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Major league baseball has proposed to sell advertisements on players' sleeves, and of course the purists find this appalling.
The ballpark itself may be an advertisement, as with
sale of naming rights
and Coors Field.
The
scoreboard is surrounded advertisements, and the ballpark
is lined with billboards.
(Of which my favorite appeared in San Antonio of the
Texas League about 20 years ago. On the left-field fence
was a panel with Official Carrier of the Dodgers,
and above it, a Greyhound bus. Now imagine riding a bus
from El Paso, Texas, to Jackson, Miss., and try to persuade
yourself that baseball offers a glamorous life, or that
you'd buy any product endorsed by anyone who'd subject
himself to that travail.)
But we seem to have a mental line in place to differentiate where commercial messages are appropriate and where they aren't.
For instance, I was cleaning some shelves the other day and happened upon a few dusty and disintegrating paperbacks published in the early 1970s. Stick in the middle of some books was a glossy 16-page signature of ads for cigarettes, whiskey and airlines.
That trend didn't last long -- I suspect that most people feel the same way I do: If I pay for the book, then I'm entitled to get it without advertising. And most authors, I suppose, would prefer not to have the ads inside something with their name on the cover; books are different from magazines and newspapers, which have identities of their own, rather than just the author's.
So we figure that newspapers and magazines should have ads, but that books shouldn't. Ballparks can display ads, but professional ballplayers shouldn't, although we don't hold racecar drivers to that ad-free standard, and the amateur realms of the diamond teem with jerseys that promote Acme Gear & Sprocket.
During my occasional visits to civilization, I have noticed that bus benches have ads. For that matter, so do a couple of public benches in Salida, where we don't even have buses.
That doesn't seem too irksome, since the bench is a public convenience that wouldn't be there without the sponsorship, and the ads aren't intrusive. If you're using the bench, you're sitting on the ad, not reading it.
As for the buses themselves, they're rolling billboards, with even the windows obscured. Schoolbuses likewise have attracted advertising, and the marketers of this great republic haven't stopped there.
It dawned on some wizard that millions of Americans spend hours each day staring at computer screens -- so if there was a way to put ads on the screens, the messages would be indelibly burned into the users' synapses.
That's one place where I draw the line. It's my computer, I paid for it and the software on it, and its screen is going to display what I want it to display, not what some other huckster wants me to see.
Besides, it seems to me that the marketers are missing some bets -- places to put their messages where they could both serve the public and tout their product.
For instance, Colorado has a shortage of public restrooms. And when you're in a restroom, whether standing or sitting, you sort of stare vacantly at a blank wall that may have some graffiti.
Why not put commercial messages there to be absorbed by a captive audience? The sponsors could pay for the restrooms, and to maintain their corporate images, they'd also keep the restrooms clean and operable. This seems like a winner for all parties concerned.
Many cities have trouble funding their parks. So why aren't there ads on picnic tables (maybe free tablecloths adorned with some corporate logo), slides, teeter-totters, and especially, basketball backboards? The marketer reaches an audience, and the public gets better facilities.
Another good spot for advertising -- the rear ends of slow-moving vehicles, be they old Volkswagens, horse trailers or semi-trailers. Monarch Pass may be scenic, but when I cross the divide, I seldom get more than a glance at Mt. Etna or Tomichi Dome.
Instead, I spend most of the trip staring at the rear of
the vehicle in front of me, and the right message there
(If you were driving a 520-HP gas-guzzling turbo-charged
SuperMegaUte, you'd have passed so fast that you never
would have read this
) could move some product.
Not only would the advertiser profit, but the public interest would be served. Highway congestion would be reduced -- our governor says that's important -- and the gross national product should continue to rise with more people buying more gasoline and getting in more accidents.
In other words, there are a lot of useful places to put messages before they start putting them on baseball sleeves.
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