That Was A Real Four-Hour Super Bowl Thriller, But It Would Have Been A Whole Lot More Thrilling if the 60-Minute Game Took A Leaf From European Television And Got Rid Of Those Artificial Advertising Time-Outs

Philip M. Stone February 5, 2008

They say sometimes that when you are in the forest you don’t see the trees, so to American audiences Sunday’s four hour extravaganza for what should have been a 60 minute Super Bowl football extravaganza plus half-time on commercial television was par for the course and probably didn’t raise any eyebrows.

But watching the game outside the US, on a public broadcaster that had absolutely no advertising whatsoever, and it became oh so clear that while advertising may pay for millionaire football star salaries, and make the National Football League and its team owners very rich, not to talk of the profit Fox made off some 60 commercials sold at around $2.7 million each, those frequent advertising breaks sure ruin the flow of the game.

Obviously, when it comes to flow versus advertising then the big bucks speak loudest even though the networks tell you the artificial time-outs are called when it doesn’t make much difference to the game’s flow. Phooey!

The BBC in the UK for the first time carried this year’s Super Bowl live. It decided not to carry the Fox commentary but rather that provided by the NFL’s commentary team of Dick Stockton and Sterling Sharpe (good, but they were not Terry Bradshaw), and then to fill in during all the commercial breaks, plus pre-game and post-game activities, it had a three-man commentary team in Arizona fronted by young Brit Jake Humphrey bolstered by two experts, Mike Carlson who has been broadcasting on American football for some 20 years and Rod Woodson, who played for 17 years including  three Super Bowl games, in one of them a winner. And truth be told, those guys were good and knew how to speak to an audience that  probably was not expert on American football and made it all understandable,  and Woodson was one of the very few who predicted before the game a Giants upset.

But the BBC understood beforehand that carrying the game without commercials presented some real time problems. “One of the main challenges facing the BBC as it shows the Super Bowl for the first time is filling those ad-breaks - well, in addition to more studio analysis with Rod and Mike, we'll also be trawling the archives for the best moments from Super Bowl past so if you have a favorite you want us to show, shout now,” blogged Ron Chakraborty, an Assistant Editor in BBC TV Sport last week.

For reasons difficult to understand, good as the preswenter and analysts were, seeing them pop up so frequently, plus those past Super Bowl fillers, just seemed to emphasize how slow the flow of professional  American football has become, especially compared with how European commercial and public broadcasting TV covers such sports as soccer and rugby.   In fact, those analysis interruptions started really getting on one’s nerves, more so, probably than for Americans who got to see the best ads that Madison Avenue knows how to produce, which has become a Super Bowl tradition.

Putting aside all the arguments about how much money flowed from Sunday’s game, and how that makes such a game possible, and rather just looking at it from a television viewer standpoint, it makes one really appreciate how sporting events are covered in Europe – and yes there are ads, too – but there are no commercial interruptions at all during the flow of the game. A rugby 40 minute half doesn’t stop several times to permit TV advertising. 

Rugby had its World Cup Championships  last year in France (a real “world” contest  and not just teams from one country) and TV share numbers during the big games in the countries playing were often more than 50% and for the really big games in the 60s, which compares pretty much to the Super Bowl.

But whether it was commercial stations covering the games, or public broadcasters, the commercials were consigned to before the game, at half-time, and after the game. There was no stopping the game for commercials when the ball went out play, when a player was injured, -- those rugby players had to slog on for 40 minutes straight unless the clock stopped for an injury, as did TV coverage.

Yet watching the Super Bowl with all its interruptions one came away with the feeling that once there is a change in team ball possession then everyone takes a break for a while for the commercials to run. It was aggravating, annoying, and spoiled the game, but it’s at that point the money people will give all the reasons why that it is, and that it makes such games possible, but we won’t get into those economics here. 

There was a song sung by American troops in World War I which had the line, “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm After They’ve Seen Paree”, the meaning of which American gals didn’t appreciate, but if we can lift that quote to describe television coverage of sporting events, then one has to admit that seeing how the Europeans cover their major sporting events, commercials and all, really makes it difficult to watch an American sporting event, commercials and all.

The Super Bowl usually draws one of the year’s largest US TV audiences, and this year’s game, from early indications, may have had one of the largest ever, if not the largest. US advertisers seldom get such numbers of the desired demographics and  not only do they pay the really big bucks the broadcasting network demands, but they pay fortunes to produce the best possible ads that premier during the game and spend more on digital tie-ins, too.

It has become such an advertising event that the major media – The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and on down have long stories on the Monday describing what many of the ads showed, which they thought, and those they interviewed thought, were the best ads etc. The Super Bowl is probably the one event during the year that people actually look forward to seeing the ads for their entertainment value!

But for those of us who don’t get to see them, and instead are treated to continually “talking heads”: no matter how good they may be, those interruptions are a real game spoiler.

Just  imagine for a moment -- the game was on a network that ran a cluster of ads before the kick-off, then  the 15-minute first half quarters were allowed to play out in, say, 15 minutes each plus time for legitimately stopping the clock, with a cluster of ads in between; then to begin half-time there was an ad cluster followed by Tom Petty’s half-time show – he was only on for 12 minutes anyway – ansd so all of half-time was limited to 20 minutes instead of the 45 minutes that Sunday’s ran, and do the same again for the second half. Would that not have made for a much more exciting game?

Not as profitable selling clusters, perhaps since advertisers don’t like getting lost in the shuffle, and the money people would choke on such, but certainly it would have been a much more exciting game.

Yeah, understood, not gonna happen, but it works in Europe, so why not the US, too.