Naming Rights

Anyone who has ever attended a sporting event at the Staples Center, or Comerica Park, or any one of a thousand other venues – or, for that matter, has attended a named school like the Eli Broad College of Business at MSU – already knows about naming rights. Most of the time it’s a harmless way to raise money for the school or make back some of the cost of building an expensive stadium and attracting a professional team to your city, although there have occasionally been incompetent uses of this concept – as in the case of the ballpark in Phoenix, for example, where Bank One was given the naming rights for $1 million a year. Arizona politics are a sewer, and the fact that a friend of several senior officials had been given a price for the naming rights that would have required 400 years to make back the cost of the building might have caused a bit of fuss if the governor hadn’t been indicted (and eventually imprisoned) in the same year…

If you were wondering how long it will take for somebody to sell the naming rights to an entire town, you can stop wondering. The town of Altoona, PA has gone through with the stunt that several Midwestern cities were threatening to do last year (when Google was supposedly looking for a new headquarters, and several places were supposedly offering to change the name of their whole town to “Google, Kansas” or whatever). You can find the original story from the Associated Press by way of MSNBC , but basically Altoona is going along with a publicity stunt being staged by Morgan Spurlock, the independent filmmaker best known for the documentary about living on junk food called “Supersize Me.” Spurlock’s new project lambasts the current state of advertising in America, and apparently he’s found a sponsor willing to underwrite re-naming the town for a week…

Of course, this isn’t a real case of buying the naming rights. Altoona will go back to its original name as soon as the promotional week is over and the headlines have been duly recorded and the fees paid. That doesn’t change the fact that for a certain period of time, over 30,000 people will be living in a town called “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." I can’t speak for anyone else, but it makes me wonder how long it will be before someone tries this on a larger scale. Detroit already is something of a huge 3D billboard for Chrysler, but imagine the possibilities of Denver as Presented by United Airlines, or Roto-Rooter Presents Cleveland. And if you could get the various studios bidding over who gets the rights to Los Angeles, you could probably balance the state budget in California, not merely the City or County finances…

I kid, of course, but there is a very real issue here with pushing back the boundaries of what is acceptable – and what is outrageous. I don’t know how the people of Altoona feel about their town and its traditional name, but I can tell you that very few people actually like the town I grew up in, let alone feel any attachment to its twice-recycled name – but there’d still be rioting in the streets if you tried a stunt like this there. Unless, of course, this sort of thing becomes commonplace, in which case we might very well be destined to witness a World Series or an NBA Championship series in which we see Microsoft versus Apple, or perhaps Nike versus Gatorade…

In which case, just remember: You heard it here first!