Fzoulcmbyl
May 7th, 2004, 09:18 am
From MSN:
Spider-Man will not appear on the base paths after all.
One day after hearing the public and media outcry following the announcement of the alliance between the league and Columbia Pictures in conjunction with the summer release of "Spider-Man 2," Major League Baseball officials and Columbia Pictures executives decided to scale back the promotion.
"It isn't worth, frankly, having a debate about," commissioner Bud Selig told The Associated Press in Oakland before the Yankees-Athletics game.
"I'm a traditionalist," he said. "The problem in sports marketing, particularly in baseball, is you're always walking a very sensitive line. Nobody loves tradition and history as much as I do."
The original plan, as announced on Wednesday, was to have a 6-by-6 inch "Spider-Man 2" logo on first, second and third base during interleague games played June 11 to 13. But, on Thursday evening, the two parties jointly announced that the logoed infield bases would no longer be a part of the deal.
"We saw some of the polls on the Internet that said that 71 and 81 percent of the fans didn't approve of it," Geoffrey Ammer, president of worldwide marketing for the Columbia-Tri-Star Motion Picture Group, told ESPN.com. "Based on this reaction from the fans, we didn't want to do anything to take away from their enjoyment of the game and if that was the case with this element of the promotion, we could afford to do without it."
In an ESPN.com SportsNation poll of almost 45,000 readers, 79.4 percent said they thought that baseball was "selling out" by allowing the "Spider-Man 2" advertisements on the field.
"The bases were an extremely small part of this program; however, we understand that a segment of our fans were uncomfortable with this particular component and we do not want to detract from this promotion in any way," said Bob DuPuy, president and chief operating officer of Major League Baseball, in a statement.
* I'm not a baseball fan, but I was against this idea too.
Fzoul
Spider-Man will not appear on the base paths after all.
One day after hearing the public and media outcry following the announcement of the alliance between the league and Columbia Pictures in conjunction with the summer release of "Spider-Man 2," Major League Baseball officials and Columbia Pictures executives decided to scale back the promotion.
"It isn't worth, frankly, having a debate about," commissioner Bud Selig told The Associated Press in Oakland before the Yankees-Athletics game.
"I'm a traditionalist," he said. "The problem in sports marketing, particularly in baseball, is you're always walking a very sensitive line. Nobody loves tradition and history as much as I do."
The original plan, as announced on Wednesday, was to have a 6-by-6 inch "Spider-Man 2" logo on first, second and third base during interleague games played June 11 to 13. But, on Thursday evening, the two parties jointly announced that the logoed infield bases would no longer be a part of the deal.
"We saw some of the polls on the Internet that said that 71 and 81 percent of the fans didn't approve of it," Geoffrey Ammer, president of worldwide marketing for the Columbia-Tri-Star Motion Picture Group, told ESPN.com. "Based on this reaction from the fans, we didn't want to do anything to take away from their enjoyment of the game and if that was the case with this element of the promotion, we could afford to do without it."
In an ESPN.com SportsNation poll of almost 45,000 readers, 79.4 percent said they thought that baseball was "selling out" by allowing the "Spider-Man 2" advertisements on the field.
"The bases were an extremely small part of this program; however, we understand that a segment of our fans were uncomfortable with this particular component and we do not want to detract from this promotion in any way," said Bob DuPuy, president and chief operating officer of Major League Baseball, in a statement.
* I'm not a baseball fan, but I was against this idea too.
Fzoul