9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"

9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"bristol.ac.uk

181 points•KellyCriterion•9 days ago•217 comments•

#price #game #beautiful #ads #fifa #cup #beautiful game #fifa cup

217 comments

gps3729 days ago

Most comments may have ignored this so far, but this is an interesting AI based research.

At the end of the article is this excerpt

>> Results from this research were generated using an AI computer vision model developed by the research team on Bristol’s Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer. Isambard-AI powered the analysis of 172.6 hours of live match footage from all 104 games played between 11 June and 19 July 2026.

So, basically now merchandizers, auditors, compliance monitors, etc. have a tool using which they can quantify whether broadcaster complied with contractual requirements of showing their ads/merch/logos as per contract. And if they missed, then they can quantify the delta - to sue the broadcaster for the balance as well.

Also, it can enable many countries, where certain content is not allowed, then this tool can simply give them data points without having to employ someone, or have someone review the output of the AI tooling.

thevinter9 days ago

I'm sure this was already easily doable for years by using plain and boring computer vision

GuB-429 days ago

It was easily doable for even more years using plain and boring MK1 eyeballs and a stopwatch.

If you are spending millions on ads, you can pay a couple of guys to watch TV and take notes.

dylan6048 days ago

Since people have bought air time on a broadcast, people have done this very thing to ensure their ad ran. They also notice other analytics like what other ads ran around it and what the content of the program was when it ran. Can't run an ad selling a new car when the scene just before the break was a brutal car wreck or something.

Eventually, people buying ad time on TV stations could request an air check and receive a VHS tape showing a bit of the programming before/after the ad pod your ad ran. Particularly useful when buying ad time on local stations out of the market where you lived.

saintmaxi9 days ago

I worked for a company in 2020 that did ad analysis with computer vision - specifically in sports, quantifying value for sponsors based on exposure on team socials (accounting for logo size, positioning, etc in photos + videos) - I was a humble annotator https://www.blinkfire.com

gps3729 days ago

Plain and boring computer vision would have still required a team who would identify frames to sample before processing, and then annotate, generalize and classify the data.

Not an expert on this but I don't think same kind of manual effort is required anymore.

disgruntledphd28 days ago

> by using plain and boring computer vision

Technology is funny, I remember when an intern project detected cats in Youtube videos and it was front page news (round here, at least).

Now it's just boring technology.

brookst9 days ago

This is also being done in retail, where manufacturers and/or distributors pay for preferred placement (end caps, eye level, etc), but how do you check that e.g. Safeway is really doing that across a couple of thousand stores?

You hire minimum wage people to walk around stores with cameras. This was actually done with notepads occasionally, but so much less expensive tondo with AI.

gps3729 days ago

True, in-store planogram compliance and floor-plan compliance have got in focus again. It never lost the focus to be honest, just that now there is an expectation to do it while ensuring nothing fall through the cracks.

But there is a much more stringent privacy requirement here since customers walking in those stores haven't really signed up for this analysis. Hence, difficult to just setup the camera and take continuous data for analysis.

amelius9 days ago

There's a lot of data extraction being done for every game. It already uses tons of AI, and has been using it for years. Doing it by hand would have been more surprising.

What's also surprising is that despite all this data we can't automate those soccer player jobs yet.

overfeed8 days ago

> So, basically now merchandizers, auditors, compliance monitors, etc. have a tool using which they can quantify whether broadcaster complied with contractual requirements of showing their ads/merch/logos as per contract

Automated ad-monitoring tools existed for decades for TV and Radio using even older DSP techniques and imperceptible audio/visual watermarks.

wateralien9 days ago

It's not only the World Cup, it's everything, everywhere, all the time. We are drowning in marketing messages. It's gross.

BLKNSLVR8 days ago

The paperclip maximizer was some other dimension, we got the advertising maximizer.

tavavex8 days ago

Millions of people go about their lives every day devising complex schemes to put as much visual garbage, deceptive messaging and mind-exploiting advertising in front of your eyes. They don't care about truth or integrity, they only value money. Nothing is too low for them. There already are millions of little maximizers everywhere, I'm just surprised there has been no backlash against them or their industry of spreading manipulative slosh onto every possible flat surface.

bdcravens8 days ago

Yes, but FIFA's attempt to control every aspect of it was suffocating. I've never seen an event where stadiums had to change their name for an event. (Since the companies that paid for those naming rights hadn't paid FIFA)

doom28 days ago

This is nothing new. For example, in the 2006 World Cup, the Allianz Arena was called FIFA WM-Stadion München (among many other stadiums that year).

gumby9 days ago

AR glasses with ad blocking would be a must-buy for me…though how would I learn about it?

Seems like a good feature for AirPods too, though the new CEO Ternus seems committed to the opposite.

dylan6048 days ago

I have no faith in humanity, especially those involved in tech, to make this. If they did, they'd block real life marketing only so it could be used to replace with ads bought directly with the AR maker.

elar_verole8 days ago

Replace all ads with beautiful classic paintings, get closer to see info about (title, artist, year)...

