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Canucks fans not impressed with NHL's new digital rink board ads

Rob Williams
Rob Williams
|
Oct 13 2022, 11:07 pm
Canucks fans not impressed with NHL's new digital rink board ads
Sportsnet

Hockey fans get inundated with advertisements during every NHL game.

It’s true whether you’re at the game or watching at home.

Teams and television stations need to pay the bills somehow, and by and large, fans accept it.

Rink board ads became prevalent in the late 1980s, and ads on the ice in the neutral zone were seen across NHL rinks by the 1990s. More recently we’ve seen the NHL allow on-ice ads in the corners, and digital ads superimposed on the glass for the at-home viewer.

For the past three years, player helmets can have a sponsor logo on them too. The Canucks introduced NexGen Energy as their latest helmet sponsor.

Canucks jerseys don’t have ads on them… yet. The team is working on getting a sponsor for their jerseys, Daily Hive has learned.

On Wednesday, Canucks fans got their first taste of another new way to generate revenue: digital rink board ads.

The NHL first introduced us to “digitally enhanced dasherboards” in a press release last week.

If you’re at the arena, you won’t notice a difference. But if you’re watching at home, as many Canucks fans were for Wednesday’s game in Edmonton, you’ll see digital ads superimposed onto the boards instead. Essentially, this allows teams to offer more advertising options to companies, including selling ads for road games.

For the most part, the digital ads looked normal during Wednesday’s game, blending into the background as viewers expect. The exception to this is when ads changed mid-shift, which served as a distraction.

Then there were the technological malfunctions.

Digitally enhanced dasherboards didn’t have a perfect rollout, as the video below illustrates. With five minutes left in the first period, the artificial intelligence technology went haywire.

Yes, there was something ironic about a Rogers ad not working properly inside Rogers Place, shown on Rogers-owned Sportsnet.

This is a new technology for the NHL, and I’m sure it’ll improve with time.

We’ll become numb to this in no time, undoubtedly.

But hockey fans watching their team expect immediate perfection.

So needless to say, the digital rink board ads generated a reaction on social media.

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