As many as 25,000 people died in India back in 1984 due to the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, and residents are still understandably upset about the experience that left many without family members, spouses, or friends.

In 1999, Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical, a purchase that Dow execs are likely muttering about to one another these days. The lasting unhappiness with Union is now being manifested in what seems to be a growing protest against Dow having anything to do with this summer’s Olympic Games in London.

Dow has forked over big bucks to be a top-tier IOC sponsor and was all set to “wrap” the main London 2012 Olympic stadium in a massive banner as part of its deal. However, the company responded to activists last month by scrapping to scraps its plans for the stadium wrap. That, apparently, has not been enough.Continue reading...

When it was announced in August that Dow Chemical planned to spend $10.8 million to have its name emblazoned in a fabric wrap around London’s Olympic stadium for the Games next summer, there was an angry outcry, particularly by athletes and Olympic organizers in India.

After all, it was there that the Dow subsidiary Union Carbide leaked enough gas and chemicals to kill approximately 15,000 and leave many others sick back in 1984. There was even talk that the Indian Olympic team would boycott the Games, but that was rejected on Saturday.

Dow didn’t own Union then, but Indian residents are feeling the fallout and Dow’s name doesn’t exactly inspire the Olympic spirit in many Indian residents. Now TheHindu.com reports that Dow has “agreed to remove all its branding from the London Olympic stadium.”Continue reading...

English Premier League club Newcastle United caused a stir by announcing it sold the naming rights for its historic stadium, St. James' Park, to British retailer Sports Direct. In England, a country where soccer stadiums could be mistaken for places of worship, this is scandalous.

However, rising player wages and billionaire owners like Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour are making money more important than ever in the British game, as the New York Times notes.

Sponsorships, of course, generate significant revenue for sports teams, yet American sports teams have generally avoided covering their jerseys in corporate logos, even though rival soccer teams around the world (including American ones) don't seem to mind. Manchester United even has two shirt sponsors: Aon (game jerseys) and DHL (training kit). Spend enough time around a Premier League stadium and you might mistake it for a NASCAR race.Continue reading...

Less than three years before New Jersey's New Meadowlands Stadium hosts Super Bowl XLVIII, “serious negotiations” are under way for the $1.6 billion shared home of the Giants and Jets to land a naming-rights sponsor, with MetLife potentially the leading contender, reports the Newark Star-Ledger.

Elsewhere in the Garden State, another stadium is getting a new corporate sponsor. High Point Solutions, a New Jersey supplier of routers, switchers and servers, in March agreed to a five-year, $1 million deal with Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, also according to the Newark Star-Ledger. Quinnipiac is home to close to 6,000 undergrads.

Now the owners of High Point, two brothers who the Wall Street Journal points out never got college degrees themselves, are sticking their company’s name on another university stadium in their corporate home state. This time it’s at NJ's Rutgers University, which has close to 40,000 undergraduates. 

"We're making up for lost time," said cofounder Tom Mendiburu to the Journal.Continue reading...

There used to be an arena in Vancouver called General Motors Place, but a certain little recession and difficulty in the auto-selling marketplace caused that deal to be cut short and naming-rights to be available again. So last July, Rogers Communications, the Canadian telecom giant that also owns the Toronto Blue Jays and has its names on various properties in Toronto, pulled off a double whammy in Vancouver.

Not only did Rogers suddenly gain a major springboard for young telecom users to be exposed to their growing brand in western Canada, the company also knocked out competitor Telus from having the naming rights (which it was also competing to obtain) and to continue as the official telecom company of the arena.Continue reading...

After 2 ½ years of construction, $1.6 billion spent, and countless debates over how it all should look, feel, smell, be, the New Meadowlands Stadium opened on April 10, 2010, with its 82,566 seats awaiting the backsides of happy lacrosse fans.

Lacrosse isn’t exactly what this stadium is known for, though. This place is all about football: New York Giants and New York Jets football. With 20 home games a year, twice the number of any other stadium in the land, you’d think there would be one company out there ready to pony up some big bucks on the naming rights.

But the troubles on Wall Street and Main Street were just too bad at the time for any corporation to feel good about spending that kind of dough on such a thing. It appears, however, that times have changed.Continue reading...