Even by 'basically all ads are obtrusive' standards, the NHL's plans for virtual ads on rinkboards seems dire
Hopefully it is something that we "just get used to" (sigh)
ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski unveiled quite the development: the NHL is debuting “digitally enhanced dasherboards” this season. Basically, virtual ads will “erase and replace” the (often national, but sometimes amusing and local) advertisements you’d see when you watch a hockey game in a different market.
Go ahead and read Wyshynski’s report. Doing so might ease some of your concerns … at least if NHL exec Keith Wachtel is correct that “over time, like everything else, people will get used to it.”
(Let that grim bit of reasoning sink in for a moment … Ah, late capitalism.)
This tweet may capture the gist of what this could look like.
Watching that clip elicits a range of reactions. Personally, they go from:
“Maybe this won’t be so bad”
To …
“My experience tells me that this could be really bad.”
Look, we all knew that the NHL and other sports leagues would take a mile every time we gave them an inch when it came to ads. No huge fuss over ads on helmets, so the NHL starts adding to jerseys. It’s a bummer, but again … late capitalism. Just gotta accept that the thing you enjoy will become less and less of an escape from the dark realities of our times, and the endless selling of our data, eyeballs, and spending patterns.
With a lot of that stuff, I shrug my shoulders and say “Bad, but inevitable.”
Some of these digital ads may cross the threshold to genuine irritation, though.
Perhaps some of that comes from sheer experience. There’s the idealized “software running without any chance for bugs” version of this presentation. Then there are the many personal experiences where digital ads look like absolute garbage.
Ultimately, it will be about execution. NHL ads on the glass often look really bad, but personally, I have been able to ignore them.
Such practices seem especially ugly (and perhaps even make the NHL look “bush league”) when glitches happen. This seemed to occur a lot with ads that are projected on the ice surface itself, specifically ones beamed between the blueline of the offensive zone and that same zone’s faceoff circles.
While I put out a call for examples on Twitter, my searching didn’t drum up a great example of how it looks when it goes wrong (if the NHL still hasn’t worked out those kinks in 2022-23, I’ll try to capture it). But the actual area of those ads is more or less captured from this 2016 screen from The Globe & Mail:
Honestly, such ads would be slightly annoying but acceptable if they were painted-on. Instead, by projecting them on the ice, there can be flickering, issues with placement, and … really perfectly reasonable moments of “human error” that become tougher to accept when it’s part of a shameless cash grab.
So, will this be another disaster? Will watching hockey games feel like a nightmare fuel plane scene where everything goes wrong at once?
Welp, hopefully not. Or at least not too often?
Y’know, some of this stuff would also be easier to stomach if fans were fed a few lines about how all of these cash grabs may, say, eventually lead to the salary cap actually going up a bit?*
Then again, that might require a special type of greed the NHL shies away from: requiring that every team is a money-making machine.
My guess is that we’ll get used to those rinkboard ads, as our corporate overlords predict. That’s especially true for those who are already hopelessly hooked on that NHL Kool-Aid. Perhaps (already scoffing at this, honestly) the ads will even be less irritating and distracting at times.
I do wonder, however, about someone giving an NHL game a shot for the first time ever, or the first time in a long time. If the games look like garbage as those ads blink in and out — or it makes it even tougher for a newbie to follow the fast action — then we may get yet another example of the NHL being pennywise but pound-foolish.
Overall, ideas like these seem like they’d work better for a slow-moving sport such as baseball. Hopefully the bad thing won’t be too bad, I guess?
Spends a few solid minutes grumbling about the league’s aversion to the Olympics, to the point that it indeed gets a little weird.
