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after your client
Great buzz when the press jumps on the story
By Kathy Prentice
While the Massachusetts legislature is in the news for considering the sale of naming rights to state parks, commercial sale of naming rights to towns is already an option for advertisers.
Buying naming rights to publicize a dot.com launch made the news as the calendar turned over to the 21st century. Branding, introducing new products and remaking an image are tied to tagging towns with a corporate moniker.
That’s the news. To find out how to make the buy, read on.
This is one in a Media Life series on buying the new out-of-home venues. They appear weekly.
Fast Facts
What
Sale of naming rights to towns
for commercial use.
Who
Buzzmarketing, headquartered in
Media, Pa.
How it works
Advertisers purchase the naming
rights to towns for use in publicizing a product launch or branding
effort.
A consumer web site, Half.com,
used a naming campaign to publicize its launch in January of 2000. The
company was later bought out by eBay and the vice president of marketing,
Mark Hughes, who launched the naming campaign, has spun off a marketing
firm that arranges the acquisition of naming rights.
The value in naming is tied
directly to the publicity generated, Hughes says. And that is contingent
on how the campaign is created. "The better the story is, the more
publicity you’re going to get."
The Half.com renaming generated a spot
on "Good Morning America" and coverage in publications including
The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.
"Before we actually had an
agreement the press got wind of it and we had 40-plus requests for
telephone interviews, a Japanese TV crew, and calls from as far away as
Australia," Hughes says. "It snowballed like crazy. And all that
before we spent one dollar on traditional advertising. That’s the power
of publicity."
Each naming deal is developed
specifically to meet the needs of the town as well as the needs of the
advertiser. In the case of Half.com, negotiations included what and how
the town would be paid, how long the name change would last, and how the
town would be depicted in advertising.
"You have to be careful how you
approach it, what you say and what you do every step of the way,"
Hughes says. "When I showed up I imagined them laughing me out of
town. Instead they asked interesting questions like how would they know I
had the backing to pay and how would they be portrayed if we ran a TV
ad."
Variables in buying naming rights
include budget, size of town and length of term, Hughes says. "A
larger town would be more expensive."
Constants in each deal include
the fact that there will be opposition and that people have to be drawn into the concept, Hughes says. "You have to survey the landscape and
talk to a lot of people."
Options that advertisers have
when using
their naming rights include using the re-named town in their promotional
materials, advertisements and on their web sites. "It depends on what
their resources are," Hughes says.
Small towns are targeted for
naming campaigns.
Name changes range from one to
three years and aren’t officially recognized by the U.S. Post Office.
In Halfway, Ore., 75 percent of
the 350 citizens supported the yearlong name change, which provided
$100,000, computers for the elementary school and a web site for local
businesses.
Re-naming can stand alone or be
part of a media mix, Hughes says. "A company can lay down the
foundation of their campaign with buzz and follow up with traditional
advertising."
Buzz should always precede
traditional advertising like TV, Hughes says.
How measured?
Media impressions are tabulated,
Hughes says. "Print from Bacon’s clippings, web from Bacon’s web
and TV from Video Monitoring Service. Multiply those impressions by the
Ogilvy research of 6X. Then assign a CPM value of $10 to those
impressions."
Research
"There is no law which says
that advertisements have to look like advertisements. If you make them
look like editorial pages, you will attract more readers. Roughly six
times as many people read the average article as the average
advertisement. Very few advertisements are read by more than one reader in
20." --from "Ogilvy on Advertising" by David Ogilvy
What product categories do well?
Hughes says he sees re-naming
rights working well for three categories:
- New product or new brand launches top the list.
- Companies that want to reposition themselves. "It’s very touchy and expensive to do with traditional advertising. Re-naming creates an event that says we’ve changed and this is who we are now," Hughes says, "like a computer company moving into the music business."
- Brands with moxie, Hughes says. "Brands that don’t follow tradition, brands that want to create some stir."
Demographics
A demographic group can be
targeted. "Our target with Half.com was adults 25-39," Hughes
says, "though it had universal appeal."
Generally, buzz appeals to
consumers under 35, Hughes says. "Younger people love this stuff. It’s
unique, it’s fresh, it’s not the same old drivel they get jaded
on."
Making the buy
Two to four months is a workable
timeframe, Hughes says. "If it drags on, it loses appeal."
Price range is $100,000 to a
million dollars plus, Hughes says. "It may approach two million, depending on
what’s involved."
Geography can affect pricing when
advertisers are targeting a specific consumer group by location. "It
doesn’t necessarily have to be a factor," Hughes says. "It
depends on the brand."
Who
Half.com bought re-naming rights to
Halfway, Ore., dubbing it Half.com, Ore.
What they’re saying
"We were looking for a big
blast idea, to cut through the dot.com clutter and get into the customer’s
head. Get their attention. We wanted monumental branding. A publicity
stunt. We thought of using mercenaries in a helicopter to put a T-shirt on
the Statue of Liberty saying 'Raise your hand if you want to pay half,'
but we didn’t want to go to jail. And then it dawned on me … find some
town with the name 'half' in it and ask them to change it to Half.com."
– Mark Hughes, CEO of Buzzmarketing.com
Hughes engineered the purchase
of naming rights of the town of Half.com when he was vice president of
marketing for the company Half.com.
Web site info
Buzzmarketing at
www.buzzmarketing.com
Etc.
Naming rights for airports, malls
and bridges are also available.
May 12, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Kathy Prentice writes about out-of-home advertising for Media Life, penning her stories from the resort town of Traverse City, in the upper reaches of Michigan.
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