I’m not a sports fan, so if I watch a portion of the Super Bowl it’s purely to absorb the cultural aspect of the event. I will admit that I do enjoy chips, salsa, and beer, and the combination of those is usually enough to get me over to someone’s house on game day.

I didn’t make any plans to watch this year’s Super Bowl, which was began at around 1am in The Netherlands. However, as I was finishing up a paper, I discovered to my astonishment that the game was actually on TV. There were Dutch announcers and slightly less extravagant graphics, but there was one remarkable difference: no commercials.

To many, including myself, the Super Bowl is as much a showcase of marketing as a sporting event. Everyone knows that the commercials are the most expensive television ads of the year, due to the extremely large viewing audience. If you didn’t know that (maybe if you’re from another country, say The Netherlands), all you’d have to do is watch the game on Dutch TV. Instead of showing you the ads, they show statistics about how much the ads cost and how high various Super Bowls have been rated. They also show replays of various game moments to fill the down time. I didn’t expect to see U.S. based ads on a Dutch station in any event, but I’m surprised they didn’t even show the normal ads for dish-soap, chocolate milk, and Norwegian vacations. At least I think those are the products being advertised in the commercials I usually see.