Yesterday, Travis reported on Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard’s prediction that in 30 years, the National Football League will die because making necessary changes to improve the safety of the game will produce a sport that no one wants to watch. I think both that scenario and the one that Travis himself lays out are not unrealistic. But it’s also worth remembering that the NFL’s life or death won’t happen in a closed surgical theater. There are people other than the players and owners, and in college, the athletics programs and fundraising departments, with a vested interest in keeping football alive and immensely popular.

Significant among those interests? Broadcast television and ESPN. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the League is touting the performance of football on television. 55 percent of the television broadcasts since September 1, 2010, that averaged at least 20 million viewers were of NFL football games, or 135 out of 247 broadcasts. The next-closest program? American Idol, with 39 broadcasts, followed by the London Olympics, with 18. The first scripted program on the list is NCIS, with 11 broadcasts that hit 20 million. There’s no wonder broadcast nets pay big for the games they air: Sunday Night Football is part of what’s helped NBC rebound from fourth place to first in the ratings.

Some of that’s an indication of the increasing weakness of broadcast television, which has had a tremendously difficult time launching scripted programming that finds an audience anywhere near that large, and which has seen the numbers on big reality programs, like Idol and Dancing With The Stars decline. But that weakness means the value of football is two-fold. Football broadcasts prop up television’s advertising revenue model. And they provide a potential launching platform for new programming. That’s one of the reasons the Super Bowl rotates from network to network every year: it’s such a critically important platform for showcasing existing programming to one of the largest audiences that assembles in front of the television anymore.

And that’s just on broadcast: football’s even more important to both cable networks and the cable business model. People who oppose cable bundling frequently complain about the price of sports channels, but access to lots and lots of football is one of the reasons sports make cable seem like a good deal for the more than 100 million American households who subscribe to it. The death of football through formal dismantlement or a rising disinterest and distaste would make bundled cable television seem less valuable.

Television, in other words, badly needs the NFL to stay healthy. What that means the industry can, and will, do remains an open question. But football and television’s futures are deeply intertwined, and at a time when the content television is creating for itself is having trouble finding an audience, those ties are tighter than ever.

Poor Rush Limbaugh, who really has no one else to blame for the fact that his comments about Sandra Fluke lost him advertisers and made Mike Huckabee a viable competitor, seems to be feeling sorry for himself lately. In a recent interview with The New Republic, President Obama said, truthfully, that “If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.” Now, Limbaugh appears to believe that this means President Obama is pulling some kind of mysterious strings—and to be denying his own influence. As The Hollywood Reporter explains:

Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience Monday that President Obama is promoting a “secondary boycott” against those he disagrees with and that the mainstream media is on board with the strategy.

“I would love to take credit for this,” Limbaugh said Monday. “I’d love to say that I find myself here because of a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed strategy, but one of the reasons that Fox News and I stand out like sore thumbs here is because the rest of the media is gone. The rest of the media is in the tank. The rest of the media has long ago ceased doing their job. They’re not reporting, they’re not curious, they’re not holding Obama accountable. They are on board. They are part of the agenda-advancement team.”

I’m awfully curious about this kind of thinking. Does Limbaugh believe himself to be influential, or not? If he doesn’t believe himself to have any particular influence over lawmakers, does that mean advertisers can’t decide if they do or don’t want to be associated with him, which is, after all, how pure media organizations have always set up that part of their revenue equation? How does President Obama saying that legislators care what Limbaugh thinks translate into him organizing a boycott against Limbaugh? What kind of free time does Limbaugh think President Obama has? It’s always entertaining seeing what it’s like down the rabbit hole, but I have less amused tolerance than usual when the subject is Limbaugh’s hurt feelings.

Given that the DC Metro system can’t turn down advertising just because they contain ideas the organization or its leaders find distasteful—which, for the record, is a state of affairs I approve of—this is probably the best possible solution to the problem of what to do with prominent Islamophobe Pamela Geller’s nasty ads which suggest that Israel is civilized and the Muslim world is decidedly not:

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said it is adding a line of text distancing itself from all new “viewpoint” ads that reads: “This is a paid advertisement sponsored by [sponsor].The advertising space is a designated public forum and does not imply WMATA’s endorsement of any views express.”

