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Naming subway stations after companies?
Branding consultants are branching out.

"One of the worst and most insulting ideas I've heard in a long time." A New Yorker comments on branding the subways.

NEW YORK, NY, Aug 11, 2004.

Naming a subway station after a business?

"Why not?" says the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Facing yearly budget shortfalls in the billion dollar range, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority is floating the idea of selling naming rights to everything from subway stations and bus lines to bridges and tunnels. Last month the authority quietly solicited proposals from marketing outfits who engineer these sponsorship deals.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has even proposed selling naming rights to
New York's cherished public parks, makes no bones about aggressively pursuing corporate sponsorship deals for the city. How many other cities can you name with a chief marketing officer? Appointed last April, Joseph Perello's job is to "leverage the city's image and assets to generate new revenue streams for the city." He was formerly vice president of business development for the Yankees. His office generates statistics like "Every three years the authority moves the equivalent of every man, woman and child on the planet." Now that's a lot of eyeballs.

The corporate naming business is going gangbusters.

Public spaces are getting corporate names like nobody's business. The list of venues losing their sentimental attachment to their historic roots keeps getting longer. The Celtics used to play in the Boston Garden. The San Francisco Giants used to play in Candlestick Park. Seattle has Quest Field, Key Arena, Safeco Field. This naming trend is clearly accelerating. Look at Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field), the Staples Center, Coors Field, FedEx Field. Nextel recently agreed to pay $50 million to the city of Las Vegas for naming rights to their new monorail system. Is this really naming and branding heaven for these corporate naming sponsors?

Not everyone is a fan of corporate naming in public spaces.

The city of Boston discovered a few years ago that there were limits to the enthusiasm of bidders. Seeking co-branding partners for Downtown Crossing (already rebranded from Washington Street, a name many Bostonians still cling to), Back Bay, Sullivan Square and South Stations, the city came up empty. Maybe the reason was the corporate sponsors could only add their names to the existing station names, not own them outright.

Not everyone is a fan of giving corporate names to public spaces. Jerold Kayden, a Harvard professor of Urban Planning, says, "It's another step down the path of degrading the public realm. The message is subtle but pervasive: Government can no longer provide traditional public facilities and services, such as parks, mass transit, perhaps even police and fire, on its own without the assistance of private money."

A reader who wrote to the Boston Globe said, "It increasingly feels like the Evil Empire, but we've replaced pictures of Lenin with logos for Fleet, State Street, etc. The obvious question becomes, why stop with train stations? Next in line will be parks, highways, streets, and children."

In the words of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "The fact is branding, naming or
whatever you want to call this trend, is a cloak hiding the failure to adequately fund infrastructure. We don't like gimmicks paying for transit--we think transit, sewer (any corporate sponsors lining up here?) or any other public service is just that, public. The infrastructure costs ought to be paid for by taxpayers or users."

Do company names belong on schools?

Last year the school board of Belmont, California, decided its financial plight was so serious that it was willing to let corporations put their names on school buildings, cafeterias, and athletic fields.

The Berkeley Unified School District could not go there. They considered and rejected a $100,000 deal that would give Pepsi the rights to all campus vending machines as well as the right to erect an electronic Pepsi scoreboard at the Berkeley High School football field.

People pushing for these sponsorship deals say they are a great way to bring sorely needed revenues to strapped districts. Critics argue that it teaches kids that everything is for sale if the wad of cash is thick enough.

Professor Alex Molnar, director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State, has been thinking about this issue for a long time. He understands why districts are tempted by these offers, but he thinks schools should think twice before accepting. "I don't question the desperation, I question the value of the response. This is not the only way to address a district's fiscal crisis. In the long run, it undermines the quality of education by making the schools beholden to special interests."

Editor's note: In a recent poll (Dec. 2004), asking a broad cross-section of Americans if we should sell naming rights for public places, 10% of people said "yes" and 90% said "no."