The sales of Nike merchandize over the Labor Day weekend rose 31% over the previous year, seemingly vindicating its decision to make Colin Kaaepernick the face of its ad campaign to commemorate the 30th anniversary of its ‘Just do it’ slogan, overcoming all the threats of boycotts and Donald Trump’s opposition.
Some football players continued the protest, either kneeling, raising their fists, or simply walking on to the field while the national anthem played before preseason games. Although the numbers of players doing so are few, the protests continued during the opening games of the regular season too. It looks like the NFL is backing down from its earlier hardline stance in response to resistance from the player’s union.
Trump continues to demagogue this issue, saying that football viewership is down because people are disgusted with the kneeling protests. It is true that football viewership is on the decline but that is more likely due to factors other than the kneeling, such as the increasing awareness of the brain injury problem. I personally cannot bear to watch games anymore, knowing that with each tackle, the players are damaging their brains
There is nothing Trump won’t politicize, for grand or petty reasons.
Let’s not forget him politicizing the Thanksgiving turkey pardoning, where he joked about looking into if he could take back the pardons that Obama gave his turkeys. Because wanting to undo even your predecesor’s most mundane and inconsequential actions totally doesn’t make you look like an obsessive insane fucking crazy nutjob.
Witch hunt! No collusion! Fake news! Liberal media! BINGO!
More on-topic, I don’t like that we have to rely on a corporation to give Colin the justice he deserves. Corporations are fundamentally profit machines, no more or less, and their actions will reflect what they believe the prevailing trends of their customer’s bigotry is. Using his sacrifice to sell shoes just seems like…I don’t know. Imagine Malala getting a Pepsi sponsorship.
I have seen many attempts of parody / mockery of the ad, Kaepernick’s face with an altered slogan or the slogan across another face. Some are meant to be humourous, but a fair number have subtle and/or overt racist connotations.
I’m not boycotting nike by not buying their products -- I’ve never bought them, period, because of their history of overpriced and poor quality product, toxic chemical and sweatshop working conditions. I readily support Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter, but not that company.
I have heard an argument that has a very different take on the ratings decline. It seems that while ratings are declining, the total number of persons who have watched one or more football games over a week (during the season) is not declining.
From this and other data, the person I read took note that when professional football was only available for 6 hours on Sunday and 3 hours on Monday, people made it a priority to watch the games that were broadcast. Now, however, there is Thursday Night Football + an extra prime-time game on Sunday nights. Additionally, college football games that are viewable on television are no longer limited to Saturdays, but are also available on Fridays, Thursdays, and possibly some other days on special occasions (I don’t remember for sure). Thus, the analysis concluded, the decrease in ratings for specific broadcasts don’t indicate a general unwillingness to watch football, but rather is more likely to represent the fact that a person can choose to mow the lawn or go to church or ride a bike on Sunday afternoon, and there’s still going to be football to watch later to scratch the same itch that before could only be addressed during nine specific 9 hours per week. Miss those 9 hours now? Another game is coming right along, so there’s less priority on carving out time for any specific broadcast.
I wish I could find the original analysis that gave me this information (not least to prevent me from screwing up some aspect of the argument), but you’ll mostly have to take my word for it. I do remember that Super Bowl stats played into the argument, however, and so I looked those up.
It turns out this alternate explanation for decline in the ratings of specific broadcasts receives some small support from the observation that when only one game is on, people still tune in in numbers as large as before:
There certainly are those of us who will now refuse to support hand-egg because of the league’s immoral sacrifice of the brains of its players, including some folks who were semi-regular (or more regular) viewers before this news. The analysis I read, however, suspects that those numbers are small, and are less likely to affect broadcast ratings than a surplus of broadcasts that removes some of the shine from all of them.
Of course, on all the important points in your OP, we’re in agreement. Just thought this was interesting when I read it and might be interesting to you.
@Crip Dyke No. 3
I would add that fans can now watch just the good parts online without having to endure all the boring parts and commercials.
AFAIK, ratings only capture people who viewed the live broadcast, and a lot of people no longer watch TV as it is broadcast. They either watch online (as per hyphenman @ #4), or they record it -- even it they only use a DVR to timeshift it just enough to skip the ads.