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Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

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    Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

    Sporting events in non-English speaking countries, where clearly the vast majority of the fans at the event are going to be local fans, where all the advertisers' signs are targetted at an English-speaking (TV) audience.

    The BMW International Open - in Munich ! - this week is plastered with huge billboard slogans around the greens proclaiming "Sheer Driving Pleasure".

    And it's not translated into German on the billboards next to it, at least not on the coverage I've been watching - just in English, all the way.

    BMW's marketing tagline ought to be "Did you drive like a complete cunt before you bought a BMW?", of course, but that's by-the-by.

    #2
    Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

    Erm, Rogin.

    Using English tag lines is a well-established tactic in "aspirational" marketing on the Continent. It's done all the time in France, Germany, Italy, etc, without any consideration of whether golf tragics in the UK might see the ad.

    And hilariously, French law requires that a French translation be included in a footnote.

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      #3
      Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

      Well I think it's a shame. When I watch an event from some far-off distant land I like the fact that it's clearly from there and belongs there, it adds to the wonder that I'm able to be watching it in the first place through these satellite thingies. I like watching sporting events from France and chuckling that "BNP" clearly has nothing of the connotation over there as it does here.

      A golf tournament from Munich with all the same marketing and branding (in English) as the one the sponsors hosted in Surrey a month ago, might as well be in, well, Surrey.

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        #4
        Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

        Somehow I never felt the same angst about the Radio Rentals ads at Mexico '70

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          #5
          Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

          I think it goes way back to my childhood, when "It's A Knockout" would be supplemented each summer by a brief but blissful couple of weekends of "Jeux Sans Frontiers", with its scratchier production quality and its wonderful theme tune based on Beethoven's Ode to Joy, where this time Stuart Hall would almost choke himself to death laughing about people from Exmouth and Ipswich dressed up as human-size penguins falling into swimming pools while competing against similar people from places like Wassenaar and Quimper.

          And of course the early Channel 4 coverage of the Tour de France was clearly showing an event that was from "somewhere else". Every venue was so exotic, so different, so foreign . When they showed the Milk Race it was, well, just a bunch of grim-faced blokes on bikes slogging their way through the rain up some hill in the Pennines.

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            #6
            Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

            I kind of know what Rogin means. Watching that Chilean 'urban' bike descent video on here, earlier this year, was incredible.

            But then the protagonist reached the bottom of that extreme yet seemingly ramshackle course and... there were all the Red Bull banners, and one's heart sank a little.

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              #7
              Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

              It's a much more generalised, and despicable trend.

              There's a McDonalds in the Piazza di Spagna, and another one in the Galleria in Milan, FFS.

              And every single "unspoilt Tuscan village" is crawling Brits, Germans and Americans.

              You should watch more cricket. A number of the hoardings for Windies/India are in Hindi (notwithstanding the fact that the matches are in the Caribbean).

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                #8
                Annoying things in sports no. 6 (series)

                We sometimes see ads in Japanese appear during MLB games, especially if Ichiro is at bat.

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