Goodbye, San Francisco. Hello, Brandopolis
Corporate marketing in city takes new forms as logos, names proliferate across landscape
When the threeblocklong park atop San Francisco’s transit center reopens Monday, we’ll again be able to stand among green trees and shrubs and contemplate the changing city around us.
Which from here looks a lot like — Brandopolis.
After all, this buoyantly landscaped aerie bears the official name of Salesforce Park, which in turn is the rooftop of Salesforce Transit Center. The glassy buildings around it are adorned with corporate logos for Deloitte, BlackRock, Trulia and Slack.
One block to the west, Blue Shield of California Theater recently debuted at the corner of Howard and Third streets, six blocks north of Oracle Park, which itself is eight blocks north of soontoopen Thrive City.
Don’t have time to walk? Hop on a Ford GoBike.
None of these marketing monikers were visible five years ago, and they symbolize the changing city every bit as much as the glassy towers that have sprouted near the Bay Bridge. We’re in a
region with an abundance of deeppocketed corporations and institutions seeking attention — and where the branding of buildings and spaces continues to take new forms.
Some are baffling, such as Thrive City — “The Official Surrounding District of Chase Center,” according to a news release last month from the Golden State Warriors and Kaiser Permanente.
A “City.” In a “District.” That really is an 11acre block developed by the team spending $1 billion or so on the 18,000seat arena alone.
Look past the jargon of a deal reputed to cost the nonprofit health care provider as much as $295 million, and it’s a twist on the standard naming rights deal. Instead of charging Kaiser to dub the plaza outside the arena “Permanente Place,” the everinventive Warriors tossed in the larger site with its office buildings and restaurantlined passages.
As for Salesforce Park and Salesforce Transit Center, that onetwo punch is more brazen than baffling.
Salesforce is San Francisco’s largest private employer, occupying three towers within yards of a curvaceous metalclad megastructure built to welcome buses from the East Bay as well as (cross fingers) commuter trains and highspeed rail. Why not pay at least $110 million over 25 years to help keep the public facility clean and safe?
The brazen part is how Salesforce drove a deal with the Transbay Joint Powers Authority to place its name front and center — rather than, say, “The Transbay transit center, presented by Salesforce.” Astro, one of the software giant’s cartoonlike mascots, even adorns the rugged boulders that direct you to the park.
In the eyes of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, discretion clearly is not the better part of valor.
Still, Benioff’s playbook isn’t new. Private companies have paid to brand civic infrastructure elsewhere.
“We refer to it as municipal marketing,” said Kyle Canter of Superlative Group in Cleveland, the firm that lined up the Transbay authority’s sponsorship deal with Salesforce. “Governments are realizing that the name of their assets has a significant value, while companies get their name into the lexicon of the community on a daily basis.”
Indeed, Superlative arranged the “sponsorship” of two lightrail lines of the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System — one with a university, the other with a tribal casino. It also brokered the 20year sale of naming rights for its hometown convention center to an online bank.
Nor is Canter startled by Thrive City.
“That’s creative, integrating a (marketing) slogan into the name, but consistent with what you see in sports,” Canter said. “Owners are getting more and more savvy from a real estate perspective.”
As are governments in need of new financial revenue streams.
Look no further than the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center: The Facebook founder and his wife donated $75 million to the public hospital that reopened in new quarters in 2016.
Just this March, Caltrain’s Board of Directors voted to pursue the sale of naming rights for its stations. The rail line that someday will bring South Bay commuters into Benioff’s branded basement might do so by way of “Facebook Menlo Park,” or “Palo Alto — a Stanford joint.”
Nonprofits want a piece of the action as well. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in March sold the naming rights to its theater building at Third and Howard streets to Blue Shield of California. Never mind that the nonprofit receives more than onequarter of its annual revenue from the city. A deal’s a deal — even for an institution that bills itself, among other things, as a “center for the art of shaping the narrative.”
This is what’s insidious. Brandopolis respects no boundaries, even if familiar landmarks are cheapened as a result.
Is the trend inexorable? Not always. The company that sold Ford the naming rights to its bikeshare system was purchased this year by Lyft, which is rebranding the twowheeled transit as Bay Wheels. If the buyer had been our other big rideshare company, I suspect, we’d soon be riding Ubercycles.
But the larger forces are persistent and inventive. Which brings us back to Salesbay, or Transforce, or whatever else you might call the new transit center and its environs.
The property ownerfunded community benefits district for the 30 or so blocks that include Transbay and Rincon Hill now wants to brand the area as the East Cut. This isn’t a reference to a barber shop chain, thank goodness. The name instead is a tip of the figurative hat to 1869, when Second Street was cut through Rincon Hill to reach the waterfront.
Cool, right? Except that Second Street is the western boundary of the socalled
East Cut. The branding makes no sense. A fauxhistoric name is being applied to a part of town with two distinct areas.
Nothing stays the same in cities, to be sure. Commercialization is part of the landscape. Look at buses and trains cloaked in shrinkwrapped ads — they’re tacky but no longer shocking.
Heck, I’ve been around long enough to remember when the Giants welcomed us to brandnew PacBell Park. Which begat SBC Park. Which begat AT&T Park and, as of this season, Oracle Park.
Not to be confused with Oracle Arena in Oakland, a branding that no longer exists.
On the bright side, we still refer to the kayakdotted water where Mission Creek meets the bay as McCovey Cove. At least for now.
“Look at the revenue you could get from having an outdoors retailer like REI ‘sponsor’ McCovey Cove,” Andy Dolich, a sports business consultant, told me this week. The scary thing is, I only
think he’s joking. Because in Brandopolis, you never know what’s coming next.