Sports Business Daily is reporting that internet retailer Overstock.com is getting naming rights at the Coliseum for six years, at $2 million per. Overstock has gone through many different ad campaigns over the years. The new one includes a new actress spokesperson, Caitlin Keats. Now I haven’t bought anything from Overstock in years, and I always found them more geared towards housewares and with a feminine edge. Buying naming rights to the home of the Black Hole is certainly a move away from that. I personally have nothing to say about the name change other than this:
Knowing that Overstock is pushing its O.co domain hard, Ken Arneson is trying out a bunch of new names. My favorite is the “O.co Liseum.” Squint hard enough and you might think it’s not commercial at all. Maybe not.
newballpark.org 
O joy…
Another goofy corporate name for the venerable old dump. At least it’s shorter than Network Associates…
$2M per for naming rights to a stadium housing an MLB and NFL team is just pathetic. Where were all of Doug Boxer’s mystery companies?
Take that back. If they’re going to call it Overstock.com Coliseum (which is what they’re reporting it to be). This is easily one of the dumbest names ever for a stadium.
The “O” face is classic. I like it because of that, alone.
East Bay corporations again passing on naming rights for the Coliseum.
Funny, every time that add comes on the television, I always comment to my wife how it almost sounds like some cheesy softcore porn commercial. At least that’s how the woman in the commercial sounds to me. Then again, I could just be a perv.
So our options are Overstock.com Coliseum, O.co Coliseum or O.Co.liseum… can they give the money back? 2 million is not worth sounding like a bunch of morons.
Not too crazy about it, but 2 mill is 2 mill.
Petco Park is the dumbest of all the names.
I hate all the names pretty much, especially the ones named after banks. Pacbell was okay and Wrigley’s the best. HP Pavilion named after a product is pretty pathetic too.
Landshark Stadium was my personal fave.
$2 mill for a stadium used from April through December in Oakland vs. $4 million for a stadium (Cisco Field) used from April through October in San Jose. Now we know the precise worth of Oakland vs. San Jose naming rights.
@pjk – It doesn’t mean that at all. HP’s naming rights are $3 million a year at the arena and that was when it was fairly new. The Coliseum Authority deserves credit for getting as good a deal as they did.
As for Overstock, its profit margin last year was 1.27% Retailing is a tough game.
jk, Wrigley Field isn’t corporate named. It was named for the Wrigley family, not the gum.
As for Petco Park being the worst, far from it. Names like Overstock.com, SBC, AT&T, TD Banknorth, 3Com, Network Associates, Enron, M&T Bank, and University of Phoenix are all far worse. Plus many more. Petco is actually a nice short name from a local corporation. Oakland should be so lucky to get a sponsor like that, that’s both local, and not with a stupid “.” in the name.
@Dan–and what’s your opinion on the Cisco Field name? Big profitable company, kind of a boring name IMO. Sounds like San Francisco too much. East bay company’s like Kaiser, Clorox, Safeway, Dreyer’s sound a little better and they’re old school companies you can kind of relate to. Pixar Park is kind of cool, but parent company Disney may not bite. I know, I know, before TonyD, pjk and Jeffro hammer me, we’ve been through this before: Dreyer’s is just regional, Nestle is the parent company; Kaiser is a nonprofit, it may not fly; Clorox took a ton of jobs out of Oakland, they don’t care, etc…
HP Pavilion only has hockey, considered the lowest profile of the major sports and certainly the one with the lowest TV ratings – and naming rights still sold for more than the Overstock deal. The Coliseum has the TV ratings bonanza of NFL football along with the national pastime. Oh wait. The Raiders are always blacked out in the Bay Area so it’s questionable how much exposure a stadium sponsor actually gets from Raiders games.
re: East bay company’s like Kaiser, Clorox, Safeway, Dreyer’s sound a little better and they’re old school companies you can kind of relate to.
…And once again, none of these companies stepped forward to buy naming rights at the Coliseum. And to my knowledge, none has made any public pledge to do so for a Victory Court ballpark, either.
The worst thing about Overstock.coliseum is the Overstock brand. It’s the MacFrugal’s of e-commerce. A cheap brand like Overstock cheapens the A’s and Raiders brand just by association.
@pjk–as much as Safeway and Kaiser spend on their TV and radio ads, stadium rights seems rather cheap to me. I wish there was no naming rights at all. If you look at it, 2-4 mill/year barely pays your average Football/Hockey/ Baseball player. Hec, they can’t find a company for Cowboys stadium. They want too much.
