No, Sponsorships Are Sponsorships

To answer my last post: I see no obvious difference in “level of waste” between the naming rights for the new Mets stadium and the sponsorship of the New York City Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Both a stadium and a parade provide public benefit. The costs of providing each can be partially defrayed by allowing one or more companies to add their name(s) to it. And either can be wasteful or efficient, provide more or less equal compensation to those employed by them, and so on.

The heart of understanding this NALM misjudgment is to realize that, since a stadium alone does not entertain, it’s easy to underestimate its communications impact. But sentimentality makes this particular comparison more uneven: Macy’s has been sponsoring the Thanksgiving Day Parade for so long that most people never consider the possibility of another company doing it, or of the parade not being sponsored at all. (I remember being pretty annoyed when Met Life took over the naming rights for what till then was the Pan Am building.)

I doubt that Citicorp will hold the naming rights to the Mets stadium 85 years from now, but if it does, it will seem very strange if another company takes it over. We can compare the marketing effect or degree of public benefit of sponsoring a parade vs. naming a stadium some other time, but it’s clear that they’re of a piece and not particularly different in principle.