Good One, Barry: BILLBOARD WAS IN THE CARDS
By John Ryan, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
Apr. 5–Whew, that’s a relief. Barry Bonds wasn’t offended by the TRADE BARRY! billboard that appeared near AT&T Park on Saturday.
Being that, of course, he put it there.
“Obviously Barry is in on this. We didn’t do this without Barry’s approval,” said the man on the phone who said he was Mark Sapir, marketing director of Topps trading cards.
Our head hasn’t settled from the spin-cycle treatment we got Tuesday, but we’ll run it back because this is what they mean by “viral marketing,” which is appropriate because we feel a little queasy just writing it:
— Saturday night, we receive an unsigned e-mail with a picture of the billboard. “This is crazy, who is doing this?? Saw this go up outside SBC on Third Street. Sicko’s,” the e-mail says.
— Despite intense and nationwide media coverage, nobody claims responsibility for the billboard Sunday and Monday, though we learn there’s more to come.
— Tuesday morning brings an e-mail, also unsigned and from the same address as Saturday’s, saying, “So apparently a new billboard went up this morning, turns out the TRADE BARRY board was Topps company, but even stranger is there were cop cars all over and someone tried to burn down the Trade Barry sign last night.”
— We reply to that e-mail asking who it is. We get a call back. The man identifies himself as Sapir and says he’s in New York but heard reports of vandalism and that CBS Outdoor, which owns the sign, had filed a police report.
— The CBS Outdoor phone tree leads nowhere.
— The San Francisco Police Department doesn’t have a report but has a dispatch record. Our suspicions of a setup are bolstered, and our faith in humanity restored, by Dewayne Tully of the San Francisco Police Department’s public affairs office.
“We know just a little bit about this,” he says. “We got a call this morning shortly after 10 a.m. We don’t know who the caller was, but somebody called the police department saying someone had ripped off the vinyl from a billboard and was attempting to set the billboard on fire.
“One of our police units responded. According to the reports I have, no one was there.”
When we talked to Messr. Sapir-If-That’s-Your-Real-Name, we asked if maybe, perhaps, there was a tiny possibility that the so-called vandalism — and the use of an officer’s time to check it out — was just another part of the ruse?
“I totally understand,” Messr. Sapir-If-That’s-His-Real-Name said. “Quite honestly, if the board had burned down, it would have been a bigger story than anything. All I can do is tell you what I know and what the truth is.”
We were going to ask how Giants management would feel about its $22 million man continuing to cause distraction for financial gain.
But we agree with Bonds’ guiding principle:
Who cares what they think?
Contact John Ryan at jryan@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5266.
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Copyright (c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
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