About
Football advertising, treated as a genre
The subject here is the advertising, not the football: the films made around the World Cup between 1998 and 2014, the people who made them, and the commercial machinery that decided what they were allowed to say.
The genre has unusual rules. The people on screen are not actors and are contracted elsewhere by four in the afternoon. The central prop is a ball, which will not repeat a trajectory on request. The finished film has to carry its argument with no sound, in nine languages, on a screen the size of a hand. And in most cases the brand paying for it is not permitted to name the tournament everybody watching knows it is about.
How it is divided
Three parts. The Four-Year Clock covers the calendar that makes these films possible and the award juries that decided which ones counted, with a page for each cycle underneath it — 1998, 2002, 2010 and 2014. The Shoot covers the production constraints. Sanctioned covers the rights structure: the sponsor tiers, the slot prices and the shirt.
Every campaign here carries its brand, its year and, where it is known, its agency and its director. Films are described rather than embedded.