Bowl Game Sponsorships

'Tis the season - College Football's bowl season. The same aspects intrigue me each year: the odd matchups and the bowl sponsors. I'm always curious as to how the relationships between the sponsors and their bowl games came to be.

Some of the relationships between sponsors and their bowl games make perfect sense. For instance, San Diego County Credit Union's sponsorship of the Poinsettia Bowl (held in San Diego) seems like a great opportunity for boosting local community awareness. Tostitos makes a clever match with their sponsorship of the Fiesta Bowl, a big-time bowl that provides huge brand exposure.

Other sponsor/bowl pairings leave me scratching my head. GoDaddy seems to have no connection to its bowl's host city of Mobile, Alabama. And Mobile isn't really known as a tech-savvy town. The same goes for Royal Purple's sponsorship of the Las Vegas Bowl. Does anyone associate Las Vegas with synthetic oil? Actually...don't answer that question.

You can check out all of the other bowl game matchups and the title sponsors on ESPN's website. You'll see that most of the sponsorships make sense from a location standpoint in that most of the sponsors are headquartered in the same city as the bowl game.

So what amounts of money are corporations spending for these bowl sponsorships? According to this article by IEG, the costs vary. The amounts listed are for the 2012 - '13 bowl games. I assume that prices are similar for this season's sponsorships.

And how do these sponsorships arrive at these amounts? IEG's Jim Andrews explains in this article that the naming rights for the BCS bowl games are part of ESPN's broadcasting rights for these games. This means that Tostitos, for example, is making a really, really big media buy from ESPN and gets to be the sponsor of the Fiesta Bowl as part of the buy.

When I originally considered writing about this topic, I wanted to highlight how much of a waste it is for Beef 'O' Brady's to sponsor a bowl game between teams from two low-profile conferences in Saint Petersburg, Florida. But these types of bowl sponsorships, with their community relations aspects, charity ties and other benefits, are a great marketing expense for companies of this size. It's the big bowl sponsors that stand a greater chance of getting a poor return on their bowl game investment.

In conclusion, don't be like me and discredit bowl sponsors as just a name on the bowl logo. Companies sink a lot of money into these decisions and in return, communities benefit and we get more college football. OK, it's not always riveting football but it's definitely more football.