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As anyone who knows me can tell you, I do enjoy a bit of televised sport. And as a designer, I pay particular attention to the different ways each network presents the on-screen information.  Tonight I was flipping between the MLS season opener and the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, two sports presented very differently.  While the soccer match flows uninterrupted for a half at a time, it seems that CBS couldn’t cram enough commercial breaks into the last two minutes of each half.  Twelve seconds of gameplay, sixty seconds of commercials. Twenty seven seconds of gameplay, thirty seconds of commericals.  And we wonder why the attention span of American children is less than 5 minutes.

This constant commercial interruption has become a part of the American landscape, but it has not gone without discussion.  After the fantastic display of hockey at the Winter Olympics, many were wondering if the NHL would see a subsequent bump in viewership. Many of the sports pundits on ESPN lamented how NHL games don’t have the same ‘end-to-end’, uninterrupted flow, and that’s mostly due to the sponsors. Now soccer, being more of a niche sport in America, can afford to play a half without commercials, with one or two sponsors placing their logos adjacent to the ESPN scoreboard. It would be harder to imagine them doing the same for football or basketball.  There’s simply too much money at stake.

So this got me thinking… with people growing increasingly savvy at finding ways around commercials by watching content online, would hockey, basketball and football… and indeed network viewership benefit with fewer commercials breaks?  During a few EPL soccer broadcasts in the states, I’ve seen what I would call “Banner Ads” that would pop up from the bottom of the screen. These are, unfortunately, not terribly smooth or attractive, but perhaps leading to a better solution that is mutually beneficial to both sponsors and sportsfans.

Instead of paying millions of dollars for expensive :30 second television spots, would we all not benefit from slim banner ads running along like the ticker or crawl does now?



Now this would work well for soccer…. in fact it’s already done in small spans on British broadcasts, but also for every other sport.  For the cost of a :30 second spot, you could run a banner along the bottom of the screen for 3 or 5 minutes of gameplay.  This way, the advertisers avoid expensive production costs for TV commercials, but also gain eyeballs by ensuring their message appears when people are actually watching the screen. It would also allow for better cross-branding, as the text-based nature of these banners allows for the users to make connections to company websites or pages (as I’ve shown).  Of course there would still be the need for full commercial breaks, but by presenting another option for sponsors, you could provide a solution that benefits everyone involved… the sponsor, the network, the league, and the viewer

Now I’ve now doubt the league and network could come up with a lucrative pricing scheme to make this worthwhile, but the real questions are thus… Would users find the distraction rumbling along the bottom of the screen too distracting that they’d prefer the commercial breaks, or would the networks, in their greed, add these banners while keeping the same number of commercial breaks?  Interesting that we having seen anything like this, but then again, the World Cup is still 77 days away.