There's something to it

account428 days ago

Instead of blocking the ads you could even replace them with satirical slogans that mock those ads like "BUY", "CONSUME", "CONFORM" etc.

thinkingtoilet9 days ago

[flagged]

officialchicken9 days ago

And then the US advertisers came up with "hydration breaks".

ricardobayes8 days ago

I'm the opposite - maybe because I grew up watching "soccer", I find American football much more exotic and insteresting. Lately I'm discovering the nuances of baseball, what a game!

tomhow8 days ago

Please don't post snark like this on HN. Looking through your recent comments, too many of them are snarky dismissals. This needs to stop if you want to keep participating here. This site exists for curious conversation, so please don't comment if you're not willing or able to operate in that mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

torginus8 days ago

I like American football enough to watch it, but not enough to watch it live, which which kind of gets rid of the ads.

As for continuous play, I feel like the Americans made the very particular decision to cut out the potentially boring parts the game, so every moment is either setup or bombastic action.

It's weird but there is appeal to the idea.

strictnein9 days ago

[flagged]

serial_dev9 days ago

I'm actually surprised it's only that many ads? How can people even take a screenshot of the screen without a bunch of ads on it? You can't even take a look at a player, their jersey has basically ads on it, the ball, the shoes, the names of stadiums... Or do they not count the adidas/nike/reebok logos?

pluc9 days ago

The jersey thing is completely insane to me. I'm from North America where jerseys are largely NBA, NHL and MLB. No ads (although, NHL has started). But the euro jersey has the biggest ad dead fucking center.

I understand the concept that the kit colours is what identifies the team, but still, I can't justify wearing a giant advertisement. If you gave it to me, I'd refuse it. Fuck you, pay me.

tialaramex9 days ago

But they are being paid, they're paid a tremendous amount of money, and advertisements are where the money comes from.

aczerepinski9 days ago

NBA and MLB both have ads on the jersey (Nike and an additional per-team sponsor)

dwedge9 days ago

Not sure if there's push back or something behind this but a lot of premiership teams this season in the UK have a second kit where the sponsor is either missing or the same colour as the shirt so barely visible. Examples: https://www.safcstore.com/en/c-18416 https://www.brightonandhovealbion.com/media-article/125th-an...

parthdesai8 days ago

As someone who didn't grow up in NA, i don't understand this attitude. At least in soccer (football), we don't have to sit and watch ads and waste our time (barring the NA world cup). I know a league game will take ~2 hours to complete with a 15 minute half time break. I can allocate that time and then move on with my life. I much rather have that than having to sit through ads that end up taking more time than actual playtime! NBA used to have a thing called TV timeouts. But hey you don't get ads on the jersey

basisword9 days ago

All of those sports have about 2 hours of advertising breaks during the game. Football has one, at half time, and that also includes some analysis.

tremon9 days ago

> The analysis counted advertising built into the match footage (e.g. on the hoardings [sic?]), rather than commercials shown during advertising breaks.

invalidusernam39 days ago

Hoardings is UK English (so... English) for the advertising boards around a football pitch

Tycho9 days ago

It was funny a few years ago when the English Premier League was all moralistic, having players “take the knee” before matches in solidarity with social justice, meanwhile all the stadiums and team shirts and television broadcasts were abound with online gambling ads and sponsorships.

basisword9 days ago

How are those things in anyway related? The morality around gambling is very debatable. The morality around racism is not.

ndriscoll8 days ago

They're pretending to care about social problems while causing and encouraging social problems.

account428 days ago

The morality around "racism" however is.

Tycho8 days ago

Ah yes now that I think about it, I remember the nuns in my neighbourhood, between feeding the poor and preaching love and inclusion, would hand out casino memberships and bet coupons to the local youths.

iso16319 days ago

They didn't "have" players "take the knee", they just didn't stop them. It's called freedom.

Tycho9 days ago

Freedom as long as it’s a cause officially sanctioned by the league.

onaclov20009 days ago

I've been wondering about building counter ad technology. I think we recall their being some patents I saw sometime in the last handful of years that talked about swapping items out in a live show during reruns. But like why couldn't we just do that on our side and removing the items I assume we just pipe the HDMI in run some algorithms and then pipe it out. And I know I'm saying it as if it's trivial but if someone can write an algorithm to find existing things and swap them out it's the exact same thing except you just swap them out with a patch of the original scene for the original scene without whatever product placement I suppose.

gonzogato8 days ago

I haven’t gotten to the “replace” bit yet, but I’m automatically muting live ads and auto skipping through recorded ones: https://github.com/michigandrew/the-clicker. Love your idea

onaclov20007 days ago

I've done a bit of experimenting on OTA stuff (I use hdhomerun and had AI make me a DVR recently lol) and I think sometimes there is a fade to black that indicates start and end of ads, though the last thing I tried it on (Olympics) they didn't follow that very well, so I haven't revisited.

I'll take a closer look at your idea too!

onaclov20008 days ago

Also just the title of this post reminds me of ready player one (I just watched again recently), we can fill 80% of their field of view with ads before inducing seizures (I forget exact quote but it's close enough)

GJim8 days ago

> I've been wondering about building counter ad technology.

Ah... Old school culture jamming :-)

See also, billboard hacking and Adbusters.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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