I think Cisco Field sounds like a good stadium name. Cisco is short, and sounds like it could be someone’s last name. It does not sound corporate, that is, compared to AT&T Park or SBC Park, for example, compared to PacBell Park (which actually sounded good).
“The Raiders are always blacked out in the Bay Area so it’s questionable how much exposure a stadium sponsor actually gets from Raiders games.”
Only the home games get blacked out, so at least 50% are still televised locally. More to the point, NFL games are all televised nationally, so the local blackout is really a minor issue exposure-wise. Overall, in terms of venue sponsorship, you can’t beat putting your name on an NFL stadium from a national exposure standpoint.
@pjk I agree with your underlying point, however.
jk, to answer your question, Cisco Field is a great name. Doesn’t sound too corporate. Is short and to the point. And they’re a large local corporation for San Jose with their HQ a few miles from downtown. Lightyears better than some other names we’ve seen in the Bay Area in the last few years in terms of corporate names. And it’s in a different league than a moronic name like Overstock.com Coliseum.
I’m a bit concerned with the six-year term. Is that reflective of the belief that the A’s/Raiders might be there for an additional 6 years? Yikes.
Everytime I watch MLB network and they show the CIsco ballpark cam, my heart flutters.
@gojohn10 – Mine too.
@nsj – Power Balance’s deal is for five years. Dont read too much into short term deals like this.
Cisco ballpark cam…I love it! Perhaps the Big SJ! company has MLB’s ear after all ;o).
Monster Park… Truly a classic.
So if i’m reading it right… Most likely overstock.com Coliseum for the rest of this year and then o.co Coliseum for the next 5 years.
@ jeffrey.. was a great name but to bad it backfired for monster cable everyone thought the sponsor was for monster.com, I’m sure they had no problem with the free advertising tho.
Question: are the naming rights deal going to the revenue stream of the a’s at all (split with the raider somehow) or just directly to the coliseum authority? Overstock.com at the Coliseum? Too bad Kaiser can’t step up with a sponsorship and appropriately rename it the Mausoleum…/crash
@ST – All of the money goes to the Authority, and boy do they need it.
Thrasher Park.
haha my sister said “well if it’s o.co will it be faster to get there since it’s the shortcut?”
@ST–they use to call it the Mausoleum back in late 70’s, when attendance was beyond awful. In 1979 they drew 306k, the worse total in modern history I think. I went to about 18-20 games that year, and some were barely over 1000 fans. If you got 6k on Sunday, that was a good crowd. It was cool though to see Rickey come up, and workhorse Rick Langford pitch. The next year was Billy Ball, and attendance almost tripled. The year after that, the Haas family came in and attendance doubled from the previous year to 23k/game, strike and all. We shut down KC in 3 in the ALDS (first half/2nd half winners), but the Yanks swept us in 3 in the ALCS. To go from 4k a game to 10k a game to 23k a game is pretty impressive. FYI, we tripled the G’s 7800/game attendance that year (1981).
I expect many, many Overstock Coliseum is Understocked in Fans jokes out of Anaheim, Seattle and Texas…
I also couldn’t ever keep my head out of the gutter when I’d hear, “O, O, O, the big big O, Overstock dot com” sung to the tune of Jingle Bells on the radio.
If we’re counting MLS as a major league (which I don’t), I’d say Dick’s Sporting Goods Park outside Denver is about the worst corporate name. The old Great Western Forum was about the best, given that it didn’t really sound all that corporate.
newballpark.blogspot.com/2009/08/verizon-coliseum.html
I still don’t know what happened to the verizon deal from a couple of years ago.
@Brian
Yeah, Great Western Forum was the best. As a kid, I had no idea it was a corporate sponsor until someone told me that it was many years later.
Target Field has a nice ring, for the corporate ones. And Wrigley, which hardly anyone even remembers started as a corporate name. I dislike the beer ones, Coors and Miller, Busch is a little better since it isn’t Budweiser.
It’s a misconception that Wrigley started as a corporate name. It never was. It was named for the Wrigley family who owned the Cubs at the time, not unlike it’s contemporaries Shibe Park, Ebbets Field, Navin Field, Griffith Stadium… It was a very common practice during the early part of the last century to name parks after the owner. Suppose it’s a good thing such naming doesn’t occur much today. Or we’d have parks like Wolff/Davis Coliseum, Neukom Park, and Major League Baseball Stadium in LA.
NEWSFLASH! jk-usa doesn’t like the Cisco name!
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Honestly, is anyone surprised?
Considering the reports of bad smells in the Coliseum I think “(over)stock yard” would be an appropriate name.
