Getting Out of Hand

I watched the Perpetual Commercial 400 at Daytona Saturday night.

In baseball, football, basketball and hockey they wait for the game to stop before a commercial. In soccer, where the clock never stops running, they wait for halftime before they run commercials. Only NASCAR, a program featuring rolling billboards going in circles, cuts away to commercial during competition; despite frequent caution periods where actual racing is prohibited.

The broadcasters realize that the slogan "Every Lap Matters" is ridiculous. Every time a car spins or some debris falls on the track the race goes to caution, and any lead that has been built up is erased. Each caution also allows one driver who fallen behind to get a lap back. The networks believe that as long as they show the last 10 laps of the race uninterrupted viewers will keep coming back. NBC pushed this to the limit showing 2 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of racing during their last year of NASCAR coverage.

TNT either to make a better product, or to find a way to reach Tivo owners, has gone with a new format for advertising. Instead of cutting away from the race to show commercials, they have logos on the screen constantly and at odd intervals show commercials on part of the screen while continuing to show the race on the rest. This allows for seeing more of the race, but it makes the commercials seem endless.

Every time something happened we were listening to the sponsors not the announcers. We could see Allmendinger hit the wall, but were left to wonder what caused it. Who hit Biffle? Why was Kyle running on the apron? We wait to find out.

And even with the national commercials being shown during the race coverage, they still cut away several times for local ads.

At Daytona, the UPS Toyota of David Reutimann came back from 5 laps down, on 5 successive cautions, to finish 22nd. Kyle Busch’s Interstate Batteries Toyota was leading when the caution came out with 4 laps to go. On the restart he managed to hold off a challenge by Carl Edwards, in the Aflac Ford, and held a narrow lead when the caution came out on the last lap, ending the race. Kyle Petty did not bring any Papa John’s pizza to the other announcers in the booth, but the winning team sprayed Coke Zero on each other in victory lane.