On November 12, 1931, from a gondola high atop Maple Leaf Gardens, Foster Hewitt broadcast the hockey game from Toronto’s new stadium. Hewitt is a Canadian icon. You know you’ve made it as broadcaster when Upper Deck puts you a hockey card. He opened his Saturday telecasts with, “Hello, Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland.” Back then, Newfoundland wasn’t a Canadian province. It was an independent dominion.
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Not far from Hewitt’s terrifying, specially-made broadcast gondola, was the scoreboard. Before Jumbotrons… Before HDTVs the size of a football field hung above rinks, there were scoreboards. Toronto’s was a muted surf green box. It had “Toronto” on one side and “Visitor” on the other. It had a clock, the score, and the jersey number for a player in the penalty box. If you grew up in Toronto, you’re about my age, and you’re reading this, you’re nodding. Tell the folks at home what brand adorned that box for years?
Yep. Dominion. A long since-rebranded grocery chain. And, that’s where this starts. If you got that right, give yourself an El Producto.
The 16,485 fans in the stands saw that ad dozens of time every game. The millions of people who watched that game at home on tiny black and white sets that took two minutes to warm up saw that ad every time the single camera panned up to the score, to show the time left, or to let you know that Dave “the Hammer” Shultz was in the penalty box. Dominion owned exclusive real estate for a long, long time.
Maple Leaf Gardens closed more than twenty years ago. The scoreboard came down and the Dominion ad along with it years earlier. Hell, Dominion hasn’t existed as a brand for thirty plus years. Even though I went to a game a year — if that — Dominion is stuck in my brain.
That doesn’t happen today. The Jumbotron at Scotiabank Arena is 32-feet high and 50-feet wide. For context, that’s like an 800-inch TV. Brand logos rotate through it. NHL rinks have ads on the boards. There are ads over every doorway at every stadium in every city.
TV overwrites them. Watch an NHL game. You see how the board ads change? They’re not changing at the game. Just on TV. Of course. Because the moving ad signage would distract the players. Which means the only people who see the real board ads are the people in the stands.
You’re thinking, meh. No biggie. But it kinda is. A national chain isn’t going to board ads in Toronto. They would have to buy board ads all over the place to reach a national audience. So, in-rink ads sell to local companies. A Toronto car dealer or something like that. If it is a national chain – like McDonalds – it comes out of a local ad budget. Because it reaches a very local audience. The audience is smaller, the budgets are smaller, the ads are piddly.
On the other hand, those ads TV superimposes to viewing audiences are national. And, unlike the Dominion ad, they’re not static. TV companies roll through the ads. I watch very little sports these days. But I would be hard pressed to tell you what ads I saw rolling across the boards on Hockey Night in Canada. I’d strain to recall what ads I saw during the Super Bowl. “Unaided recall” is a big deal with the people who shell out bucks to show fans ads.
As usual, the people with ad inventory had a golden goose and made foie gras. It’s fancy, rich, and looks good served on a Bernardaud dish with some truffle foam, but it’s a goose egg as far as laying other goose eggs go.
They’ve taken scarce, high-value ad inventory and turned into infinite, low-value ad inventory. Print had implicit scarcity. You only printed so many pages. Each ad packed some impact and cost something.
What happens when, instead of having 50 pages of ads, you have a website with 50,000 pages of ads? Each ad has less impact. Is worth less. Sells for less.
At first, you’re not going to notice this. Early websites had, say, 100 pages of ads. The price had yet to be completely clobbered. The volume of ads made up for cheaper prices.
For a bunch of years, web traffic grew faster than prices dropped so things in the ad world seemed fine. “Seemed.” It masked a foundational problem. Traffic couldn’t outpace declines. There are fewer people to get online and our consumption time has a ceiling. Infinite inventory is killing the value of ads.
We started with sports. We’re going to go back there.
For decades, the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings played their games at Metropolitan Stadium. The Vikes won the 37th and last NFL Championship there in 1969. In front of 47,900 fans. A year later the NFL merged with the AFL and mandated new stadiums have seating for at least 50,000 fans. In 1982, the Vikings (and Twins) got a new home. The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. It could seat 64,121 fans.
The NFL is going in a new direction. Small stadiums. The NFL is creating better experiences for fewer fans. Because that creates MORE VALUE. It’s something ad folks may want to consider.