Something fishy

Well, baseball backed off from putting Spider-man ads on the bases. Do you ever get the feeling that someone put one over on you?

"We listened to the fans," said Geoffrey Ammer, president of worldwide marketing for the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group. "We never saw this coming, the reaction the fans had. It became a flashpoint -- the reaction was overwhelming." I find it very hard to believe that they never saw this coming. Everyone knows baseball fans are a bunch of purists. Mr. Ammer also said, "We saw some of the polls on the Internet that said that 71 and 81 percent of the fans didn't approve of it." So after ONE day of floating this idea, they pulled it because of a few loud fans like myself? One ESPN poll had 40,000 respondents. Who knows how many people voted several times?

I think this was all staged. They should have known a huge reaction was coming and developed a plan for waiting it out. Instead, they immediately do an about-face -- but keep the other parts of the promotion. This way, everybody wins, from their perspective. Sony's new movie gets essentially free advertising from the press, à la "Passion of the Christ". Baseball looks like an extremely responsive and caring entity that puts the wishes of the fan before all else. The promotion goes on --

"Other parts of the promotion will be unchanged. Movie trailers will be featured on stadium scoreboards, the logos will be placed in the on-deck circles, and fans attending the games will receive "Spider-Man 2" foam fingers and masks. Movie branding will also appear on a ceremonial pitching rubber and home plate -- both of which will be replaced with the standard white variety once play begins." (from ESPN).

-- with MLB still getting $2.6 million from SONY. And now, the idea of advertising on the field has been planted in our heads.

What would have happened had they initially announced this promotion the way it is now? There still would have been a huge and violent fan reaction to MLB's greediness. But now that we've killed the sacrificial lamb, we tend to overlook the rest.