On The Ball?

Five minutes after the opening bounce, my girlfriend asks me: “what’s the company logo printed on the ball?” Well, an hour and a half, three cataracts and two headaches later we’re both still stumped.

Fans scream ‘ball’ and abuse at the umpires, but the little voice in my head has profanity only for the cameraman to zoom in on the football! Nothing else matters.

Roo lines up 50m out, dead in front. The camera zooms in… I can see the enlarged ball, but Roo’s sausage fingers are covering the printed logo! By the end of the game my neck resembles that of a baby giraffe’s and the advertiser on the ball has escaped me, but it’s about the only form of advertising in AFL that has.

Advertising in sport is everywhere. If you have the money, your company name, logo or slogan can be placed just about anywhere.

Some Australian sports, like basketball and rugby are a stone’s throw away from advertisements being tattooed onto players’ skin or shaved into their heads! AFL is yet to fall so far. Footy jumpers only have one or two sponsors, unlike the marketing patchwork quilts that other codes have to pull on every weekend.

Football supporters now have to get their heads (and wallets) around the fact that their treasured game of AFL is now a business. That’s the bottom line. From jumpers, television ads, trading cards, official food and drink, stadium signage to pixel space on club websites: the AFL is a smorgasbord of opportunity for marketing exploits.

Advertising has married into the sport: ‘for better or worse…til death do us part’.

Advertising is directed at the fans, but it also affects players, largely through lucrative endorsements deals. Though somewhat more gratifyingly last year when Barry Hall broke his wrist on a QBE Insurance boundary board…now that’s impact advertising!

Karma and advertising united in one satisfying crunch.

However advertising in sport is sometimes purely irritating.

Take the ‘TripleM Rocks Football’ radio broadcast for example; great commentary team, but there’s one problem: its in-game promotion. If I hear the scoreboard called the ‘TripleM, Foxtel scoreboard’ or mistake the number of Chris Judd’s disposals for how many Carlton Draught beers he’s had, I’m going to shoot someone. Brayshaw, Taylor and the rest have to keep up with the sponsors as much as the game itself.
It’s like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth.
It’s absurd.

My jury’s out on advertising in Footy. On the one hand it brings money to the game that will (or should) be put back into it. While on the other, it has the potential to smother the game.

Lets Just Say That
Advertising in AFL must be checked not just chequed in the future.