i only learned about the NHL board ads situation yesterday but it is by far the funniest fuck up from a sports organization since the glowing puck.
broadcasts are overlaying custom localized ads onto the entire length of the boards surrounding the hockey rink, basically trying to chroma key them in behind the players, on top of existing ads that are physically printed on the boards, and
A) when it works, it is unbelievably distracting and makes the game basically impossible to follow. the ads are full of motion graphics that turn the playfield into visual static
B) it doesn't fucking work.
unsurprisingly, this level of on the fly matte trickery is beyond existing technology, so it just constantly glitches out, players disappear behind the ads or completely off the field, the ads flicker between the digital overlay and the print reality, and the overlay lags behind camera movement.
anyone with their head on could have told you this would never work, and we can be assured that it didn't work when tested, but because literally every executive at every company in the world sees advertising as free money that they are entitled to, the idea that they were not physically able to put ads on a surface that they had realized was not currently returning the maximum theoretical possible revenue was rejected out of hand.
modern business assholes apply the "time to lean, time to clean" principle to everything they can see, attempting to milk revenue out of every imaginable crevice and crack in every single thing they touch, and if something isn't directly returning profit at all times, they start looking for ways to get rid of it. they couldn't get rid of the rink, or the boards, so they plastered ads all over them, but even that wasn't enough, it wasn't generating even more revenue month after month, and they couldn't find anywhere else to shove even more ads into the game so they had to figure out how to put ads on top of the existing ads. these people are out of their fucking minds
