Page 144 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport in Advertising • 133

Suggestions for Analysis

Advertisements have become an inseparable feature of the mediation of sport spec-

tacles and megaevents. Advertising campaigns are often specifically created to air
during a sport event. Even when the advertisements may not explicitly contain sport-
related content, they often reference the event by its absence. The viewer understands

that the advertisement is part of the flow of the event and supplies that knowledge
before it can make sense. The sport event may be what sustains a narrative across
a number of advertisements, without any sport being shown. Record the advertise-
ments broadcast during a sport megaevent, such as the Federation Internationale de
Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, and consider the way sport is referenced
by its presence and absence. Television advertisements may only be one part of an
advertising campaign that embraces newspapers, magazines, the Internet, the sports-
cape and the clothes of performers, billboards and other aspects of urban architec-
ture. In what ways do advertisers use the variety of media forms at their disposal?
What connections are made between them?

Further Reading

Andrews, D. L. (1996), ‘Introduction: Deconstructing Michael Jordan: Reconstruct-
ing Post-industrial America’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 13: 315–18.
Cole, C., and Hribar, A. (1995), ‘Celebrity Feminism: Nike Style Post-Fordism,
Transcendence, and Consumer Power’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 12: 347–69.
Dyer, G. (1982), Advertising as Communication, London: Methuen.
Hillyard, D. (1994), ‘Televised Sport and the (Anti)Sociological Imagination’, Jour-
nal of Sport and Social Issues, 18: 88–99.
Jackson, S., Andrews, D., and Scherer, J., eds (2005), Sport, Culture and Advertising:
Identities, Commodities and the Politics of Representation, London: Routledge.
Jhally, S. (1987), The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of
Meaning in the Consumer Society, London: Routledge.
Scherer, J., and Jackson, S. J. (2007), ‘Sports Advertising, Cultural Production and
Corporate Nationalism at the Global-Local Nexus: Branding the New Zealand All
Blacks’, Sport in Society, 10: 268–84.
Silk, M., and Andrews, D. L. (2001), ‘Beyond a Boundary? Sport, Transnational Ad-
vertising, and the Reimagining of National Culture’, Journal of Sport and Social
Issues, 25: 180–201.
Williamson, J. (1978), Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertis-
ing, London: Marion Boyars.