When flipping through a football matchday programme from the early 2010s, you expect to see advertisements for local plumbers, car dealerships, and perhaps a bakery. What you don’t expect to see is a full-page pitch for server rackspace and IP transit. Yet, on page 55 of the December 2013 FC Groningen booklet, we find exactly that: a massive advertisement for CJ2 Hosting & Development.
The ad is a fascinating paradox of mediums. It uses traditional, physical print media to sell the invisible, emerging world of cloud computing. Under the headline “UW DATA IN VEILIGE HANDEN” (Your data in safe hands), CJ2 promotes its “TIER 3 Data Hotel Groningen.” The text is filled with IT jargon that must have looked like an alien language to the average football fan reading the magazine at halftime: Colocation, VPS Hosting, Total Cost of Ownership, and free cooling.
However, from a B2B marketing perspective, it was a calculated move. The business lounges of the Euroborg were filled with local CEOs and managers. CJ2, proudly stating they are a “Gronings company with a no-nonsense mentality” located at the Zernikepark (the city’s science and tech campus), was appealing directly to local executives. They were selling digital infrastructure using the exact same regional pride that local construction companies used.
A Look into the Future
Looking at this advertisement from the perspective of 2026 highlights how rapidly the world has digitized. Today, cloud hosting is a ubiquitous, multi-trillion-dollar global industry dominated by faceless tech giants, and it is almost never advertised in local print magazines. Furthermore, the northern Netherlands actually became a massive European hub for data centers (including Google’s massive facility in Eemshaven). This 2013 advertisement by CJ2 Hosting & Development is a brilliant, slightly quirky time capsule—a moment when the “cloud” still had to be explained on paper to football fans.