Which proves my bush league comment. Seriously, if your league can’t get enough butts in the seats to pay the rent, go ahead and plaster everything with ads, but once you’re established, keep the playing field focused on the game, not the business end of the sport.
Whoa there feller, I didn’t say that they were so distracting that I could concentrate on the game, just that they were a distraction. Like the moron in the front row with a rainbow afro wig and a John 3:16 sign distracting. Or a man Wells has really let himself go distracting. About the only in-game distraction that really hurt my concentration of the game was, ironically, Fox’s blue light special puck.
Steve, I know. We’ve had the “salary floor” discussion before, and we agree that the abuse of the revenue sharing system by some teams is disgusting.
But for every team like the Twins or Brewers (well, the Twins have gotten a little less tight fisted of late), there’s a team like the As, who would love to have an extra million dollars to pay a Bobby Crosby so they could keep an Eric Chavez.
Back to Spiderman:
This whole time, I’ve been asking myself: “Why would they want to put their ads in such a crappy spot?” On TV, it will look like (at best) a little red spot on the base. From the stands, that’s optimistic. You almost never show the top of the base on TV.
I came up with a handful of answers:
“We’ve spiked Lloyd McClendon’s coffee with PCP. He’ll be pulling up bases all weekend!”
“We’re morons who don’t have any idea how to buy/sell/place ads.”
“We wanted to paint a giant Spider-Man logo in center field all across MLB, but they wouldn’t go for it.”
“We knew the fans would bitch up a storm about this, and all that talk on SportsCenter and the general media will be a goldmine of free marketing, even if the actual ads are terrible in placement/viewing.”
I can’t come up with a more rational answer then the last one. I honestly think that Columbia expected all along that this would be more about the debate/hype than the ad. In fact, I bet they were hoping it would play out like this, because now they’ve paid $0 for tons of screen time.
