jducoeur

A hospital near my mother was soliciting for sponsorships of their various treatment rooms. I wish I'd had the money to sponsor the Intensive Care Unit under the name Ms. Cynthia Peekaboo.

Then it would have been the Peekaboo ICU.

The Carolingian Garden!!!

What's wrong with selling naming rights?

Personally, I look at it this way: I'd prefer that governments not get involved in building arenas; but, if they do, it's their duty to look for reasonable ways to recoup the costs. (To take an excessively libertarian view: it's better to leave the naming up to the free market than to have the government impose a name.)

It's agressive, non-avoidable advertising.

If you're all for advertising over every concievable publicly-viewable surface, then naming rights on a stadium is part of the package, I'll grant you.

It's no more aggressive, no less avoidable, than it would be if it were advertising for the sports teams that play there.

But it's out of place, where a sports team belongs there.

"Candlestick Park" had nothing to do with the sports that was played there.

What if NYC sold rights to their park, and everyone talked about "Marlboro's Central Park?"

Just so. It isn't that I find the practice unreasonable or unfair or anything of the sort -- I just think it's *tacky*. It takes one out of the event, and underscores the commercialization of the whole thing. It tends to destroy the sense of tradition -- I mean, it was the "Boston Garden" for decades, and now the name seems to spin like a pinwheel. And in general, it misses the point that names have power: it replaces a genuine name, something that builds its own connotative weight over time, with an advertising slogan, as ephemeral as a teardrop.

This is a case that sits in between "right" and "wrong". It's entirely and correctly legal, and I wouldn't try to stop anyone from doing it. But that doesn't mean I have to approve of it: IMO, excessive commercialization is a problem unto itself, and this is a particularly front-and-center example of it.

By contrast, I really like what they're doing this week. By auctioning off the name on a very fine granularity, and giving the proceeds to charity, they turn a highly corporate-focused practice into a community-focused one instead. And the "name for a day" thing has some potential to puncture the commercialization with a bit of ridicule: somehow, "Joe's Arena" just gives the whole thing an edge of silliness that is instructive and helpful.

All that said, I do agree with metageek's point that cities shouldn't be in the business of building and running sports arenas. Unfortunately, it's a competitive issue: while there is no direct benefit to the city in creating one, I think there's a subtle (if possibly slight) comparative disadvantage to *not* doing so, and it's very politically difficult to get out of the business. I think the whole country would be better off if municipalities were entirely out of that business, but IMO it's something of an arms race, where it's very difficult to disarm first...

Actually -- to be fair, I should admit that I do understand metageek's point. I just think it misses some subtleties.

From a strictly utilitarian POV, leasing naming rights is not only reasonable, it's almost an imperitive. We're talking large amounts of money here (~$10M/year for the Garden), and you can make a fair argument that it would be irresponsible for the city to forego that much money.

That said, from the utilitarian POV, the whole exercise is silly in the first place -- as he says, cities shouldn't be in this business in the first place. The only reasonable argument for building these arenas is to foster a subtle sense of civic pride, through an illusion of collective ownership in the sport, making the citizenry feels like stakeholders in the franchise. That being the case, leasing naming rights is counter-productive: it strikes a stake right through that sense of collective ownership, by stamping one of corporate ownership right on the front door.

So really, the question is whether one admits any validity to the exercise in the first place. If not, then metageek's point is quite reasonable: leasing naming rights is an attempt to mitigate a bad practice. But if one does think there is any value to the idea, then it's counter-productive. I doubt there's any objective way to resolve the argument: it's such a fundamentally subjective goal that quantifying it would be difficult, and it isn't clear that anyone has both the money and the impetus to run a sufficiently unbiased survey.

BTW, there is one other counter-argument, although it's even subtler, namely the counter-bureaucracy argument. By leasing naming rights, the bureaucracy is able to paint the arena as a revenue source, and thus a good practice that should be encouraged and expanded. This is the classic problem with allowing any bureaucracy to collect money: they will always turn it around and use the collection to justify expansion of the bureaucracy itself...

Chelmsford almost sold advertising space on its school buses. I didn't write to protest, but I really dislike advertising on *anything* that isn't part of the thing advertised.

If you own a plumbing business I'm fine with advertising it on your pickup truck. But plastering non-related advertising on something else is tacky -- I think maybe your word is the correct one. Or one of the correct ones. It's also visually ugly.

I'm tempted to try to get someone to take up a collection to see if we could really do that. That would be an interesting demo. If we didn't raise enough to win the auction, we could donate it to charity or something instead.

Of course, the world being what it is, that's entirely impractical. If we really could raise that kind of money among Carolingia as a whole, there are much better things in the barony to spend it on.

I think a bunch of scadians manning the phones at PBS in garb some pledge evening, would be great. But it'd have to be some relevant program....

I like that a lot! If there were enough of us, they might even put in a little plug as they sometimes do ("Tonight's telephone volunteers provided by the Barony of Carolingia...")

The recent Vinland Raids documentary comes to mind. Perhaps something else historical...

Happy birthday!