The agency was urged to add a disclaimer to a set of ads that went up earlier this month that opponents said equated Muslims with savages. The agency started to add the disclaimers to all new noncommerical ads last week as the controversy grew, with counter ads and counter-counter ads.

“Metro advertising space is deemed a public forum by the courts, and the ads you see on buses, trains, and in stations comply with existing guidelines and are protected by the First Amendment,” General Manager Richard Sarles wrote in an internal memo. “However, we want to make sure customers know we don’t endorse any of these messages.”

It’s worth noting that WMATA ads, for those of you who don’t live in Washington, are a great expression of the bizarro world that is our city’s dominant industry. You’ll see entire stations covered in military hardware or lobbying campaigns—the Capitol South Metro, which is the dominant stop on the Hill, gets particularly saturated—in addition to universities targeting the kind of kids who intern in Washington with ads telling them that they can be fifteen different kinds of wonk. But Gellar’s ads set a new standard in ugliness and crassness. I’m glad they inspired WMATA to point out that while the system may be obligated to take almost everyone’s money, that Metro is on board with every sentiment that gets splashed on subway cars and station’s walls. And in an environment of unusually heightened political and lobbying competition, there’s something appealing about the idea that the new disclaimers will mark all the other opinion ads that come along in Gellar’s wake. Washington may be the site of heated political contests, but its leading industry isn’t the sum total of the region.

Campaign finance and advertising have been a heated subject of discussion down the stretch of this fall’s presidential election, particularly the role of Super PACS in both the contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney and down ballot races. But though it’s unlikely to change the game entirely, the Obama campaign is going back to a kind of advertising it pioneered in 2008: billboards within Electronic Arts campaigns. Obama was the first candidate to advertise in video games in that race, which is all well and good. But while it’s easier to report on who’s spending what, and on what kinds of advertising, the larger question with this, and with the rest of the campaign advertising we’re awash in, is whether it makes a difference.

Commercial brands seem to believe that in-game advertising is valuable. Unilever signed a deal this spring to place its products inside the Sims. It’s a kind of advertising that makes sense because it can be smoothly integrated into the environment where it appears. Tricia Duryee put it, “It’s much harder to work a bottle of shampoo into a game that’s set in the forest or at a poker table. But when a game is about sleeping, eating microwave dinners or taking showers, that sort of product placement becomes much easier.” It’s not disruptive to have products be branded in-game as they are in real life. And if advertisers are looking for product recognition and familiarity, placement is an easy way to achieve it.

That said, the overall impact of in-game advertising appears to be a bit of a mixed bag, for both game companies and advertisers themselves. EA may have more than 300 million users, about whom they have a fair amount of data. But straight-up display advertising doesn’t seem to have become a core business for it and other video game companies the way it is for, say, television networks. If players want to escape into a world, the best way to sell your product or your person may be to bow to the rules of that world, rather than placing advertising that takes players out of the universe they’ve entered.

The Obama campaign’s decision to spend money on advertising in EA games may be about generating impressions and reminding folks to step away from the console on or before November 6 (the 2008 ads reminded players that early voting had started, among other messages). But it’s also a way of letting a constituency know that they’re on the campaign’s mind. It’s become all too easy for advertisers, political and otherwise, to gin up stories about spots that they have no intention of actually running, or no funds to actually air. But to get attention to your advertising in a sector of the media that isn’t dedicating a lot of space to campaign coverage is a clever trick. And that coverage, more so than the ads themselves, may be worth the money.

