advertising Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

The Fighting Illini Ticket Office Chose An Unfortunate Picture To Advertise The Penn State Game
Illinois's ticket office sent this email blast out to its fans early this morning—view the full email online here, while it lasts—as a Valentine's Day promotion. The team beat Purdue by 20 at home last night, and so it's trying to move tickets to its next home game, against the woeful Nittany Lions....

Expensive Cable Sports Are Always Expensiver Than Ever
Today the New York Times's Brian Stelter crunches the (preposterous) numbers and finds runaway sports-programming costs weighing down the cable bill of everyone in America, whether or not they give Shit One about sports. The phrase "impending $7 billion deal with the Dodgers" should give you an idea...

Kendrick Perkins Is Angrily Demanding That You Buy A Cubic Zirconia-Encrusted Thunder Pendant, So Get On That
Kendrick Perkins took some time out of his busy basketball schedule to star in a Tim and Eric sketch advertisement for a local jewelry store in Oklahoma City, Mitchener Farrand Jewelers—"the diamond guys on May" and your "official" NBA jewelry store in Oklahoma City....

Maaco's Las Vegas Bowl Ad Was As Shoddy As One Of Their Paint Jobs
Maaco—best known as the place to get your stolen ride resprayed on the cheap—is your of-late title sponsor for the Las Vegas Bowl (née California Raisin Bowl) and, owing to this honor, had prime advertising space early in the game's ESPN broadcast....

Here's A Radio Ad Using Smooth R&B To Sell Tactical Firearms To Women
The Paul Finebaum radio program is a must-listen on Mondays after Alabama losses, but almost as good as the panicked redneck phone calls are Finebaum’s advertisers. Here’s one we’re told has been running a few months, from Hoover’s Tactical Firearms in Birmingham. (That’s the gun range that made ne...

Manchester United Decides It's Not Making Enough Money, Buys Back Kit Sponsorship Rights
Here is all you need to know about why ads on NBA jerseys are a matter of when, not if: Manchester United is currently making $16 million a year on the sponsorship rights to its practice uniforms, and are so sure it can make more that the club has bought out its contract....

Lance Armstrong's Last, Sad Ride Will Be For Michelob Ultra
Lance Armstrong probably doesn't feel like a grand prize this week. But he is....

A Full List Of The Brave, Brave Companies That Dropped Lance Armstrong Only After Nike Did
Here are the companies that, in the last 10 hours or so, have announced they will end, not renew, or otherwise quietly distance themselves from their endorsement deals with Lance Armstrong....

Anti-Romney Ad In Ohio State Student Newspaper: He's Been A Michigan Fan A "Long, Long Time"
Via Buzzfeed, the anti-Romney advertisment that greeted readers of this morning's Lantern, the Ohio State student newspaper, assuming there are any, and that they felt like reading the paper on a Saturday morning. This ad took up a full page opposite the cover of the sports section (layout visible h...

An Online Fantasy Football Gambling Site Is Using An Impersonator To Make You Think Jim Rome Is A Spokesperson
When your company's website features a prominent "Is This Legal?" link on its homepage, it's probably in an industry engaging in some kind of questionable behavior. But there it is on the front page of fantasy football gambling site FanDuel, in which we're told that yes, it is legal (in 44 of the ...

Olympics Brand Police Not Happy About Athletes Humping With Unauthorized Condoms
As we've seen again and again (and again), the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) protects Olympic sponsors with the ferocity of a mother bear protecting its cubs. That extends to condoms: when Australian BMXer Caroline Buchanan tweeted this picture of "a bucket ...

Your Complete Guide To London's Creepy Brand Protection Policies
With the Olympics underway, so many nice folks—tourists, ticket scalpers, chemically enhanced athletes—will grace London. But so will unpleasant people, like the so-called Olympic brand police. Hundreds of "trading standards officers" are now stalking the streets, looking for anyone who might be en...

We Already Have Our First Olympic Brand Violator, And It Is Pepsi
With the Olympic sponsorship protection Gestapo cracking down even on the family of royalty, we're amazed that it took just an hour for an unapproved sponsor's logo to appear onscreen. (The Olympics started this morning, if you didn't know.)...

Counterpoint: Ads On Jerseys Are Bush-League Crap, And If You Think They're OK, You're A Stooge
Oh, gee, the NBA wants to build on its incredible globe-spanning success and goodwill by putting ads on its uniforms, because...that's how they do it in the WNBA. And MLS. And various other unpopular and/or foreign sports leagues, and uh NASCAR, which, really? NASCAR was a long-form automobile comme...

Ready Or Not, Here Come Ads On NBA Jerseys
"Years in coming," advertisements will begin appearing on NBA jerseys as early as the fall of 2013. The NBA Board of Governors hasn't taken an official vote on the matter, but according to deputy commissioner Adam Silver, not a single owner is against it....

Here's The Secret Jose Canseco Old Milwaukee Ads That Aired Last Night In Kansas City
Old Milwaukee's made a name for itself in the advertising world by dropping oft-bizarre spots (often featuring actor Will Ferrell) and running them in one, usually small, television market....

To UEFA, Wrong Underwear Far Worse Than Fan Racism
Know this: UEFA is very protective of its sponsors. (Here are the Euro 2012 sponsors, soulless corporations all, and you should avoid their products for the remainder of the tournament. Except possibly Ukrsotsbank PJSC.) Paddy Power, the Irish bookmaker, is just as corporate and just as interested i...

Dave Winfield Appeared In An 80's Ad For Toronto Tourism, Years Before Joining The Blue Jays
Dave Winfield only spent one season with the Blue Jays, but his role in helping Toronto win the 1992 World Series made him a legend in the eyes of Hogtownians. That wasn't always the case, though. After a 1983 incident in which Winfield killed a seagull during warmup tosses—an incident that earned...

Kegasus, The Beer-Loving Mascot Of The Beer-Loving Preakness, Is Actually A Sober Phony
What's the saying? If you'll keg stand for something, you'll fall for anything? Promoters of the Preakness Stakes must believe it. Turns out that Kegasus, spokesbeast for the Preakness and the best mascot in all of sports, is a sham....

Azerbaijan's Stinky Olympic Wrestling Team Is Sponsored By Febreze
It kind of makes sense for a group of sweaty, smelly wrestlers to partner up with a product that stakes its business model on eliminating odors. If nothing else, we get to see some poor sap take a hefty whiff of some wrestler's headgear and compare it to passionfruit. (Related: Don't ever put a bl...