New free trade agreement puts football back in Bell Media’s hands
Maybe you haven’t heard: The new North American free-trade deal will zap American commercials once again from Canadian Super Bowl telecasts.
So, cheese curds from Wisconsin, eggs from Michigan and milk from Ohio might now flow north across the border, but damned if we get to see funny Budweiser or GEICO ads during the NFL championship game.
Who says those dragged-out trade negotiations weren’t all spent on serious trade issues?
The reason for the ban on U.S. ads during the Super Bowl: Cancon business.
More specifically, so Bell Canada can recoup the reported tens of millions it pays the NFL for exclusive Canadian rights to telecast league games, from preseason to the Super Bowl.
See, restricting us humourless Canadian football viewers to the same small, monotonous, uncreative number of junior frenchfry, doughnut and domestic-beer ads — always repeating on a small loop — during the Super Bowl is good for our simple souls and good for the Canadian economy.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell released the following statement to U.S. media on Tuesday, in which he kissed U.S. President Donald Trump’s rings, no doubt while getting a hoist up from Bell executives:
“We greatly appreciate President Trump’s leadership and determination in bringing about a resolution to our intellectual property issue in Canada.”
Intellectual property. Ha. At last check, Cleveland Browns games were still being allowed to cross Lake Erie.
As background to all this, this past January for the second straight year Super Bowl TV viewership in Canada cratered — down by the millions on Bell Media’s family of CTV and TSN channels from 2016’s record high of 7.32 million.
That’s because for the second straight year, a Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) decision enabled domestic cable and satellite providers to not substitute the base U.S. network feed and its American commercials with the Bell Media feed and its subbed-in Canadian commercials on CTV, CTV Two and TSN2.
Numeris tracking figures provided to Postmedia by CTV showed that 4.45 million Canadians watched February’s thrilling Super Bowl LII — down 39 per cent from 2016 Super Bowl viewership in Canada, and down slightly (0.4 per cent) from 2017’s 4.47 million average audience.
The last two years were the first two times in decades that Canadians could watch U.S. Super Bowl commercials as they aired on the root American network: in 2017 on CBS, in 2018 on NBC.
The simple math is telling: nearly three million Canadians in each of the past two years eschewed the CTV/TSN offering to instead watch the big game on the root American feed. And that’s without a single ad on TV promoting the alternate option.
Everyone presumes it’s to be able to watch those U.S. commercials, into which American corporations typically pour millions of production dollars to make often the slickest, coolest, funniest TV ads of the year.
But I refuse to believe that’s the only reason. The monotony and often ham-fisted subbing out of ads on the Canadian feed (when we so often miss part of the announcers’ talk segueing out of U.S. commercials or promos, even the occasional action) has infuriated north-of-the-border viewers for decades.
How do I know this? Because I have football-loving Canadian friends who have complained to me about this for decades. And because I typically complain louder than them.
And here’s a point. If it’s all about the bucks for Bell and the NFL, then why the hell doesn’t CTV/TSN not jam a productplacement ad into every available Super Bowl ad slot?
Y’know, filling ad slots with actual ads?
But no. Year after year, we see CTV/TSN devote a big chunk of that supposedly precious ad time to a small selection of in-house program promos, which pitch the network’s ever-so-exciting new winter lineup of shows, especially CRTC-pleasing Can-con shows.
These promos air during the Super Bowl telecast over and over and over again until the game clock winds down to 0:00 — annoying us to the point that (a) many viewers subconsciously resolve to never watch one of those wretched programs if even their lives depended on it, and
( b) viewers year ’round wonder why they instinctively feel compelled to violently stab a pin into every bouncy red balloon they ever see.
So, yeah. Pardon the majority of Canadian viewers if they don’t spike their clickers — like a football into the end-zone turf — in celebration over this week’s news.
AMENDED LAWSUIT: According to ESPN.com’s Mike Rodak, the former girlfriend of Buffalo Bills running back LeSean McCoy claimed in an amended lawsuit filed Tuesday that he physically assaulted her during the 2017 NFL season.
Previously, Delicia Cordon had not claimed McCoy had physically abused her.