This video montage of political attack ads from The Atlantic’s been getting passed around, and I found it particularly illuminating in the context of the powerful anti-Romney ad that’s airing in Ohio:

What’s fascinating about most of these ads is how deliberately unartful they are. There are exceptions, of course—the two-headed freak offered up by a carnival barker in the 1952 Adlai Stevenson ad, or most prominently, the Lyndon Johnson Daisy ad that suggested Barry Goldwater’s hawkishness would have terrifying consequences. But many of them have deliberately low-grade graphics, like the stock footage of the roller coaster in Walter Mondale’s anti-Reagan ad from 1984, the cheap blurring of Bill Clinton’s face in George H.W. Bush’s 1992 ad implying that Clinton was so contradictory as to sound like two entirely different people, or the deliberately choppy cuts of the 2004 George W. Bush ad showing John Kerry as a flip-flopper by showing him windsurfing back and forth. They’re cutesy or literal, though that doesn’t mean that the ideas they convey are. In a way, the crudeness of the images isn’t meant to condescend to the audience—it’s a way of conveying that both they and the candidate are in on the joke of their opponent’s weakness.

Over at The Daily Beast, Maria Elena Fernandez has written a piece that explains both why Charlie Sheen continue to employed, and in two paragraphs, everything you need to know about the utter venality of advertising:

In turn, Sheen is more well-known and more polarizing than ever, according to his Q score. Immensely popular at the height of his run on the high-rated Two and a Half Men, Sheen is now familiar to 87 percent of Americans six years of age and older, a seven percent increase in his status prior to his Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour. But even as he’s become more of a household name, the number of people who dislike him also went up, increasing his negative score from 31 to 47 in just one year. The average celebrity registers a negative score of 26, Schafer said. Sheen, however, remains very popular among 18-to-34-year-old men, who happen to be the toughest demographic to reach in media and marketing.

“It looks like from everything that transpired, it was his female appeal that got hit the hardest,” Schafer said. “He’s a complete turn-off to women right now, whereas, back in the day, at the height of Two and a Half Men, he was way above average with female consumers. He’s lost most of his consumer strength with women of all ages and men 35 and older. But young males, 18 to 34, were relatively unaffected by all of his ranting and raving. They actually like him as much as they did before, so if you’re a marketing person and you’re seeing that you have someone that can really attract that hard-to-find consumer group, then maybe Charlie’s a good approach because he’s going to create both awareness and emotion.”

That statistic about how Sheen’s latest antics changes the perception of him is also pretty telling, too. Women, unshockingly, are unlikely to resonate with an addict with a record of violence against women. Older men get it, too. But younger men (and not all of them, of course) apparently still have tiger blood in their eyes. And the ability to reach them is one way of determining the financial value of a bad reputation. But I also feel like that divergence is a symptom of the real clashes we’ve seen over culture and sexism in the past few months. In some cases, men and women are just not seeing the same things.

Adidas is notorious for pushing the envelope in sports fashion, most recently for outfitting men’s college basketball team in hideous neon uniforms for the NCAA Tournament.

The company’s newest product, however, reaches a whole new level of provocation, and it’s hard to imagine a shoe company coming up with a worse idea than this:

That’s the new Adidas JS Roundhouse Mid, a basketball shoe that was set to debut in August and was aimed at those who have “a sneaker game so hot you lock your kicks to your ankles.” The shoe’s rather unsubtle use of shackles has, understandably, drawn criticism for symbolizing slavery and prison chains.

Adidas said the shoe represented “nothing more than the designer Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion and has nothing to do with slavery.” Scott, the company noted, is known for “quirky, lighthearted” designs.

Adidas pulled the shoe out of production late last night, and I’m of the belief that it wouldn’t intentionally approve a design that symbolized slavery. But that is the problem: apparently, no one in any stage of the process stopped long enough to think that a product set to be marketed largely to African-Americans that included shackles and chains might have negative racial overtones in a country where slavery existed for more than two centuries.

It would be tough to mistake Mickey Mouse or panda bears—features of past Scott designs—as anything but “quirky” or “lighthearted.” To many Americans, though, this design’s dependence on shackles and chains isn’t quirky, lighthearted, outrageous or unique—it’s offensive. Amazingly, it took a massive public outcry for Adidas to realize that.