Land Shark Stadium?
I heard the announcers refer to the Miami Dolphins stadium as "Land Shark Stadium" during Monday Night Football's game. It stunned me, and made me curious as to what was going on here. Obviously, it's not Joe Robbie Stadium anymore, but land shark?
The answer is actually pretty depressing:
The Miami Dolphins have a new naming rights deal with Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville and Anheuser-Busch InBev's joint brewing project, Land Shark Lager, which renamed the facility "Land Shark Stadium."[4] The sponsorship deal is reportedly for eight months and the name will revert to Dolphin Stadium in time for the Super Bowl XLIV and the 2010 Pro Bowl, possibly to be replaced by another sponsor name if a deal can be secured before that time.
Now, granted that's from Wikipedia and therefore isn't necessarily totally accurate. But I can't decide what depresses me more - the fact that the naming rights are after Jimmy Buffett's brewing project, or the fact that the Dolphins willfully renamed their stadium for what will amount to a single season.
Either way, folks, not cool. Not cool at all.
Are you certain it's not a nod to Saturday Night Live?
ReplyDeleteLong time ago, was a sci fi short story about a time when all songs were commercial jingles and when one musician performs his own piece which HAS NO PRODUCTS NAMED, everyone is outraged.
ReplyDeleteJust one more example (Land Shark Stadium, Monster Cable, etc) that everything is for sale, no matter how crude and thuggish the buyer may be.
As John Osborne put it (talking about movies, but same principle): "These are people who believe their knack for making money somehow qualifies them to make aesthetic decisions."
Think about how not very long ago the idea of a football player saying "It's a business" would have been considered bizarre.
When I grew up my father, a huge fan of the IWW, used to respond to the word "capitalists" with "hang 'em from the lampposts." And it's still the best advice to consider when thinking about Wall Street. (That was one of his few automatic responses, the other one was when Generalissimo Francisco Franco's name was mentioned he automatically said "Fascist bastard bombed his own people." For years I thought that was the rest of his full name.
I digress, but back to the topic -- product placement, whether in a movie or in a stadium, is obscene, and reduced the film or sport to pure cash registering crap.
William Blake: "Where there is a view to money, art can not exist but war only."