It’s probably going to take a while before it starts to roll off the tongue.
Centennial Arenas and Foothills Centennial Centre are now known as Viking Rentals Centre following the announcement earlier this month that the Town of Okotoks had struck a naming rights deal. It’s a good thing that it’s a 10-year agreement because I’m guessing it will take some time before the new name becomes ingrained in the local vernacular.
I’ve found naming rights are an interesting issue in the sense that there always seems to be corporate entities that want to attach their names to venues, which suggests there’s value in the practice, yet at the same time, there’s a revolving door of those that do so, which leads one to believe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Whether it’s beneficial or not is likely up to the individual circumstance, but what is constant is that it takes the public a little while to adjust to a new name.
Heck, I’m still referring to Toronto’s stadium as Skydome even though it officially became Rogers Centre almost two decades ago. Maybe that’s because I can still remember it when the Blue Jays won back-to-back World Series titles there in the early 1990s or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Rogers has its name on multiple venues -- Rogers Place in Edmonton and Rogers Arena in Vancouver – so it’s hard to keep them all straight.
When I catch a Vancouver Whitecaps game on the tube these days, which isn’t often given most MLS matches are now on Apple TV, I get a kick out of the fact that the players are wearing Telus jerseys, yet most of the fans in the stands have Bell, one of Telus’ direct competitors, emblazoned across their chests. That’s because the new naming rights agreement with the team took effect upon signing but supporters weren’t quite ready to ditch those expensive jerseys bearing the former sponsor’s name.
Even when the name catches on, there’s often a push to create a nickname for the venue, which is generally catchier than the official moniker but does little to burn that corporate branding into the brains of sports fans. When what is now Rogers Arena opened 30 years ago as GM Place, it soon became known as ‘The Garage,’ which was a clever play on words but eliminated General Motors entirely despite the handsome fee the auto manufacturer had paid to be attached to the building.
I suspect there will be attempts to affix a nickname to the Viking Rentals Centre, particularly given all the possibilities thanks to marauding lore associated with such a name, but let’s hope for the company’s sake that none takes hold.
It will undoubtedly take a while, but if Viking Rentals Centre is repeated often enough, at some point Centennial Arenas and Foothills Centennial Centre will largely disappear from the local lexicon.
At that point, the sponsorship agreement struck with the Town will really start to pay dividends, although how good a deal it ends up being depends on the annual fee, which lowly taxpayers aren’t privy to at the current time.
