If you watch North American Professional Hockey such as the NHL or AHL, you will see a wide variety of advertisements around the rink (both underneath the ice and on the side boards). These ads display many different companies and are arranged in a way where they are not cluttered.
Over the christmas holidays, I started to watch the Spengler Cup, a hockey tournament played in Europe, featuring teams made up of “lower caliber players” compared to tournaments like the World Championships and the Olympics. I noticed that similar marketing methods are used, but unlike in North American Hockey, the players were skating around like billboards. It seemed like no matter where I looked there were ads. The thing that shocked me most was that the majority of the ads were only for a few different companies! I believe that all of these ads are over-kill. I know that many people watch hockey and other sports so it is a good means of advertising, but there such a thing as too many ads.
In North America we use professional athletes to endorse and promote companies through off-ice campaigns rather then slapping ads all over them. While they play the only real on-ice promotion that players do is displaying the small manufacturer’s logos on the gear they are wearing. In the Spengler Cup I noticed that many of the manufacturer’s logos were covered up by these, mainly, “non hockey related ads”. I think that all the advertising during the Spengler Cup takes away from the game itself, and it makes the players look ridiculous.
