A musing for a Wednesday morning:
I’m sure by now a lot of you have seen the news about the renaming agreement for the Staples Center into the “Crypto.com Arena”. Here’s a link to the story from the AP. While the renaming itself is nothing new (this happens every once in a while with major venues), it did make me think of a few things:
First, the company. I’m fairly sure AT LEAST 75% (I might go as high as 90%) of the people that saw this on their morning TV news had no idea who this company is. And, other than what I reasonably presume is their area of business (cryptocurrency), I know nothing of them. I’m going to go out on a limb and say most of you don’t, either.
This was followed by a question and a wondering. I wonder how many people went “crypto what?” and followed it up with an online search or a visit to the dot com. I have a cursory familiarity with cryptocurrency– or “crypto”, if you’re into that brevity thing, so I didn’t feel like I needed to go search– for now. But a lot of people out there, I imagine, do not. I would love to see the statistics and numbers on search results on this. Bet it brought a nice chunk of traffic to their site. Guess you could call that money well spent.
This is supposed to be a 20-year deal. And, with deals like this, there is lots of money involved, a lot of moving parts, etc. But, given that crypto is such a new and volatile space, I wonder if and how long it may be until we’re back here with yet another renaming. It reminds me of a similar story from a number of years ago whose details escape me at the moment.