Virtual Ads

At their exhibit at the New Orleans Convention Center, the Spalding team showed off its plans to use NBA backboards as an advertising medium. Spalding’s rear-screen projection system would put ads on the glass backboards during timeouts, halftime, and other non-play periods.

Virtual ads are nothing new: the patent dates back to 1993 and the technology really took off in 2002, about the same time that virtual first-down lines started showing up in NFL broadcasts. But where midfield soccer ads, corporate logos behind home plate, and branded first-down lines are all examples of completely virtual advertising, the projection technology proposed by Spalding is visible to in-game spectators as well as broadcast viewers. In fact, the target audience is presumably the in-game spectator since timeouts and halftime trigger commercial breaks for broadcasters.

It will be interesting to see how this technology is received. In the 2001 World Series virtual ads were criticized as obviously fake and obnoxiously big, while today they are a fully-integrated part of the event.