[Mb-civic] NYTimes Article: Now a Message From a Sponsor of the Subway?

[Ian]

Sports stadiums were apparently not enough.  Here comes the corporatization
of...our entire transportation system!

Peace.

----------------

Now a Message From a Sponsor of the Subway?
July 27, 2004
By MICHAEL LUO

Facing what it says could be budget gaps of more than $1 billion in the
coming years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the keeper of the
region's mass
transit system, is exploring selling naming rights to its subway stations,
bus lines, bridges and tunnels.

 Transportation authority officials quietly issued a formal request for
proposals this month from marketing firms that they would charge with
landing sponsorship deals that could include anything from renaming historic
stations to attaching corporate monikers to building projects like the
long-awaited Second Avenue subway. Indeed, the authority's officials said
they could easily imagine the Delta Times Square Shuttle or, say, I.B.M.'s
adopting the Tarrytown station on Metro-North's Hudson rail line.

 That said, some industry experts, noting that subway stations do not quite
resonate in the public imagination the way baseball stadiums do, said the
authority might have a hard sell on its hands.  "People don't have that same
emotional connection with their subway stops," said William Chipps, senior
editor of IEG Sponsorship Report, a publication that follows the sponsorship
industry. "To be honest with you, most people don't have good thoughts about
it at all."

 For the moment, the transportation authority is optimistic.  And unashamed.

 Katherine N. Lapp, the authority's executive director, said that such an
idea might offend some New Yorkers, but that the option was being considered
as a way to avoid raising fares and tolls.  "It's our job to figure out
other ways to add revenue," she said, pointing out that any naming deal
would have to be vetted by the authority's board. "Every dollar we get from
these types of sources is one dollar more we don't have to take in fares or
tolls."

 The corporate naming business has exploded over the last decade. As
companies have struggled to be heard above the collective advertising din,
corporate sponsorships have become a widely embraced, and wildly expensive,
alternative approach to marketing. In Boston, the Celtics now play in the
FleetCenter, not Boston Garden. The San Francisco Giants have SBC Park
(formerly PacBell Park), with Candlestick only a memory. Elsewhere, there
are FedEx Field, the Staples Center, Minute Maid Park, the MCI Center, Coors
Field, the Delta Center, and on and on.

 The phenomenon has even spread to nonprofit institutions like hospitals and
museums, as well as more and more financially troubled municipal
governments. There is the Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, R.I.;
the Ford Center for the Performing Arts in Chicago; and the General Motors
Hall of Transportation in the venerable Smithsonian.  San Diego even briefly
had Chevrolet as its official beach patrol car. And here, Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg has proposed selling naming rights to some of the city's public
parks.

 How much money there is to be made in the naming of transportation hubs
like Times Square - the busiest subway station in the country - or a
historic landmark like Grand Central Terminal, is an open question the
authority is now ready to examine. Companies might want to sponsor entire
routes like the Lexington Avenue line - newly crowned as the city's best in
a subway report card. Even the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, cursed mightily every
morning and afternoon by commuters, could be up for grabs.

 Since 1996, the transportation authority has more than doubled its
advertising revenues by taking more creative approaches to using its space,
allowing companies to monopolize entire subway cars or stations with their
ads, and turning ad spaces above subway stations into blinking displays.
Last year, the authority brought in $78 million in such advertising.  "It
stands to reason, doing the more creative sponsorship branding approach,
hopefully, we would like to double that," Ms. Lapp said.

When it comes to transportation systems, there are few precedents for this
approach, and those have produced mixed results. In Las Vegas, Nextel
Communications recently agreed to pay a reported $50 million over 12 years
to plaster its name on a station at the Las Vegas Convention Center and one
of the nine trains for the new monorail system that opened this month.
Business sponsorships also help pay for the streetcar line in Tampa, Fla.
But a few years ago, officials in Boston tried auctioning off naming rights
to four historic stations there, only to attract no bidders.

 In New York, officials with the transportation authority, in an internal
presentation on the sponsorship program, argued that the authority's assets
compare favorably with stadiums in their attractiveness to sponsors, because
of the large number of people who use the authority's transportation network
every day.  To put it in perspective, the officials asserted in the
presentation, more people ride with the authority in 11 weeks than fly
airlines in an entire year, and every three years the authority moves the
"equivalent of every man, woman and child on the planet."  And in the
request for proposals itself, transportation officials point out: "The
demographics of M.T.A.'s customers cover the full range of contemporary
U.S.A. This is an audience that has elected to be on board."

 Another challenge for governmental institutions seeking sponsorship deals
is public acceptance. In Boston, Ralph Nader and an organization he helped
found to fight the spread of advertising in America, Commercial Alert,
lobbied vigorously against the plan to add corporate sponsors to the names
of subway stations.  "This is part of the decline of American values," said
Gary Ruskin, the group's executive director. "We used to name things after
people who were heroes, people we were proud of. Now we name things after
the corporation with the deepest pockets."  "How low will New York sink?" he
said.

Although renaming a subway station or bridge or tunnel may seem harmless,
there are subtle but important effects, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, an
assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University, who
has written about the cultural impact of trademarks.  "The moment you slap
any sort of private trademark on a public institution, you're reducing the
sense of public investment," he said. "I feel less invested in the quality
of Verizon Grand Central Station or Eddie Bauer Central Park."

 Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has drawn ire for aggressively pursuing
corporate sponsorship deals for the city, including a five-year, $166
million exclusive arrangement with Snapple to sell its drinks in city
schools. Mr. Bloomberg has also hired a former New York Yankees executive,
Joseph M. Perello, to be the city's chief marketing officer.

 Although the transportation authority's request for proposals highlights
some of its high-volume stations, like Times Square, Herald Square and Grand
Central Terminal, as among its prime assets, Doug Pirnie, senior vice
president of sales and marketing for International Management Group, which
handles many sponsorship deals, said it might be more effective for
advertisers to choose more subtle opportunities to get their names out there
to riders. When it comes to sponsoring public institutions, he said, the
best approach is not necessarily starting off by trying to get a company's
name on everything.  "They want to do something that contributes to the
overall public good and can be perceived by the public as a contribution to
their better way of life," he said.  One idea? "I don't know what the M.T.A.
spends on maps," he said. "They could have a company pay to print those
maps. In return, they could put its logo on the maps, or if they have
business outlets around the city, show them on the map."

 Gene Russianoff, a staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a transit
advocacy group associated with the New York Public Interest Research Group,
was cautious when asked about the possibility.  "We're not dogmatic on the
topic," he said. "Having said that, any sort of major naming rights, like a
subway station, is something I think they would have to go slowly on. At
minimum, they should poll the riding public on its views."  He pointed out
that some stations already include names of important institutions located
nearby, like 116th Street Columbia University, or 47th-50th Streets
Rockefeller Center.

Perhaps the most obvious existing example of a corporate name on a subway
station? Times Square, formerly Long Acre Square, renamed in honor of The
New York Times a century ago after the company moved its headquarters there.