The one thing that distinguishes advertising for basketball in Puerto Rico from anywhere else is the message board above the backboard where you would expect the 30-second shot clock to be.
The board remains predominantly blank--until someone puts up a shot. Then one of three or four advertisements gets flashed upon the screen. Once, when a game was getting out of reach, I was taking side bets to whether "Lipton Iced Tea" or "Es Para Usted" would be the next message on the board.
So, this is the way the rest of the world mixes advertising with sport. How about sports in the United States?
Well, if you look carefully, we're not immune to commercial saturation either.
There is advertising in American sports everywhere, and it may take different forms--subliminal or otherwise--depending on the situation.
Take football. There has been more conversation in broadcast booths on the subject of marathon football games over the past three years than the issues of free agency, instant replay and turf toe combined.
Not surprisingly, no mention has been made for the reason of the length of football games--the amount of commercials which are sold for each telecast. Television hates self-criticism.
The USFL was the training ground for commercial saturation. Television timeouts were called not only after punts, extra points, and field goals, but even after kickoffs and turnovers.
The NFL started using a modified version of the USFL timeout patterns, but stopped after the games dragged--I mean dragged in the first three weeks of the 1985 season.
Take basketball. The NBA has the TV timeout problem solved. Each coach has seven full timeouts, and must call one per quarter. Not only that--a coach can use only three timeouts in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter.
Advertising during play is minimal here, though the funky sneakers that players like Micheal Jordan and Magic Johnson wear serve as ads.
There's Not Enough Room!
Take auto racing. Cars look like bicycle racers nowadays. Of course, there are the one or two main sponsors featured prominently on the car's rear quarter panel and hood.
But there is a kind of advertising peculiar to the NASCAR circuit. If you look carefully enough, you will see some 40 four-by-six-inch ads for oil, gas, rubber, and equipment crammed onto the front fenders of these racing machines. The stickers are the same on almost every other car, which may mean that these products are the "official" products of NASCAR.
The last blank car to win a NASCAR race was when Greg Sacks drove an all-white TRW research-and-development car to an upset victory in the Firecracker 400 on national television. Next week, of course, the TRW car was sporting corporate logos on its body.
