NCAA football bowl sponsorships

LadyStanley

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Sep 22, 2004
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Why do these companies – little local outfits to enormous Wall Street behemoths – opt to spend a collective $100 million for the naming rights to bowl games? Experts say the reasons vary: To create or boost brand awareness that leads to increased sales. To create new customers, especially young ones. As a lab to activate new products and services. As a reward for key clients and valued employees. As a place for B-to-B network amid swanky corporate hospitality for a week. To feed the corporate ego. For any and all of those reasons.

Rose Bowl sponsor was paying $25m/year. Deal expires after 2020 game.

Depends on company and desires, I guess
 

GindyDraws

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Mar 13, 2014
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The thing is, there's a sort of hierarchy towards bowl games. You have your legacy bowls that clearly are at a status above no other; the New Year's Six (Rose, Cotton, Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, and Peach) come to mind, and given that they are tied to the College Football Playoff, are also going to bring in the largest sponsorship deals for the bowl event groups, which is good for them (especially the Rose Bowl, which are undoubtedly the most traditionalist of the bunch, given how when the BCS was on FOX, the Rose Bowl maintained exclusivity on ABC due to having a separate broadcasting deal) but lousy for the company since they can't just rename the bowl game and get all of the advertising. At best, the company can get offhanded plugs by the networks or via camera footage, so it becomes more of a war of attrition.

It's when you start going down the list that companies can control the operations a bit more and even iconic bowls like the Gator, Alamo, and Independence aren't completely free from getting fiddled with. For a few years, the Gator Bowl was just the TaxSlayer Bowl; the Copper Bowl is now officially the Cheez-It Bowl, and the Citrus Bowl was for over a decade the Capital One Bowl.

Personally, it's at its funniest when you get to the absolute bottom of the bowl games; the events that play at the beginning of the cycle or have deals on CBS Sports Network. Naturally, the whole "DreamHouse New Mexico Bowl" fiasco was worth a few chuckles, but how about the St. Petersburg Bowl, where it was sponsored by Bitcoin one year? At this point, if a company decides to sponsor any of these crud bucket bowls, they have carte blanche to do whatever they want with it.
 
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nickp91

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Jun 29, 2011
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This is a great opportunity to have the SalesForce Bowl or the Amazon Web Services Bowl
 

PCSPounder

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Apr 12, 2012
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I still enjoy one of the finer ironies of life... I went to the 1996 Cotton Bowl. Colorado v Oregon. It was the first time a close regional team had not been in the game in decades, if not ever. Announced 58,000, never actually more than 40,000... but it was, for a year, the best Cotton Bowl area hoteliers ever had. The game was used to a Texas school buying up most of the tickets and seeing their fans go up & back on game day.

Now you have a proliferation of these games where almost nobody shows up, but hoteliers selling maybe 200 rooms are having a good holiday, and ESPN (who owns a lot of these games) are getting better ratings than they would for NBA. Probably, by extension, NHL, although the NHL seems to have created their own bowl game. So while I hear every complaint about too many bowl games (and there are), there seems to be a consistent 1,200,000 people who would even watch the Nihilist Arby’s Bowl or the ISIS Infidel Slaughter Bowl if ESPN broadcast it.
 
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golfortennis

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Oct 25, 2007
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I still enjoy one of the finer ironies of life... I went to the 1996 Cotton Bowl. Colorado v Oregon. It was the first time a close regional team had not been in the game in decades, if not ever. Announced 58,000, never actually more than 40,000... but it was, for a year, the best Cotton Bowl area hoteliers ever had. The game was used to a Texas school buying up most of the tickets and seeing their fans go up & back on game day.

Now you have a proliferation of these games where almost nobody shows up, but hoteliers selling maybe 200 rooms are having a good holiday, and ESPN (who owns a lot of these games) are getting better ratings than they would for NBA. Probably, by extension, NHL, although the NHL seems to have created their own bowl game. So while I hear every complaint about too many bowl games (and there are), there seems to be a consistent 1,200,000 people who would even watch the Nihilist Arby’s Bowl or the ISIS Infidel Slaughter Bowl if ESPN broadcast it.

I was going to bring up the ESPN owning them thing. I thought I saw a few years ago that out of about 40 bowls, they either broadcast or owned 35 of them. I know in golf(at least in the past, not sure about presently), the company that sponsored a tournament also bought a certain amount of ad time on other tournament's broadcast. I wonder if there isn't some quid pro quo with ESPN?
 

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