Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Sun 2024-10-06 9:30AM New York Jets @ Minnesota Vikings
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Buffalo Bills @ Houston Texans
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Carolina Panthers @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Cleveland Browns @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Indianapolis Colts @ Jacksonville Jaguars
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Miami Dolphins @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Baltimore Ravens @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sun 2024-10-06 4:05PM Arizona Cardinals @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-10-06 4:05PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Denver Broncos
Sun 2024-10-06 4:25PM Green Bay Packers @ Los Angeles Rams
Sun 2024-10-06 4:25PM New York Giants @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-10-06 8:20PM Dallas Cowboys @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Mon 2024-10-07 8:15PM New Orleans Saints @ Kansas City Chiefs
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Notes -
Americans do not engage in consumer activity for purely rational reasons, after a full assessment of the merits of the activity compared to alternatives, and with full knowledge of which activities produce the most happiness. Americans buy lotto tickets and gamble on their phone because of advertisements. Americans buy overpriced shoes and other items because of advertisements. They choose their beer based on advertisements. Companies frequently use celebrity endorsements because they know this tricks the consumer’s mind. Advertisements are not just to placate the gods or something, they work because they trick you. You need rationality and ideally wisdom to prevent this from happening; and yes, I think that wisdom can usher in peace and harmony and wellbeing.
Companies spend large money on celebrity endorsements. Adidas spent a billion for Messi. Nespresso spent 40 million on George Clooney. They understand that they can trick people to their product, like the NFL, which requires the belief that the NFL is popular in order for it to become popular.
This isn’t a sophisticated argument. Of course there must be something primitively alluring if you intend to make a lot of money. So all the people who would otherwise have made the poop eating league are instead making the NFL or gambling companies or OnlyFans or sugar or pop music or Fortnite. They use everything they can to get you to watch, eg half time show musical performances. What draws someone to spectate professional sports is the propaganda that it is culturally relevant, socially valuable, and worthy to witness. Why do people watch current sports games instead of game reruns from 2010? For no other reason than the hype. If the NFL were selling games from 2010 at half the price of viewing 2024 games, still almost everyone would watch 2024 games, because they value the surrounding hype and not the content.
People have been gambling since before recorded history, all across the world.
People have also been engaging in conspicuous consumption since before recorded history.
“Americans gamble on their phone because of advertisements” is not negated by the fact that gambling has always existed. People in America have always gambled, but fewer, and in specific contexts, and less frequently. Are you trying to argue that gambling hasn’t increased despite the legalizing or advertising of gambling? Or that the celebrity endorsements of online gambling companies have been futile in bringing in customers?
People may gamble more, or less than they have done in the recent or distant past. Certainly the recent SCOTUS decision has made online gambling far more popular compared to the recent past, but thinking of men drinking in taverns in frontier, it wouldn't shock me if gambling was far more common then. Historic moralising certainly focuses on gambling to a degree which seems weird to my modern ears.
However, your point didn't argue that advertising has increased gambling rates relative to some counterfactual. You argued that:
In contrast with:
Which to me implies that if it weren't for advertising and marketing, this is what they would be doing.
I'm not a sports guy myself, but aside from the gambling aspect, I think collective entertainment is basically a good thing. It's good when you and your neighbours like the same things and have a common identity and basic understanding of the world. It's good when people socialise together in person, even if it is just to watch big men throw and kick a ball. Church would probably be better for aggregate happiness and sense of community, but we work with what we've got.
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These arguments and ideas all stem from a very narrow view of consumer choice and individual psychology. The correct answers all lead back to my original post. People have an appetite for leisure, discretionary spending, risky behaviour, lifestyle purchases. Advertising can sway some of these choices from Coke to Pepsi on the margin, but your suggestion that there is mass trickery going on to induce people to buy something which they are otherwise averse to is an elementary and naive understanding of the power of suggestion and consumer preferences. In short, companies aren't spending all their effort to get you spending money on things which you have deemed less socially valuable, but instead to spend your money on their specific product instead of something else. You should re evaluate whether it's likely that everyone shares your value, moral, and belief system and is being tricked by advertisers to do bad things, or if your mental model of their behaviour is perhaps very flawed instead.
You’ve ignored nearly all my points, so I will simplify them for you.
Why do you think people watch current NFL games, and would not view older NFL games if they were less expensive? Is it based on the content of the product, or is it based on the manufactured hype around the product? If it is based on the manufactured hype around the product, to what extent do you think this hype is due to the astroturfed (pun intended) millions or hundreds of millions in making NFL appear socially relevant on social media and TV? If the consumers understood that the hype is fictitious, do you think they would still watch as much?
If I hire people to show up at my storefront and loudly proclaim how important my product is, while pretending to be legitimate, in order to bring in passersby, would you consider this “trickery”, or just “satisfying the appetite for leisure and discretionary spending”?
Why do you think Adidas spent one billion dollars for Messi? Does Messi affect the quality of Adidas sneakers? Do you think a rational consumer making rational choices would pick a shoe because it has the name “Messi” attached to it? Or is Adidas instead manipulating the purchasing habits of irrational children and low IQ adults?
