You bet it is - and I know I am far from the only one who feels
that way. Nobody ever complains if car racing, soccer, or
skiing is on and you want to changes channels to football,
hockey, baseball, basketball, or even golf.
No not nobody: one man's meat.......
I'm pretty sceptical about that claim - at least as far as North
American audiences are concerned. I'd be perfectly willing to
stipulate that car racing does indeed have large audiences
outside of North America.
What you think doesn't matter. The "claim" is accurate as stated - nothing
else comes close. In the U.S., NASCAR has a very large following -- as
good an excuse as any other for not raking leaves or cleaning out gutters
-- and has a *long* season. I'm not sure of current figures but it was
certainly true fairly recently that, in the U.S., the total annual
motorsports audience was bigger than any other single sport.
In every pub I've been to in Canada and the US, everyone watches
football, baseball, hockey and basketball, with even golf being
tolerated if there is nothing else on. Soccer and racing of any
kind - whether cars, horse, skiing, running - merely generate
requests for the channel to be changed.
Possibly speaks to many of the people who hang out in pubs with TV feeds --
much of which BTW is obtained/shown illegally -- and of course ball sports
have the gambling angle. Personally I can't be bothered with ball sports
and when "in pub" I prefer to do without the distraction of being fed
"entertainment" anyway.
And anyway I wasn't criticizing AMD for buying advertising on
cars because of the /size/ of the audience, but because of the
/kind/ of audience. Audience size merely determines the price of
the ads.
And what is it about car racing audience that disqualifies them? From my
observations they're a pretty sophisticated bunch who try to gain &
understand some technical knowledge of the sport they watch... and F1 is
the ultimate in high-tech sport. Watching cars go "round and round" is
certainly no worse than watching a group of rich, drug-enhanced fat guys
running around on a padded carpet.
I figured that, but I was thinking car parts, tools, tires,
fuels, lubricants, etc - not computers.
You figured wrongly then - everybody knows that all cars have computers in
them now and computers are used to analyze their performance; racing cars
in particular have extremely sophisticated computer systems, both on-board
and for processing of downloaded data for all parts of the system,
including suspension movement. All the F1 teams use "super-computers" -- a
couple known to use AMD -- in the design & development of every part of
their systems - fans know this and it seems to fit the usual advertizing
msg that the winners are the ones with the best computers... real or
perceived, as with all advertizing.
If that is the case, why are the American TV networks not showing
it ? Even up here in the Great White North I get NBC, ABC, Fox,
etc., and their sports programs are dominated by the "ball"
sports - with not much hockey and even less car racing.
You must be watching the wrong channels at the wrong times... or possibly
your local affiliate filters out according to some perceived local
preferences/prejudices, real or imagined. Motor racing is hardly suited to
the tundra; maybe they figure you'd really all rather watch (re-runs of)
the Ididerod every week?
Intel's would have been annoyed about *any* advertising coup by
AMD - no matter how big or how small. I just can't begin to
believe that this car racing stuff even remotely qualifies as a
big one.
You are wrong then - you only have to look at all the new circuits being
constructed at huge expense around the world -- China, Bahrain, Turkey in
the past couple of years -- and the clamour from those countries to host a
round of the F1 championship.
Intel was not just annoyed - the quote was "furious... incandescent with
rage". They threw a tantrum, not because they'd been excluded but because
they'd have had to share the "stage".
Because a significant proportion of the kind of people who watch
cars go round and round like to smoke while they watch ? I
think the car racing audience is/was a far better target for the
tobacco industry than it is for AMD.
I dunno where you pulled that from - smells worse than an old ashtray.;-)
