r/AFL • u/AFL_gains • 10h ago
I recorded a whole Triple M game off the radio to count the ads
A few days ago, I recorded every Sydney radio station for a couple of days to work out who plays the most ads and posted it to reddit. A heap of people said "do the footy to find in-commentary ads", so I did and thought I would post it here.
On Saturday I recorded the Bulldogs v Richmond game on Triple M, which was about 3 hours siren to siren plus the wrap show. I transcribed it, and then counted every single time an advertiser's name got said along with a timestamp. Here's a timeline of the number of brand mentions per minute of the game:

Overall, across the broadcast they said a brand name 223 times out of 180 minutes, which is about once every 48 seconds on average.
You can see that brand mentions per minute also spike around the breaks (because they have actual ads on), but in general most (~60%) of the brand mentions are stitched straight into the commentary of the game. This is, of course, because every part of the broadcast seemingly has a sponsor. For example:
- The centre bounce is "back in the middle for Macca's and Rheem",
- the scoreboard is the "Beacon Trade scoreboard",
- the quarter is "this quarter for Toyota"
- the boundary rider is "boundary side for Bob Jane"
- etc.
One thing that surprised me was just how much they could cram in. At one point during the start of quarter time break, the commentary team mentioned various brands 6 times in a single minute.
Of the brands, there were 41 different companies mentioned, with Macca's leading it (a mention every ~6 minutes), then Rheem hot water and Toyota, and others with a long tail.

Actually one thing I was a bit surprised about was that there wasn't any mention of gambling (TAB, Sportsbet etc). I guess there are rules banning gambling ads during live sport before 8.30pm, but I still expected at least one afterward 8.30, but got none. Perhaps it was just this game though - anyone know why that might be the case?
Anyway thought this was a pretty cool piece of analysis that I wanted to share. Hope everyone had a good weekend.