Progress continues on the San Diego Convention Center Corp.’s search for a naming rights sponsor for the center’s Sails Pavilion and the Civic Theater.
Since last fall, Convention Center officials and the Denver-based sports marketing firm it hired, The Bonham Group, Inc., have been approaching companies and assessing their interest in various marketing packages involving the two sites.
More than 200 companies have been approached so far, said Matt Yonan, Bonham’s vice president of sales and marketing.
Carol Wallace, president and CEO of the corporation, is confident about the process.
“I have to say some companies we’ve contacted have said now’s not the right time for them,” Wallace said, “but the response overall has been very good.”
Serious candidates will begin to emerge in the next two to three months, Yonan said.
“We do have several leads,” he said. “We are following up on several different companies that we would consider very active and interested at this point.”
He wouldn’t give further details.
Wallace and Yonan would not reveal the Corp.’s asking amount for the naming rights, calling the information sensitive.
According to Yonan, the search will likely be completed by September, about a year after it began. An announcement could be timed for the grand opening of the Convention Center’s expansion that month, he said.
San Diego’s situation , selling naming rights to two facilities but not the whole center , is slightly unusual, Yonan noted.
“The revenue opportunities aren’t close to being the same as if you name the whole facility,” he said. “I think it’s fine that San Diego wanted to look at just naming a part of it, because the value we predicted they could get was sufficient for them.”
For the rest of the industry, full naming rights are a matter of necessity, and something that will continue, especially with all the expansion and reconstruction taking place, he said.
As far as Wallace and her organization is concerned, rights will not be sold to the Convention Center itself.
“That was part of the early analysis,” she said. “It was determined that we have better name identification as the San Diego Convention Center and there is a lot of capital already invested in that name.”
According to Yonan, the two venues have generated different types of interest. The 35-year-old Civic Center’s $15 million to $25 million renovation has a different appeal than the less local and more business-audience focus of the Sails Pavilion, he said.
Although a few companies have asked about sponsoring one site separately, the current drive is to find one sponsor for both sites, Yonan said.
“We push it being together, and to date, those are all the conversations that are active,” he said.
One sponsor would be a more straightforward marketing partnership for the Convention Center Corp., Yonan said. Also, the appeal of sponsoring one of the sites could leverage the other, he said.
A likely outcome would be a large company buying rights to both, then naming each site after a separate brand or division, he said.