Agree w/ Brian. Dick’s Sporting Goods Park (Colorado Rapids of MLS) is the absolute worst. Having people call your stadium “The Dick” is terrible.
Actually the fans of Colorado have embraced it. They took what was an insult and made it their own.
Does anything top Amway Arena? Each ticket comes with a season ticket package you have to sell to your friends.
love 95.7 but monty needs to come up to speed on a few things around the ‘9ers and A’s stadium issues—
@Lone Stranger–
NEWSFLASH! Lew Wolff doesn’t like the city of Oakland. Never has, never will.
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Honestly, is anyone surprised?
1998, LW in a SF Chronicle interview: “I wouldn’t spend five minutes on any other city besides San Jose.”
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@jk–you gotta get over LW hates Oakland–it has nothing to do with liking or not liking Oakland…it has alot to do with that Oakland cannot support a privately financed ballpark—and btw–Al Davis has mentioned Oakland as being tough…W’s are clearly looking to SF at somepoint—
no doubt in my mind the w’s will be moving to sf before this decade ends, think the lease at oracle ends in 2017. the new owners already had their major press conferences this past season in the city of sf and keep reading reports that the w’s and sfg owners are working on some arena near at&t.
maybe a bit cruel but a bit of me would like to see the kings move out of sac making it more likely another nba teams comes to northern california, most likely a nba franchise led by ellison who would likely move that franchise to sj. i’d rather root for a sj hornets than i woudl a sf warriors franchise.
going back to the subject at hand, i’d personally rank this new name right up there with other horrible naming rights for local venues that had the misfortuned to be named as “monster park” or “3com park” which were the two previous names for the stick before they eventually changed it back to the stick a few years ago.
How about Ellison moving a franchise to the new arena near At&T? They can be the main tenant, instead of the Sharks, have a bigger capacity over 20k, and it’s in the City. They can play in SJ while the new arena is built I guess. I wish LE was a baseball fan and would look into the A’s. He doesn’t have a problem with Oakland like LW does, putting his company name on the Oracle Arena.
@jk–you can probably connect that LE had higher aspirations for the W’s which more than likely led to his company putting their name on the arena–LE lives in SF–had he gottent the W’s they would be making the same plans to move them—its all about being able to market a franchise these days–San Francisco Warriors carries alot more marketability than either the Golden State W’s or Oakland W’s—or for that matter the San Jose W’s—not hating on Oakland just stating the obvious
@jk-usa – Ellison moving a team to SF would be the worst possible outcome for the W’s. Much of the fanbase, which is already frustrated by the W’s inability to win consistently, would drop the team like a bad habit. Add SF’s cachet and a new arena’s polish and the W’s would be in serious trouble.
ML, uh, not so sure about that. SF Hornets or some new franchise won’t be like the W’s. And the odds are the W’s will win one of these years.They just got to!!
“I’m a bit concerned with the six-year term. Is that reflective of the belief that the A’s/Raiders might be there for an additional 6 years? Yikes.”
Don’t be. The contract has an out clause for Overstock/O.co if the Raiders and/or A’s leave the stadium.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/thehuddle/post/2011/04/raiders-black-hole-will-now-be-at-overstockcom-coliseum/1
Now isn’t this lovely… sites like Yahoo are leading with this story today.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/post/The-Oakland-Raiders-get-a-new-ridiculous-stadiu?urn=nfl-wp1313
Article titles like “Raiders Rename Stadium”, “The Oakland Raiders get ridiculous new stadium name”, and the like. Almost no mention of the A’s.
I guess the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville is also worse.
” laughingstock .com ” and ” understock.com ” will ,I’m sure, be what the New York based TV media will soon dub the Coliseum
@jk “I wish LE was a baseball fan and would look into the A’s. He doesn’t have a problem with Oakland like LW does, putting his company name on the Oracle Arena.”
You simply cannot discuss this rationally without understanding the difference between putting a company name on a building and persuading thousands of corporate buyers to pay big bucks for premium seating and making the trudge up to the venue for 81 games per year.
The building sponsorship is like a billboard. You can make advertising buys anywhere in the country regardless of where your business or customers are located; it really doesn’t matter. As long as the building gets mentioned in the media, you’re set. The fact that Oakland’s arena was good enough for a sponsorship (in a market which currently has no other NBA team) tells you absolutely nothing about Oakland’s viability for a privately financed baseball park, or about Ellison’s feelings about the city.
Let me put it this way: Ellison is a FAR more ruthless businessman than Wolff, and his ties to Silicon Valley are deeper than Wolff’s. Do you really believe, even in your desperate delirium of fandom, Ellison would be putting any less effort into getting to SJ than Wolff is?