FLOATING BILLBOARD BARGES INTO BAY : WATERBORNE DISPLAYS COULD BE FUTURE WAVE.

Byline: David Armstrong San Francisco Examiner 

If advertisers and marketers have their way, a previously sacrosanct patch of the Bay Area will become a ripe new medium for sales pitches - namely, the Bay itself, which enjoys scant regulatory protection from commercial appeals.

San Francisco Bay in recent weeks has hosted a roving, 30-foot-wide by 13-foot-long barge carrying display advertising for Glendale Federal Bank, part of the Southern California bank's pitch to woo customers away from newly merged Wells Fargo and First Interstate banks.

Glendale Federal's campaign intensified this summer when its two larger rivals began their highly publicized merger. The smaller bank's marketing efforts include traditional, land-based billboards, catchy radio spots and media-savvy stunts such as hiring a stagecoach to rumble past a Wells Fargo branch.

The most unusual part of the campaign is the barge, initially floated in April and conceived by the Pasadena advertising agency Wise Guys. Publicity materials proudly dub the barge ``the world's largest floating billboard.''

With Glendale Federal's ``Buck the System'' slogan painted on the side of specially made 40-foot by 40-foot sails, the 330-ton barge is designed to be highly visible and legible from shore, where landlubber consumers are.

The floating billboard came about, says Wise Guys President Ray Kwong, because his shop wanted to design a ``unique and in-your-face-campaign'' for Glendale Federal, and figured floating billboards would be a talker.

``You want to hit the San Francisco Financial District and draw media attention,'' Kwong says. Thus, the barge, overseen by third-generation tugboat captain Tom Decker, who pilots a 1927 vintage, 62-foot-long tug to push the barge around the Bay.

Based in Point Richmond, the barge continues to ply the waters of the Bay, going from Crissy Field to the St. Francis Yacht Club, past the Financial District and over to Oakland's Jack London Square.

According to Bay Conservation and Development Commission staff scientist Eric Larsen, ``This appears to be a fairly unregulated activity. As long as it's in navigable waters and doesn't pose a safety hazard, it's legal.''

The U.S. Coast Guard regulates moving vessels. The BCDC, a state agency, oversees stationary anchored vessels like houseboats, and regulates waterway uses such as dredging. However, says Larsen, a safely operated moving vessel in navigable waters is directly answerable to no one.

``If it was discharging waste, which this one doesn't, we'd regulate it under water quality,'' Larsen says. ``If it's stationary, we'd regulate it under air quality. But this is kind of an anomaly.''

Glendale Federal's vice president for corporate communications, Tom Preston, says the floating billboard is just one element of ``an ongoing, aggressive campaign,'' which he characterizes as a raging success.

``Our new accounts are up 20 percent,'' Preston says.

Preston allows that Glendale Federal, which has 152 branches in California, had received consumer complaints about the barge, ``but not many.'' There have been no organized protests, according to Preston, who says the barge is a benign presence.

``We aren't doing anything to damage the Bay,'' Preston says. ``We're not dumping anything.''

But some local residents resent commercialization of the otherwise ad-free Bay, which they consider a refreshing refuge from the stress and clutter of daily life. And they object to what they see as the visual pollution posed by marketing gimmicks like floating billboards.

The Oakland-based nonprofit watchdog organization Save the Bay Association has registered ``quite a few calls from our members saying, `We have to stop this,' ''' '' says its executive director, Barry Nelson.

Right now, Nelson says, ``We don't have a sense of this being a trend or a one-stop. We've never seen this before.''

Because water advertising is so new, Save the Bay doesn't have a formal position on it. ``But it's a real concern,'' Nelson says. ``If this is a trend, it would be a fearsome trend. San Francisco Bay is one of this region's assets. We'd hate to see it turned into billboards.''

But billboards it could become.

According to Wise Guys' Kwong, ``We've had calls from Seattle, from Manhattan, from Florida,'' inquiring about waterborne advertising.

``This was our first experience'' with floating billboards, Kwong says of his 8-year-old agency. But it's apparently not the last. ``We're taking the concept to Seattle,'' Kwong says, adding that Los Angeles and San Diego could be next.

And in this election year, ``Both political parties have contacted us,'' says Kwong, who adds that he can easily envision dramatic, waterborne advertising floating by, say, the Statue of Liberty.