the couch. Redzone is, don’t laugh at me, a luxury TV experience. It is the version to see football from a mass travel credit card that takes it to the airport halls. Just as those cards have lost shine, since their emitters have overloaded them, see commercials in Redzone invokes a specific repentance. I paid more for this ultra concurrent way to see my favorite sport, and you are treating me like, what, some Schmo watching on television on the network?
It is a mirage, but the commercials in Redzone click. And although the feeling of specialty is an illusion, the money that is paying for Redzone is real. So is a long time expectation that paying extra for a product of the type of Redzone will mean not to look commercials. The NFL and its partners wish to restore that expectation, leaving space for a day much more than a controversial minute of commercial commercials. They would prefer that you treat Redzone as a Netflix subscription with ad support. But that analogy does not work at all, because the NFL already has A football observation level with advertisements. It is called “Every NFL game played, forever.”
The League is trying to make your fans, your customers, think about your product in a fundamentally different way. I guess it will succeed. Redzone is a high quality entertainment, and Hanson is one of the few irreplaceable people in sports media, a legitimate star that has a parasocial relationship with millions of football fans. Redzone’s commercial burden will not remain at a minute for seven hours forever. Over time, the points will become background noise, as they have done in standard NFL games transmissions. Then, the NFL will seek a new way of making the act of seeing at home more luxurious. You will find it somewhere. Meanwhile, perhaps some more people will stop subcontracting their selection of which they play to see, in which the games, to the NFL. Maybe they will even see a 60 -minute normal football game, interrupted by commercial frequent Bud Light and Draftkings, just when the founding parents intended.
