Well, it was bound to happen:
I know that baseball is ultimately a business and that it's good for business to engage in these type of sponsorships. However, it bothers me that an insurance company: "... is a heavy buyer of sports media and marketing assets in the Philadelphia market." I also don't like the "Asplundh" ads above the left-field wall. It was nice seeing the flowers there on TV.
Jul '24
Aug '24
Don't like any of it but can't say Independence bugs me any more than Citizens Bank or W.B. Mason or Rankin, plus they were already all over the ballpark as a sponsor and advertiser. It's amusing that the Philadelpha Union jerseys say "BIMBO" and Thomas's English Muffins if you grew up with those, but that's probably an even bigger multi-national corporation.
Hopefully it looks better than the Braves' Quikrete patch which looks like it came out of a Bad News Bears movie.
really hard to integrate anything well with the pinstripes. But IBX (despite that abbreviation having its own isssues) seems a bit higher-rent than Quikrete.
I don't understand advertising. Do people really decide which health insurance to use based on whether a team they like is associated with them? I was talking with rkeden about this at the Reading game in New Hampshire on Sunday. There was an ad for a university, really just the name of the university, on the outfield wall. Do students decide where to attend college based on seeing their name at the ballgame (not that there were many high school age kids there anyway--maybe some parents)?
It's just brand awareness. And not just for individual consumers either. Potential employees, corporate customers, doctors and hospitals, lobbyists and politicians (presumably the upgrade of the sponsorship also means an additional luxury box or at least more tickets). I'm sure there are in fact any number of HR people and individual people who buy Independence Blue Cross over Oscar or Cigna, not because they are saying, "oh, I'll go with the place from the baseball jersey" but just because of the general ubiquity and (arguably) goodwill they have built up from their marketing and advertising over the years.
I still don’t get it. Health insurance is kind of unique in that a large number of customers don’t make a choice; their employers do. I’m not involved in that decision at my company, but it’s pretty clear that the primary factor in the decision is cost. It’s hard to imagine that sponsorships like this reduce costs to the customers.
Well I am certainly not saying it's good for consumers. But I also think when a company like Comcast buys health insurance for its employees there's also politics and shmoozing and relationships involved. In fact every time I have gone to a Philly sporting event in a luxury box it's been through a friend who works in his company's HR (with the seats given to him by another company they do business with).
And there are also 40 million people buying their insurance on the ACA exchange (360,000 of them in PA, myself included. Price and coverage was still my big decision point, but I'm inclined to feel secure that IBX would be an okay company to patronize and their presence in the community over many years is certainly a part of that. Their former CEO also ran the World Cup organization for Philly, and now runs the Flyers.)
I have never considered using Citizens Bank, however.
Speaking of which, the Phillies Ballpark naming rights deal has only four years left though there's the possibility of an extension. I guess Wells Fargo ending the naming rights relationship with Comcast-Spectacor which began with CoreStates put some attention on that.
Always thought it was funny the Phillies' sponsor was actually the Royal Bank of Scotland (they finally sold it a few years back).
The WFC will always be the FU Center to me, even though Corestates was first.
I think all of these sponsorship deals have become a lot more low-rent, relatively speaking. Smaller businesses and so forth. I have also never spent a dime with CP Rankin or WB Mason, but I've heard of them and know what they do, which I wouldn't have if not for baseball.
