Let’s start by considering the dozens of brand names being spray-painted onto fields and beamed onto television screens, including BBVA Compass, GoDaddy.com, Gildan, AdvoCare V100, R+L Carriers, TaxSlayer.com, Vizio and Belk. I have no idea what any of those things are, or what they do, or why I should want to pay money for them. I’m at least slightly familiar with a few of this year’s bowl sponsors, including Allstate, Tostitos, ATT, Little Caesars, AutoZone, Bell Helicopter, Kraft, Sheraton and Chick-fil-A. I’m making an undereducated guess that Beef ‘O’ Brady’s and Buffalo Wild Wings have something to do with pub grub, and I’m fairly sure that Capital One and Discover provide the kind of cutting-edge financial services guaranteed to make my wallet thinner. The only sponsors that spell it out in plain English are the San Diego County Credit Union, Meineke Car Care and Franklin American Mortgage.
Many fans of college football, those quaint dinosaurs known as purists, bemoan this tsunami of commercialism. They pine for the good old days when there were only a handful of bowl games, and they fed off long-standing rivalries between powerhouse teams, and they were named for actual physical things that had some regional association, things like roses, cotton, sugar, oranges and the bluebonnet — Texas’ state flower, not the margarine. Nowadays, these dinosaurs complain, the selling of sponsorship rights to corporations for obscene sums has turned the bowl season into a tossed salad of generic, mysterious and ever-changing ingredients. To top it off, universities that send their teams to the less prestigious bowls frequently lose money or barely break even.
This branding binge is telling us a couple of things. On a metaphorical level, it’s telling us we’re no longer a nation that grows tangible things like cotton and sugar; we’ve instead become a nation of marketers seeking to grow vaporous things known as brands. And on a linguistic level, it’s telling us that people in the world of branding have a funny way of talking.
As I’d suspected, this year’s Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl, pitting Texas Christian (7-5) against Michigan State (6-6) — yawn — is being sponsored by a Minnesota-based chain of sports-themed restaurants. The company, which has nearly 900 locations in 49 states and Canada, has an employee called the executive vice president for global marketing and brand development. Her name is Kathy Benning. As she told The Phoenix Business Journal when the company announced the sponsorship deal last summer: “We look forward to entering the college bowl arena as the title sponsor of this progressive property. It aligns our growing brands and provides tremendous opportunity to interact with our guests, who we know are passionate about football.”
And here’s Frank Muir, chief executive of the Idaho Potato Commission, explaining his group’s decision to take over sponsorship of the game in Boise now known as the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl: “We’ve got a national campaign pounding the fact that potatoes are good for you.”
“People have forgotten this,” he added. “Just because they taste good doesn’t mean they’re bad.”
Well, at least the people in Idaho are growing something besides brands.
How did this come to pass? Many agree that it began with the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the first time corporations were allowed to pay big bucks to sponsor sites and events. Those Games were a huge financial success, but critics derided them as the Hamburger Olympics because McDonald’s paid for the swimming pool.
Bruce Skinner was then the executive director of the Fiesta Bowl. In 1985, based on what he had witnessed in Los Angeles, he persuaded Sunkist to pony up $2 million to sponsor his game. The horse was officially out of the barn. “If anybody is guilty of spurring corporate sponsorships,” Skinner said years ago, “it was the L.A. Olympics.”
Every once in a long while, a corporate sponsor takes a humdrum bowl game’s name and makes it sublime — as when the Independence Bowl became the Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl, lovingly known as the Weed Whacker Bowl. Was the sponsorship deal, which ran from 1990 to 1996, worth the money? “Over all, it was a net benefit,” Evin Ellis, the company’s marketing communications manager, told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010. “We consider Weed Eater the Kleenex of weed whacking.”
There you have it: the art of brand management distilled to its essence. Corporations are now willing to shell out up to $5 million a year to have their name attached to a college football bowl game because they want the brand to become so common and recognizable that it enters the language as the thing itself. The dream is to become … generic.
The Kleenex of weed whacking. The Velcro of pub grub. The Tupperware of telecommunications. The AstroTurf of auto parts. The Muzak of the mortgage racket.
A noble dream, indeed, but there’s one hitch. As I survey the names of this year’s bowl games, I don’t see any poetry. Notre Dame and Alabama will square off Jan. 7 in the Discover Bowl Championship Series National Championship. That’s not generic. It’s just plain bland.
It’s enough to make a football fan nostalgic for the good old days. I’m not talking about the days of the Bluebonnet Bowl. I’m talking about the days of the Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl. Or the Diamond Walnut San Francisco Bowl. Or my personal favorite, the Roady’s Truck Stops Humanitarian Bowl. Now that, good buddy, is poetry.
Bill Morris is the author of the novels “Motor City” and “All Souls’ Day” and has just completed “Vic #43,” set during the 1967 Detroit riot and the Tigers’ 1968 championship season.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/sports/ncaafootball/putting-the-brand-before-the-football-game.html?partner=rss&emc=rss