Most high school sports stadiums don’t have a big corporation paying out some big bucks in order to have its name on it. But most towns also don’t house a vacation home of New Balance Shoe Co. owner Jim Davis.

Gloucester, Mass., does. For that reason, the 75-year-old high school’s crumbling stadium will soon bear the New Balance name. The company’s charitable foundation will give $500,000 to the school to fix up the stadium in annual chunks of $50,000 for the next decade, according to the Gloucester Times.

As a result, the stadium will get a new name that incorporates New Balance: The New Balance Track and Field at Newell Stadium.Continue reading...

Sure, you’ve been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and watched floats glide by and walked the thronged streets afterward with a Hurricane in your hand and your beads around your neck and stopped in to hear “St. James Infirmary” from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band yet again.

While you may have seen a lot of things in N'awlins, you probably haven’t seen a Mardi Gras parade that has you looking down toward the ground instead of up at the incredible work floating by.

For the last three years, a so-called micro-krewe called 'tit Rex (short for 'Petit Rex,' it's pronounced "tea rex" and a pun on the dinosaur name) has put on a lovely walking parade of gorgeous floats made from shoeboxes that beautifully mimic the full-size ones you’ve seen elsewhere in the city.

The floats' designers and artists walk proudly by their creations to be sure they stay on course and don’t get destroyed.

The humble 'tit Rex Krewe has a problem, though. The Rex Organization, one of the city’s biggest Mardi Gras krewes, has all the rights to the word “Rex” in association with the event — and they're not flattered at having a mini-me using their name.

According to The Times-Picayune, Rex wants the walking krewe to ditch its name pronto, before the next Mardi Gras rolls around.Continue reading...

U.S. real estate has been a pretty tricky business in the last decade as the housing bubble created whole new neighborhoods that needed shopping centers and donut shops and card stores and all the rest. Until, of course, they didn’t anymore and banks started to foreclose on such things.

If you’re in the real-estate biz, it might not be the worst idea to separate yourself from the past and start with a whole new image, right? That seems to be what’s going on in the real-estate investment trust side of the business. 

REIT.com reports that four “well-known REITs are re-branding their company names, logos and ticker symbols to keep up with the changing times or to better align their brand with their core strategies.”

U-Store-It-Trust announced that it is changing its name to CubeSmart. Its Wall Street ticker changes from YSI to the far more memorable CUBE.

“Brand has become much more important in our industry as the ways our customers find our product have changed,” said Dean Jernigan, CubeSmart CEO.

Developers Diversified Realty Corporation also changed its name to DDR Corp., entailing a new logo, tagline, and brand identity.Continue reading...

In a Facebook promotion that launched Oct. 1st, Coca-Cola is inviting Australians to 'Share a Coke with a Mate' in a $5 million campaign as summer heats up down under.

Cans and bottles with some of Australia's most popular names have been popping up over the past two weeks, cans branded Jess, Sam, Kevin, Edward, Matt and Kate.

Coke is hoping that 268 million sodas will sell during the next three months as the company swaps its branding for one of 150 of Australia's most popular names, the first time Coke has changed its packaging in 125 years. If your name isn’t one of the top 150, stop at a Coke kiosk in one of 18 Westfield-owned shopping centers for free personalization.Continue reading...

As brands mull over whether to purchase the dot-brand URL versions of their names as part of ICANN's new online gTLD domain naming rules (along with the new application procedures), place-based brands are securing their preferred top-level domains.

eWeek Europe reports that there's a move to secure the .london domain for the city of London, while .scot is being eyed by Scottish officials for tourism and place branding digital duties.

Meanwhile, in another part of the dotbranding URL saga, one month today (Oct. 28) is the deadline for brand owners to block others from snapping up the "brand.xxx" versions of digital domains — and possible .XXXploitation of their cherished, trademarked brand names.

While plenty of companies are busy blocking their products from being used in the .xxx URLs that will be used to identify sites with pornographic material, there is one brand in particular that is embracing (among other things) the concept: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.Continue reading...

NBA owners and players are trying to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. So far, training camps and some preseason games have been canceled, but the constant threat of the entire season getting flushed down the drain hangs over things. One team that might actually benefit from such a thing could be the New Jersey Nets.

The Nets are spending the season in Newark before moving to Brooklyn. A year off could help new fans forget that the team has been one of the more forgettable franchises in recent years. One little tool that the team isn’t using to help people move on from the recent past is a new name.

Mogul/rapper and minority team owner Jay-Z, a Brooklyn native, announced Monday that the team’s name will stay Nets. His other big announcement, which was made overlooking the under-construction Barclays Center, is that the arena will open in September 2012 with a series of eight concerts by him before the opening tipoff of the Brooklyn Nets season.Continue reading...

The Internet domain name industry is in upheaval as the self-appointed central authority, ICANN, is challenged by seismic shifts in economics and consumer choice.

The debate over new and expanded gTLD’s is heating up even more as Monday’s latest version of the gTLD Applicant Guidebook along with a new dedicated microsite were released.

The deadline to register in ICANN’s TLD Application System (TAS) in the first round is January 12 through April 12, 2012, with registration in the TAS by 11:59 pm UTC on March 29, 2012. 

As FairWinds Partners advised clients this week, “ICANN can continue to amend the Guidebook as it sees fit with no community input and no outside review process. It can even alter the Guidebook after the application period opens on January 12, 2012. So stay alert, keep reading gTLD Strategy for policy updates, and please email us with any questions.” 

Voices from all corners are weighing in on the imminent changes where money will buy brands domains.Continue reading...

Pity Porsche. It's not the German automaker's fault that its most iconic model just happens to have the same numerical name as the most famous terrorist attack in history. But these are the cards it's been dealt, and the brand has to play with them.Continue reading...