The NHL using virtual ad boards, or digitally enhanced dasherboards as Gary Bettman would have you call them, isn’t as bad as many people would have you believe. Look, they’re not ideal, and no hockey fan wants them, but let’s not pretend these are completely ruining the broadcast experience.
In fact, there is a much bigger issue at play here. However, no one mentions it because they’re too obsessed with complaining about how terrible NHL broadcasts using virtual ad boards appear on TV. The larger issue wasn’t something that even dawned on me until watching the Seattle Kraken take on the Ottawa Senators at Canadian Tire Centre in January.
Fans now miss out on a crash course in local culture that watching away games on TV provided. Instead of seeing dasherboards promoting things like Pizza Pizza and Bell, I was being shown ads for Muckleshoot Casino. That’s so dumb.
And it is dumb because everyone in the state of Washington already knows everything they need to know about Muckleshoot Casino. Its presence is everywhere. Seriously, no one watching the Kraken square off against Ottawa on the road was thinking, “Oh hey, I forgot Muckleshoot Casino existed. Let’s go there soon.”
Companies are throwing their money away on ads that have zero impact on the local population. That’s because viewers are just going to tune out advertisements they’re already familiar with. But you know what they don’t tune out? New ads in faraway locations that are foreign to them.
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For example, I went to Vancouver for the first time in 2004. This was before anyone used the internet to plan trips or research stuff beyond MapQuest. Anyway, one of the places I was most excited to visit was Tim Horton’s because I had seen their ads on dasherboards while watching NHL games. Same story with Boston Pizza. Advertising doesn’t get any more effective than that.
Of course, there is more to this than simply knowing which restaurants were big. You could learn about what supermarket brands and banks there were in certain places. Was there a prominent injury attorney? Who was the kingpin auto dealer?
NHL dasherboards were a peek into cities you may have never visited. It was a glimpse outside the bubble of your local area. And if you ever went there, at least you would know a few places that existed. I’m not afraid to admit that I once stopped at a King Soopers simply because I saw them advertise with the Colorado Avalanche.
Also, completely off topic, I later found out you could buy Colorado Rockies tickets at King Soopers and it about blew my nips off. This was 2009, by the way, and no supermarket in California that I knew of was capable of doing such a thing. Hell, most Raley’s at the time couldn’t even get the Coinstar machine to function correctly.
With the NHL using virtual ad boards, this window into other hockey cities has shut. And that is the real shame here. I will never know or care about what SAP sells despite watching countless San Jose Sharks games over the years. But man, when I saw a Wawa advert on the dasherboards of Wells Fargo Center when San Jose played at Philadelphia, I knew that was a place worth checking out.
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