Why have many people, myself included, attended more than one performance of Die Zauberflöte when the Met Opera and Medici.TV have prior performances available for streaming?
The leap to an F6 in Der Hölle Rache is challenging even for professional sopranos. Elite performance witnessed live is thrilling, as the possibility of failure adds to the stakes.
Your comparison isn’t accurate. A real life performance of the Magic Flute is a multisensory experience with superior aural sensation, among other things. I am not asking why someone would see a live NFL game. I am asking why the overwhelming number of NFL viewers never buy old “episodes”, but instead only watch the latest installment. If you are into classical music, you would actually do the opposite. You would determine which performance of the Magic Flute is the greatest and then buy a high-quality record of that. Recent performances of classical music are not favored due to their recency among classical music listeners. The most listened-to performances are years if not decades old, and even in the guitar world the recordings of Segovia and Bream are given special attention despite the poor audio quality. Same when television: lots of people want to see which show is the best, even if that’s 90s Twin Peaks or 00s Friends. This is despite the improvements in film technology.
The reason the average nfl viewer only watches current episodes is that the NFL markets itself as relevant, spending enormous sums to make people think it is relevant. It’s like an attentional pyramid scheme. When people realize there is no reason for it to be relevant, that they were lied to, the industry will fail. They protect against this by claiming they are “tradition” and an “American staple” instead of garbage.
But continued live performance has led to continual innovation. The NFL is live action chess. There are coaching family trees tied to different systems/concepts. Systems have shelf lives as there is perpetual innovation and counter innovation.
Does the average NFL fan have the knowledge-base to appreciate these “continued innovations”, implying that the average fan has the coaching expertise of not just the top coaches but the innovators as well? This implies that the average NFL fan is reading detailed analytic write-ups about different coaching strategies, being their true interest, right?
You present your argument in a bunch of binaries. If there are additional reasons to see live opera, then suspense inherit to live performances doesn’t matter, apparently.
And if the average NFL fan does know the general difference between power and zone run blocking schemes, knows what an RPO and a zero blitz are, and can differentiate between cover two and single high, still, the league’s ongoing tactical evolution is of no interest to them unless they can explain why mesh and four verts are the building blocks of an air raid? They need to be able to diagram jump calls in a cover four or an ever evolving league is of no interest to them?
I suspect many people, absent a solid grounding in Schenkerian analysis, can still find the aesthetic contrast between Bach and Beethoven of interest. Just as the average NFL fan has a general appreciation for the contrast between a Harbaugh/Roman offense and a Kevin O’Connell offense.
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Because, contra your claims above, current NFL games are a source of civic engagement, discourse, and philosophy. Of note, people do watch older games. The other day, I went back and watched a fun Bills-Patriots playoff game while I was cycling on Zwift. NFL Network televises old games that people watch. The advantages to real-time developments are that it's all happening live, we're engaged with something as a community of viewers, and there are few shared experiences in the modern world.
Yes. In the area where I do buy expensive sports products (running shoes), I can observe that the best runners in the world wear a couple specific shoes - if it were possible to run faster and win prizes wearing something else, they would do so (or at least a few would). I can be confident that the shoes on the feet of the guys running 2:03 marathons really are as good as it gets.
Moreover, "rational" doesn't mean that someone doesn't enjoy aesthetics, in-group symbols, and branding. You might as well suggest that someone that's truly rational wouldn't prefer a green shoe to a blue shoe when they're otherwise identical.
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Not the OP, but to answer your questions:
First, there are people such as myself who will watch older NFL games because we want to see how the game evolved and because we like to reminisce, but that's obviously not the majority of people. The reason most people don't have any interest in watching older NFL games is because of the inherent drama of a live event. If a game starts at 1 pm, few people who can't watch it then are going to tape it to watch later (and those who do are the kind of people who will watch a rebroadcast of Super Bowl XXVI if they catch it on TV). For most people, watching older sports broadcasts is like watching random episodes of World News Tonight from the 1970s; it may be entertaining but what originally made it compelling is irrelevant. If you think this is due to hype, I'll pose this question: If this Sunday, the NFL played all of its normal games, but put the entire week's promotion budget toward Tuesday Night Prime-Time reairs of the games from Week 5 of the 2018 season, which games do you think would get higher ratings? Would hype alone lead more people in Pittsburgh to watch Steelers–Falcons from 6 years ago as opposed to their current matchup with the Cowboys?
It depends on whether the customer liked the product. If it's a good product then they'll feel that their appetite for leisure and discretionary spending has been satisfied. If it's a bad product, they may feel they've been tricked. But if their appetite isn't satisfied then they probably won't buy the product again, and certainly wouldn't buy it again repeatedly. If the average NFL viewer felt he'd been tricked, the league would have gone out of business a long time ago. You act as though people watch football games and are disappointed at the end, but nonetheless fall for the hype week after week.
Adidas makes athletic shoes. Messi is one of the greatest athletes in the world. It is rational for me to assume he wouldn't endorse a shoddy product. If you were offered two bicycles by manufacturers you hadn't heard of, and your only information was that one model was used in the Tour de France and the other one wasn't, which one would it be more rational to assume is better?
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