Consumer Consumption and Advertising Through Sport

The sport industry benefits greatly from its various media partnerships. Sport as a corporate marketing tool provides increased flexibility, broad reach, and high levels of brand and corporate exposure. Many organizations have recognized this potential of sport as a vehicle for accomplishing many of their marketing-related objectives. In turn, this has resulted in significant growth in the sport industry, in particular in its media consumption both online and offline. The purpose of this research—using the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament as its sample—was to identify how advertisements contained within both the online and television broadcasts contribute to consumer culture and consumption. Content analysis was used to identify specific tactics related to materialism, maximization, regret, social comparison, and anti-materialism within 144 unique advertisements contained within the broadcasts. Findings include the high prevalence of maximization tactics, a significant correlation between length of ad and the use of materialism tactics (i.e., the longer the ad, the higher the frequency of materialism tactics), and a significant correlation between the use of regret and maximization tactics and fear appeals. It is notable that the use of a spokesperson in an advertisement showed no relationship with the five tactics and no difference was found for the use of the five tactics and medium (television or Internet).