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Getting the ‘Skinny’ on Naming Rights
A baseball team that often pokes fun at the conventions of the sport has joined forces with a beverage marketer for a promotion that simultaneously celebrates and sends up the naming of stadiums after corporate sponsors.
The St. Paul Saints, a minor-league team in St. Paul, Minn., signed a deal with the Skinny Nutritional Corporation, which distributes the Skinny Water line of beverages, to rename Midway Stadium -- its ballpark for all 16 of the team’s seasons -- as Skinny Water Stadium.
The tongue-in-cheek aspects of the agreement could be found in the fine print: The renaming lasted for just a week, from last Sunday through Saturday. The name has since reverted to Midway Stadium.
The Brigadoon-like existence of Skinny Water Stadium was marked with advertising, giveaways, contests and stunts — about a season’s worth, but condensed into a week.
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For instance, there were signs inside and outside the stadium, proclaiming the ballpark’s (temporary) new name. Fans received free samples of Skinny Water as they entered the stadium. The Skinny Water brand name was stenciled on the outfield grass.
There were also two sets of fun-house mirrors set up; the first ones made people look wider and the second ones made them look, well, skinny. And commercials the team ran to advertise the week’s events featured the Joe Tex song, “Skinny Legs and All.”
- Dig deeper into the moment.
The Saints belong to the independent Northern League, which is not affiliated with Major League Baseball. The team is known for an unconventional approach to marketing that is at odds with the staid, stolid — even stuffy — traditions of M.L.B.
The Saints have a pig as a mascot and earlier this season gave away a “bobblefoot” doll, inspired by the restroom problems of Larry Craig, the Idaho senator.
And a deal with a product that is sold with the slogan “Zero calories, zero sugar, zero guilt” is not too much of a stretch for a team that once put on “Nobody Night”: locking out fans until the fifth inning of a game, when it became official, so the attendance could be listed as zero.
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For a team so eager to spoof the trappings of baseball, the concept of naming rights is a juicy target. Once upon a time, it was unthinkable that marketers could buy their way onto the façades of stadium by paying team owners to brand what were once unbranded spaces.
By now, however, sports fans are used to seeing product or corporate names on the homes of their favorite teams, and the selling of naming rights has become big business.
Citigroup is paying an estimated $400 million over 20 years for the right to brand the new stadium of the New York Mets as Citi Field. At a recent conference sponsored by the trade publication Advertising Age, Casey Wasserman, chief executive at the Wasserman Media Group, predicted that naming rights to the new stadium for the football Giants and Jets being built in Northern New Jersey could go for more than $800 million.
“People have come to expect there’s going to be a naming-rights deal” for a stadium, says Mike Veeck, president of the Saints as well as its parent, the Goldklang Group, which owns six minor-league teams in cities that include, in addition to St. Paul, Brockton, Mass. (the Brockton Rox); Charleston, S.C. (the Charleston RiverDogs); and Fort Myers, Fla. (the Fort Myers Miracle).
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“We felt we could give them a real push,” Mr. Veeck says, referring to Skinny Water, “and have some fun with it.” Indeed, the Goldklang motto is, “Fun is good.”
Mr. Veeck comes by his penchant for promotion naturally. His father was Bill Veeck, known for attention-getting ideas for major league teams like the Chicago White Sox and the St. Louis Browns.
Perhaps the elder Veeck’s most famous stunt came during a game in 1951, when he sent a midget named Eddie Gaedel to bat as a pinch-hitter for the Browns. Gaedel, who walked on four pitches, wore the number 1/8 on his uniform, which is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“My old man used to say, ‘Operate for a couple years and then get out of town, because the winners come back to haunt you,’ ” Mr. Veeck says, laughing.
He recalls being interviewed on a radio show and a caller complained about having won a car in a promotion at a ballpark — but the car could not be driven off the field.
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“I said, ‘Hi, Jack,’ ” Mr. Veeck says. “It was the dumbest promotion I’ve ever done, and it’s a lengthy list.”
When marketers come along “and say, ‘We want to have some fun,’ that’s very rare,” he adds. “That’s like an answer to a prayer.”
So he was pleased, he says, when he heard from the executives at Skinny Nutritional. They had read an article in an airline magazine about the Goldklang Group and its unusual approach to marketing, citing examples like Nobody Night.
“We liked the way they were thinking,” says Don McDonald, president and chief executive at Skinny Nutritional in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., referring to the Goldklang gang. “They’re very promotion-minded.”
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So, too, is Skinny Nutritional, which has sponsored headline-generating events like giveaways of gasoline (“Zero gas”) at stations in metropolitan areas like Minneapolis and Philadelphia.
“We happened to hit in Philadelphia the day gas hit four bucks,” Mr. McDonald says. “It made all the Philadelphia stations.”
Likewise, the announcement that the Saints would play for a week in Skinny Water Stadium garnered coverage in the local media, he adds.
A promotion centered on baseball, a sport almost synonymous with beer, may at first glance seem an unlikely choice for a product called Skinny Water.
“That’s what we thought, too,” Mr. McDonald says, but the fans attending Saints games are “families — husbands, kids, wives — and that’s the market we want to hit.”
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And the team “has a tremendous following,” he adds, attracting outside the stadium what amounts to “a tailgate party, which starts about two hours before game time.”
Baseball teams certainly seem more open to affiliating with food and beverage brands that are not automatically associated with the sport. Kozy Shack, which makes puddings, recently signed a sponsorship agreement to become the official pudding of the Mets.
Skinny Nutritional paid $50,000 for the promotion with the Saints, Mr. McDonald says, which includes $30,000 worth of media in the form of radio, television and newspaper ads that were run by the team as well as the ballpark ads like the signs and the stencil in the outfield.
“We see minor league baseball as a great way to introduce the product into other markets,” he adds.
Skinny Nutritional has another sports connection: One of its five flavors, Acai Grape Blueberry, is named after Pat Croce, who was involved with the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team and the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team before becoming an author of self-help books and a TV personality.
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