Please don’t let this be the future of on-ice advertising in NHL (Photo)
Professional hockey in Europe is, shall we say, a little more liberal with its commercialization. And by that we mean their uniforms make the advertising on NASCAR drivers look like a public broadcasting station by comparison.
But this ice … the next time you think your local NHL arena has been overrun by ads, please recall what Oulu Energy Arena in Finland will look like this season:
That’s a fresh sheet laid down on the rink this weekend, as tweeted by journalist Ilari Savonen. Suomikiekko.com, which ran the image, asked its readers if the additional ads are too egregious or if it’s “just business.”
We can probably all agree that without the Hesburger ad at center ice, it would simply be an outrageous amount of advertising rather than a eye-gouging orgy of commercialization. Good lord, those ads in the faceoff circles ... yuck.
The NHL has been able to resist the siren’s song of ads on jerseys for decades, although one assumes their day will arrive soon. NHL ice has advertising that one could call “tasteful” if one isn’t made completely nauseous by any semblance of ads on the playing surface. So we’d rather see the NHL double-stack the ads on the boards before transforming the ice into some kind of branded quilt.
s/t reader Urpo Koskinen
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