I’ve seen similar graphics before but this is by far the most beautiful of its category. It shows the striking correlation between the stickiness of Hockey as  television content and the limited capacity of the human bladder. The green line shows the water consumption on a regular day (27th Feb.)  in the city of Edmonton. The blue line shows the consumption pattern of the same good  24 hours later during the historic Olympic Hockey Final between the USA and Canada. The pregame water consumption on the 27th is approximately 4,5% higher than the day before which suggests that the same amount of Hockey fans had the smart idea of a preemptive walk to the toilet and get the bladder ready for beer and Hockey without pit stops. The decreasing water consumption from period one all the way to the medal ceremony is witness of the increasing engagement that almost took religious dimensions.

Now let’s have a closer look at the water consumption peaks between the periods. At the end of the third period (and before the game went into overtime), the water consumption soared from 320,000 liters to 450,000 liters. This synchronized bladder resetting and toilet flushing equals to an instant 40,6% difference. Now this means of course that the same 40,6% of TV watching Hockey fans was absent when the million dollar advertising hit the screen. Let’s hope that the chosen few advertiser with the big budgets to buy these ad slots based their media buys on the effective viewership during the commercial break. Knowing that this phenomenon is widely known by professional media planner and buyer (and mostly hidden by media sellers), I am surprised that no advertiser took advantage of the situation to promote a behaviorally and contextually perfectly relevant product .

Chart Source: Todd Sinai