In the current times, almost every advert and marketing campaign includes the word “new”. Marketers seam to think that if they just stick the word `new’ somewhere, all of there problems will be solved, this is not the case.
In reality, very few of these products actually are new in any way shape or form. They are just re-brandings or clones of existing products. As practically every product is clamming to be new, the word has completely lost its impact. If everything claims to be new, nothing is.
For marketing to be effective, it needs to be unique and the product needs to be worthwhile. Just copying another product and slapping the word `new’ on it will not work any more.
Football, a game were two teams run around and try to kick a ball into the opposing teams net, a basic competitive team sport. Where the game is played for the purpose of recreation, that’s all there is to it, but in the commercial field it is little more than a business and a ripe example of pop culture.
True sport is a competition between people testing physical strength, agility and mental capability. A way for people to demonstrate there capabilities, have fun and entertain others in the proses. However since the arrival of the TV and mass media its meaning has changed. Now the entertainment aspect has grown completely out of control, effectively converting sport into little more than a form of passive entertainment, where few people actually play.
This has created an environment where millions of people are all watching exactly the same thing, a perfect environment for marketers and advertisers. Because of the sheer size of the audience, even if less than one percent actually buy the advertised products, they can still make a massive amount of profit.
The maintenance of this audience is done through the exploitation of pop culture and mass media. The professional `sports’ players are presented as glamorous stars, converting them into idols. Because most people just follow pop culture mindlessly, this has effectively trained the masses that watching sports is the right thing to do, guaranteeing the audience continues to grow.
With this environment, `sporting events’ like the world cup are not about competition between countries, or trying to prove personal strength. They are just monumental money marking scams, billions of people watch a game, throughout the game adverts are shown, a relatively small but physically large number of people buy the advertised products, the advertisers and people running the game make an absolute shed load of money.
If you want to get involved with sports, stop sitting on your but, worshipping some pop culture icons and actually start playing some sport that you enjoy.
