Even though it's necessary, I think that the amount of advertising that is done during basketball games (and almost every other sporting event) is ridiculous. I've been going to a lot of Kings games at Sleep Train Arena, and that's what has made me really notice how bad it is. At almost every timeout and after every quarter, they do some competition where they take people from the crowd and they compete in order to win something from Sleep Train, Verizon, Apple, or another one of their sponsors. Sometimes, after the Kings score, the Sleep Train horn sound is played over the sound system. I mean, come on! How much do they think that that's going to make us want to buy stuff from Sleep Train? Also, everywhere you look, you can see advertisements. In Sleep Train Arena, it's mainly Budweiser and Pizza Guy's and Sleep Train itself. This is the same as in the English Premier League for soccer. There are a lot of airlines that are advertised in the premier league, and at the stadiums they play in you can see a lot of banners and signs advertising other products as well. The soccer fans are so crazy that they probably don't even notice.
The reason that I decided to write about this is because in class I remember discussing the fact that we are constantly bombarded with advertisements, no matter where we go. This is totally true. Going to a basketball game with my friends is really fun, but I feel like the surroundings there make the atmosphere less about the game itself, and more about how much money they can make and how much they can talk about a certain company. I know that this has been a phenomenon for many years now, but I just wish we could go back to the old days when it was just about the sport itself.
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