Sports advertising, cultural production and corporate nationalism at the global-local nexus: Branding the New Zealand all blacks

Abstract

This essay provides an in-depth examination of a contextually-specific case study of advertising agency Saatchi Saatchi's production of a recent television commercial for adidas's sponsorship of New Zealand's iconic rugby team, the All Blacks. Through interviews with representatives from adidas, the New Zealand Rugby Union, and Saatchi Saatchi, and analyses of industry documents, the commercial is located within a range of interrelated cultural, economic, technological and institutional conditions of production. The analysis reveals the complexity of the processes and practices through which the commercial was encoded with dominant cultural meanings and representations employed to communicate a complex televisual discourse of corporate nationalism and spectacle at the global-local nexus.