When it comes to the title given to a sport or music venue that represents the local or even national cultural fabric of a community, what’s in a name?
Everything, judging by the rise of financial services sponsorships of stadiums and concert halls in which major brands have secured naming rights for the venue.
As a strategy, it offers mass-audience exposure in a fashion unmatched by other means. It can deepen and extend a brand’s societal and community impact, it can frequently put the company at the centre of seminal experiences for customers while reaching younger audiences, and simultaneously bring the brand into the comfort of people’s homes through television and live streaming.
The USA pioneered this modern phenomenon across its music and sports stadiums, but football club owners throughout the UK, as well as leaseholders of cultural centres for the arts, are beginning to accelerate the trend here, too.
Among Britain’s concert halls and gig venues, where the live music industry has been battered by the effects of Brexit, the pandemic, inflation and cancellations by artists who can’t even afford to tour, financial services firms have provided a lifeline through naming rights deals.
Allianz, Aviva, