Monday, January 3, 2011

Corporate sponsorship

Corporate sponsorship has not been limited to the park itself. Wrigley Field is famous for its view of the neighborhood buildings across Waveland and Sheffield Avenues. In addition to spectators standing or mac brushes sitting on the apartment roofs, corporate sponsors have frequently taken advantage of those locations as well. In the earliest days of Weeghman Park, one building across Sheffield Avenue advertised a local hangout known as Bismarck Gardens (later called the Marigold Gardens after World War I). That same building has since advertised for the Torco Oil Company,mac makeup Southwest Airlines, and the Miller Brewing Company.

A building across from deep right-center field was topped by a neon sign for Baby Ruth candy beginning in the mid-1930s and running for some 40 years. That placement by the Chicago-based Curtiss Candy Company,north face denali coincidentally positioned in the line of sight of “Babe Ruth’s called shot”, proved fortuitous when games began to be televised in the 1940she sign was also in the line of sight of the ground level camera behind and to the left of home plate. The aging sign was eventually removed in the early 1970s.

Another long-standing venue for a sign is the sloping roof of a building behind left-center field. Unsuitable for the bleachers that now decorate many of those buildings,blackhawks jerseys that building’s angling roof has been painted in the form of a large billboard since at least the 1940s. In recent years it has borne a bright-red Budweiser sign and, beginning in 2009, an advertisement for Horseshoe Casino. Other buildings have carried signs sponsoring beers, such as Old Style (when it was a Cubs broadcasting sponsor) and Miller; and also WGN-TV, which has telecast Cubs games since April 1948.

For 2008 and 2009, the Cubs worked out an agreement with the Chicago Board Options Exchange to allow the CBOE to auction some 70 box seat season tickets and award naming rights to them.

For the 2009 season, the The Chicago Cubs announced that the renovated restaurant space in the southeast corner of Wrigley Field, formerly known as the Friendly Confines Cafe, will now be known as the Captain Morgan Club.

No comments:

Post a Comment