Business: Bowling for dollars

Bowling for dollars

Companies pay big bucks to link themselves with football bowl games. Determining the payoff can be difficult.

By KYLE PARKS

NEW ORLEANS -- As fans packed this good-times city for college football's title game, there was one name they couldn't miss. It wasn't the Big Easy, Bourbon Street or jambalaya.

It was Nokia.

Thousands of Florida State and Virginia Tech fans wore shirts with the Nokia Sugar Bowl logo. The logo is on visitors' guides, on banners around the Superdome, even on city bus stops.

For the Finnish phone manufacturer, these are the perks of a naming-rights deal estimated to cost as much as $2-million a year.

Nokia didn't stop at putting its name all over town. It brought in 2,500 execs, employees and corporate customers, lavishing them with game tickets, a brunch with a jazz band and a pregame tailgate party. The goal: compel fans to remember Nokia's name as part of the game.

In all, 17 of this year's 22 bowl games have corporate monikers as part of their names. It's part of a sports marketing trend that has companies slapping their names on everything from stadiums to auto races to golf tournaments.

But putting your company's name on a bowl may not be the best bang for the buck, sponsorship experts say.

A bowl sponsor's name is showcased just one day a year, and the naming-rights trend has taken away many minor bowls' identities. Can you remember where the Micronpc.com Bowl is played, for instance? The South Florida bowl used to be the CarQuest Bowl, and before that, the Blockbuster Bowl.

And even if a company's name is paired with the traditional name of a major bowl, the corporate name is often sliced off by newspaper editors and sportscasters who insist on calling it the Sugar Bowl, not the Nokia Sugar Bowl.

Many companies quickly become disillusioned with bowl sponsorships. Some sponsors are dropping their deals after only one or two years. Just last year, CompUSA yanked its title sponsorship from the Florida Citrus Bowl: Company officials said the game wasn't being promoted to their liking.

So how can a bowl sponsor make its name stick with college football fans? Sports marketing experts say the key is to go beyond tacking a name on the event.

"No company should go into a sponsorship without building a complete program around it," said Mel Poole, president of the SponsorLogic consulting firm in Charlotte, N.C. "If all they want is their name shown during the three hours of the game, that's a waste of money."

For Nokia, the answer is to go national. The company has run TV commercials for months showing two guys in an RV on "The Road to No. 1." Nokia staffers went to Tallahassee and Blacksburg, Va., to give away two Sugar Bowl trips to students at campus pep rallies. And it ran a contest for wireless phone buyers offering bowl trips, RVs and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Kari-Pekka Wilska, who is president of Nokia Mobile Phone for the Americas, attributes much of his company's progress in this country to its relationship with the Sugar Bowl. When Nokia first started sponsoring the Sugar Bowl, many people thought Nokia was a Japanese camera company, not a high-tech company based in Finland.

"The identity that we have established by sponsoring the Sugar Bowl is largely responsible for our success in the United States," he said.

Still, Rhonda O'Connor, Nokia's sponsorship director, admits some frustration that many newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times, will refer simply to the Sugar Bowl in its game stories this morning. Many editors feel they shouldn't give companies free publicity just for buying a sponsorship.

The Outback Bowl in Tampa found a way around that problem: Five years ago, it stripped everything else from the title of what used to be the Hall of Fame Bowl so you can't avoid using the restaurant chain's name. As a second-tier bowl with a short history, it didn't feel the pressure to keep a traditional name.

"That was definitely a factor in our affiliating with the bowl," said Nancy Schneid, vice president of marketing for Tampa-based Outback Steakhouse Inc. "We stopped our affiliation with the Gator Bowl for that very reason. Everyone was dropping our name off."

Like Nokia, Outback takes its bowl marketing far beyond the stadium. Before this year's installment of the New Year's Day contest, the chain hosted luncheons at the Georgia and Purdue campuses. It catered a welcome dinner for the teams at the Tampa Convention Center (one Purdue lineman said at the event that he had already eaten three chicken breasts, two steaks and six baked potatoes). And for weeks, Outback sponsored college football updates on ESPN.

Though Outback, Nokia and other companies get their name out with these sponsorships, it's hard to quantify how much the naming-rights fees pay off.

Several consulting firms try to provide an answer by tracking how often a sponsor's name and logo appears during a game telecast. For instance, Joyce Julius & Associates, an Ann Arbor, Mich., company, estimated that the Norwest financial company got about $4.8-million worth of advertising in return for its $550,000 naming-rights fee at the 1998 Sun Bowl.

"But it's hard to equate a brief shot of a logo with a full-blown commercial," said Sean Brenner of the IEG Sponsorship Report in Chicago. "A logo doesn't allow the company to send a message on what it is and what it does."

Brenner and other sports sponsorship experts think naming-rights deals are most effective for companies or brands that are already well-known, such as FedEx, Outback Steakhouse and Tostitos. For them, brief mentions reinforce well-established brand identity.

The other big win for sponsors is a spot in one of the Bowl Championship Series bowls -- the Sugar, Rose, Orange and Fiesta -- which take turns hosting the title game. (While the Rose Bowl doesn't carry a corporate name, its name is followed by a "sponsored by AT&T" tagline.) Signing a multiyear sponsorship contract with a BCS bowl guarantees that one year, the sponsor will have the title game, as Nokia did Tuesday night.

FedEx gets its shot next year when the Orange Bowl decides the title. The title game, played on a weeknight, usually gets good TV ratings and doesn't have the "clutter" of competing sporting events.

For the bowls, the reward is much simpler -- cash. Naming-rights fees ranging anywhere from $500,000 to $2-million go a long way toward helping a bowl meet its expenses. Except for the biggest bowls, organizers usually aim to break even. The Outback Bowl, for instance, is run by a not-for-profit group that raises enough money to meet the event's $5.5-million cost.

Much of that cost is spent on payments to the teams. The Outback Bowl has the sixth-highest payout, at $2-million per team, while the Sugar Bowl is paying Florida State and Virginia Tech $12.5-million each. Schools have to share some of that amount with their conferences.

Officials at companies such as Outback, Nokia and FedEx say they don't think of these sponsorships in just dollars-and-cents terms, though. The buzz around a bowl game gives their companies' marketing a shot of adrenalin, too.

"Being affiliated with the Sugar Bowl," said Nokia's O'Connor, "jazzes up our marketing for the whole year."

Staff writer Lucy Morgan contributed to this report, which also used information from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune and Times files.