Making An Impression

To corporate sponsors of sports stadiums, it’s not just a game. It’s a news event.

by Jim Hanas

underland have decided not to cash in on possible lucrative sponsorship deals for the naming rights of their new 41,600-seat stadium at Wearmouth Colliery. Instead, club officials announced at midnight last night that the £16 million stadium, second only in capacity in England to Manchester United’s Old Trafford, will reflect the mining industry of the north east.”
This account of Sunderland, England’s decision to forgo corporate sponsorship in favor of local flavor – reported by an online soccer newsletter – seems almost quaint in light of the rage in title sponsorships for sports venues, highlighted recently by the naming of AutoZone Park in downtown Memphis and Pringles Park in Jackson. Club officials in Sunderland named their stadium the Sunderland Stadium of Light, referencing the lamps carried by area miners “as part of their everyday working lives.”
This, of course, is the exception.
In September, the richest per-year stadium naming-rights agreement in the country was struck when Edison International agreed to pay in the neighborhood of $2.5 million a year to Disney for the right to change the name of Anaheim Stadium, the home of the Anaheim Angels baseball team, to Edison International Field of Anaheim.
According to the IEG Sponsorship Report, a Chicago-based “Newsletter of Sports, Arts, Event and Cause Marketing,” there are 58 companies that spent more than $10 million on sponsorships last year, a list headed up by tobacco giant Philip Morris. AutoZone isn’t on it, but Pringles Park sponsor Proctor & Gamble – which spent over $20 million last year – is, and FedEx hit the list this year by adding a Formula One team to its title sponsorships of the Orange Bowl and the FedEx/St. Jude Classic. Sponsorship is projected to grow faster in 1998 than other forms of marketing, such as sales promotion and advertising, with North American companies spending an expected $6.8 billion on sponsorship this year, compared to $5.9 billion in 1997. Sixty-seven percent of that figure will go to sports.
The benefits of sponsoring an event or venue are obvious. It’s like purchasing a news event and getting a company’s name in print or on television each time the media covers it. According to Bill Chipps, an editor at the IEG report, the value of a venue title sponsorship comes down to how much exposure the media gives it. “There are ways to calculate how many media impressions it gets,” he says.
The number of impressions is only one consideration, however. Sponsors also want those impressions to occur in an environment that consumers already feel good about, which explains why sports grab the lion’s share of sponsorships.
“They [sponsors] are trying to connect emotionally with people’s feeling about a particular sport or team,” Chipps says. “They’re trying to connect on that emotional level.”
AutoZone Park is not the first instance in which the country’s leading supplier of auto parts has sought “to connect on that emotional level” by sponsoring sports. The company has deals with over 20 major-league franchises in baseball, basketball, and hockey, including the St. Louis Cardinals, the St. Louis Blues, the Indiana Pacers, the Atlanta Hawks, the Charlotte Hornets, the Texas Rangers, and the Phoenix Suns, among others.
Naturally, such deals are hard for sports organizations to resist, appearing, as they do, as “free money,” not only to them, but to taxpayers who would otherwise have to make up the difference.
“What AutoZone has done is really tremendous,” said Redbirds co-owner Dean Jernigan in his statement announcing the downtown stadium’s name. “Typical sports-facility financing calls for 75-100 percent of the funding to come from the taxpayer. That’s not how we’re going to do it in Memphis. AutoZone Park will be financed with 87 percent of the funds coming from the private sector. By stepping up to the plate, AutoZone has lessened the burden on the taxpayer by contributing to the private-sector portion of the financing through the purchase of naming rights.”
But for its $4.3 million – which, by the way, would almost cover three 30-second spots on the final episode of Seinfeld – AutoZone gets 25 years of media “impressions,” and they’ll make their money back anyway, from taxpayers in the form of consumers.
In other words, AutoZone’s fine philanthropic track record notwithstanding, we would do well to remember the answer to the question “How is sponsorship different from philanthropy?” as it appears on IEG’s Web site:
“Although the recipient of sponsorship may be nonprofit, sponsorship should not be confused with philanthropy. Philanthropy is support of a cause without any commercial incentive. Sponsorship is undertaken for the purpose of achieving commercial objectives.” n