It was easily doable for even more years using plain and boring MK1 eyeballs and a stopwatch.

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

Since people have bought air time on a broadcast, people have done this very thing to ensure their ad ran. They also notice other analytics like what other ads ran around it and what the content of the program was when it ran. Can't run an ad selling a new car when the scene just before the break was a brutal car wreck or something.

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.

I worked for a company in 2020 that did ad analysis with computer vision - specifically in sports, quantifying value for sponsors based on exposure on team socials (accounting for logo size, positioning, etc in photos + videos) - I was a humble annotator https://www.blinkfire.com

Plain and boring computer vision would have still required a team who would identify frames to sample before processing, and then annotate, generalize and classify the data.

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

> by using plain and boring computer vision

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.

You probably don't even need vision. The audio on adverts is noticeably different.

True, in-store planogram compliance and floor-plan compliance have got in focus again. It never lost the focus to be honest, just that now there is an expectation to do it while ensuring nothing fall through the cracks.

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.

Millions of people go about their lives every day devising complex schemes to put as much visual garbage, deceptive messaging and mind-exploiting advertising in front of your eyes. They don't care about truth or integrity, they only value money. Nothing is too low for them. There already are millions of little maximizers everywhere, I'm just surprised there has been no backlash against them or their industry of spreading manipulative slosh onto every possible flat surface.

This is nothing new. For example, in the 2006 World Cup, the Allianz Arena was called FIFA WM-Stadion München (among many other stadiums that year).

I have no faith in humanity, especially those involved in tech, to make this. If they did, they'd block real life marketing only so it could be used to replace with ads bought directly with the AR maker.

Replace all ads with beautiful classic paintings, get closer to see info about (title, artist, year)...

There's something to it

Instead of blocking the ads you could even replace them with satirical slogans that mock those ads like "BUY", "CONSUME", "CONFORM" etc.

And then the US advertisers came up with "hydration breaks".

Please don't post snark like this on HN. Looking through your recent comments, too many of them are snarky dismissals. This needs to stop if you want to keep participating here. This site exists for curious conversation, so please don't comment if you're not willing or able to operate in that mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm the opposite - maybe because I grew up watching "soccer", I find American football much more exotic and insteresting. Lately I'm discovering the nuances of baseball, what a game!

I like American football enough to watch it, but not enough to watch it live, which which kind of gets rid of the ads.

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.

[flagged]

But they are being paid, they're paid a tremendous amount of money, and advertisements are where the money comes from.

NBA and MLB both have ads on the jersey (Nike and an additional per-team sponsor)

As someone who didn't grow up in NA, i don't understand this attitude. At least in soccer (football), we don't have to sit and watch ads and waste our time (barring the NA world cup). I know a league game will take ~2 hours to complete with a 15 minute half time break. I can allocate that time and then move on with my life. I much rather have that than having to sit through ads that end up taking more time than actual playtime! NBA used to have a thing called TV timeouts. But hey you don't get ads on the jersey

Not sure if there's push back or something behind this but a lot of premiership teams this season in the UK have a second kit where the sponsor is either missing or the same colour as the shirt so barely visible. Examples: https://www.safcstore.com/en/c-18416 https://www.brightonandhovealbion.com/media-article/125th-an...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77kvx575npo

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

All of those sports have about 2 hours of advertising breaks during the game. Football has one, at half time, and that also includes some analysis.

NBA has had ads on jerseys since the 2017 season.

MLB since 2023.

What? Lakers are literally sponsored by Wish.

Hoardings is UK English (so... English) for the advertising boards around a football pitch

They're pretending to care about social problems while causing and encouraging social problems.

The morality around "racism" however is.

Ah yes now that I think about it, I remember the nuns in my neighbourhood, between feeding the poor and preaching love and inclusion, would hand out casino memberships and bet coupons to the local youths.

Freedom as long as it’s a cause officially sanctioned by the league.

I've done a bit of experimenting on OTA stuff (I use hdhomerun and had AI make me a DVR recently lol) and I think sometimes there is a fade to black that indicates start and end of ads, though the last thing I tried it on (Olympics) they didn't follow that very well, so I haven't revisited.

I'll take a closer look at your idea too!

> The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding. The reason football is where it is because of marketing.

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 wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding.

The sport, or the franchise?

Would less football be a bad thing? It's the only sport I know where the governing body have to advise the police on how to deal with fan violence, such as "please don't use tear gas on them"

> The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding.

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.

Discoverability is trivially solvable by dedicating journalists to products. There are already events the companies use to present their products, frequented by journalists who then proceed to write periodicals with new product categories, benchmarks and comparisons.

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.

Marketing is the art of fucking with discoverability so that your shit gets discovered instead of what is relevant.

Hedonistic treadmill says there is little to no value in product discoverability. Marketing is usually creating a new feeling of need, not servicing an authentic existing one.

They're not just talking about shitty ads, the entirety of the ad industry has infested our world so much that every ad is by definition a shitty one.

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.

It was only mandatory so that teams wouldn’t feel like they were disadvantaged if a rival got breaks during games that crossed a set temperature limit and they did not. League game fixtures are so random that this would not be an advantage, but for a short cup tournament like this it could be a big tactical/performance advantage, especially in the knockout phase.

Average play time is around 55 minutes in La Liga, so there’s around 35 minutes of wasted time anyway.

Each year, I watch less and less football. In Portugal you have to subscribe 2 or 3 streaming platforms if want to follow the Portuguese League, the Champions League, and eventually other country leagues (like Premier League and La Liga).

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.

Are you going to be leading the campaign to get your national FA to return all of the money it received from the highest-revenue-sharing-ever US World Cup?

You can ignore something actively but you are a still picking up on the message of it’s ubiquitousness. I think we have all had the experience of considering buying a {redacted} or something sometime after seeing and ignoring an add for one.

The worst part is, the value they get (monies) is not the same value you get (worse health all over).

On the contrary: it's because people ignore them so much that motivates those very same brands to constantly push harder, and more obnoxiously, each time major sporting events are on.

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.”

The problem is that you have no idea if those ads are working, not really.

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.

That assumes advertisers are correctly measuring the impact of their ads. They could just be wrong.

And homeopathy works because people pay for it.

I specifically avoid products i see ads for, cause the product can't be that great if it needs obnoxious advertisements, so the effect is more than subconscious. Now, i don't see many ads cause i block all of them where i can and roadside advertisements are not allowed here in Germany, but even if i was, i am of the opinion that the effect of this subliminal manipulation is severely overstated by the people selling ad space. I think the idea that i would buy something just because a company writes their name everywhere is ridiculous and as far as i know studies show that the effect on buying decisions is basically not measurable. I think the entire value in advertisements is just more people in general knowing of a brand.

The gambling ads have a conscious effect for me: I think “what a terrible world this portrays, I’m glad I don’t gamble”. For me, being reminded of gambling is just a reminder of the fact that I don’t like gambling. The same is true of some other ads too, they mostly serve to remind me that I define my personality in opposition to these things.

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

Well, they can block their competitors ads...

Good one!

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

also in the thread about OONI censorship measuring program people said they don't need a study to know China censors the internet