The NFL Just Showed That Nothing Is Sacred
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In the late 2000s, the NFL's media bigwigs realized that football fans loved their fantasy teams but disliked both commercial breaks and doing too much thinking on Sunday afternoons. Enter the NFL RedZone channel, one of the savviest things anyone's ever put on TV. The paid add-on service has moved around various homes over the years, but it's had a few constants. One is that every Sunday, it broadcasts whip-around coverage of all games between 1 pm and roughly 7 pm Eastern time, making it perfect for checking out one's fantasy players. (Sports betting has been another boon to RedZone.) The other is that since at least 2013 and probably further back, RedZone's dynamic host, Scott Hanson, has signed on at 1 pm and told his viewers, “Seven hours of commercial-free football starts now.”
When Hanson signed on this Sunday, the promise of commercial-free football was gone, replaced by “seven hours of RedZone football.” The NFL put four 15-second commercials on RedZone in Week 1. They appeared in split-screen boxes that covered half the screen and took over the audio feed. People were mad, or at least mad-ish. I would describe the tenor of my football group chats as “a little bit annoyed.” The move to add commercials generated a lot of media coverage last week, none of it positive . “Commercials make NFL RedZone Channel worse” was the headline in Pro Football Talk , a story representative in both its tenor and its lack of a threat by the writer to actually cancel RedZone in response. The uproar was enough that Gavin Newsom's social media people got him into the fray, posting about it in all caps .
The NFL's media allies and corporate partners have rallied to its defense. ESPN's Adam Schefter, the tenacious scoop collector and vital arm of the league's PR machine, wanted to make sure everyone understood : “Some added clarity: NFL RedZone is seven hours — 420 minutes. Over that time, viewers will be served 1-2 total minutes of ads in :15 increments. This comes out to anywhere between 0.25% - 0.5% of the total time, considerably less than other sports/entertainment programs.” (ESPN, where Schefter works, just struck a pending deal for a bunch of NFL media assets, including RedZone.) Hanson, RedZone's host, got out in front of the commercials on social media , telling people he wanted them to get the details from him. Nobody had put him up to hit, he said. NFL sportsbook partner FanDuel got in on the action after Sunday's games with this admittedly funny graphic:
What's a savvy media consumer to make of all of this? It's got layers. On the one hand, the complainers are pretty annoying. In a vacuum, no serious person cares that much about one or two minutes of ads in the course of seven hours of television. But on the other hand, these scolds may prove to be canaries in the media coal mine. I don't believe that RedZone is on its way to full-scale enshittification , in which the viewer experience will degrade until there's a 15-second break between every Russell Wilson incomplete pass. But the fact is that the NFL and its partners are making RedZone worse and expecting people to swallow it. The problem is less about RedZone commercials and more about the most visible cultural institution in the country experimenting with a new frontier of taking from its fans, without consequences.
Not to be too naive about the freakin' NFL being profit-motivated, but commercials on RedZone are a betrayal. They're a betrayal not just of general customer–business dynamics in media but of RedZone's specific value proposition to its customers. Newspapers and magazines have ads in them, but premium TV and video services historically have not. Different media companies have different levels of firewall in place, but they mostly have something : Slate Plus members do not get ads on their Slate podcasts, for example. My own football podcast has plenty of ads on it, but not on the add-on episodes for paid subscribers. My premium Spotify account spares me from ads when I listen to music. RedZone is an add-on channel that costs $15 a month as a standalone or much more as part of a larger “Sunday Ticket” viewing package. By the karmic laws of the media universe, there should not be commercials on it. And that's before you get to well over a decade of promoting RedZone for its “commercial-free football.”
You need not have been born yesterday to be frustrated. Everything about the NFL moves in this direction all the time. The Philadelphia Eagles just got a play sponsored. (The Tush Push, now brought to you by Dude Wipes .) Very little square footage in any NFL stadium hasn't been sold off to someone or something. But ads on RedZone are an affront because of how people use the service. The old joke about RedZone is that on a football Sunday, it does everything for the viewer but make them a sandwich and bring it over to the couch. RedZone is—don't laugh at me—a luxury TV experience. It's the football-watching version of a mass-marketed travel credit card that gets you into airport lounges. Just as those cards have lost luster as their issuers have overmarketed them , watching commercials on RedZone invokes a specific regret. I paid extra for this ultra-convenient way to watch my favorite sport, and you're treating me like, what, some schmo watching on network television?
It's a mirage, but commercial on RedZone puncture it. And while the feeling of specialty is an illusion, the money you are paying for RedZone is real. So too is a long-established expectation that paying extra for a product of RedZone's type will mean not watching commercials. The NFL and its partners would like to reset that expectation, leaving room to one day air much more than a measly minute of RedZone commercials. They would prefer you treat RedZone more like an ad-supported Netflix subscription. But that analogy doesn't quite work, because the NFL already has an ad-supported football-watching tier. It's called “every NFL game ever played, forever.”
The league is trying to make its fans—its customers—think about its product in a fundamentally different way. My guess is that it will succeed. RedZone is high-quality entertainment, and Hanson is one of the few irreplaceable people in sports media, a legit star who has a parasocial relationship with millions of football fans. RedZone's commercial load will not stay at one minute per seven hours forever. Over time, the spots will become background noise, just as they have on standard NFL game broadcasts. Then the NFL will hunt for a fresh way to make the act of watching at home more luxurious. It will find it somewhere. In the meantime, maybe a few more people will stop outsourcing their selection of which plays to watch, in which games, to the NFL. Maybe they'll even watch a normal 60-minute football game, interrupted by frequent Bud Light and DraftKings commercials, just as the Founding Fathers intended.
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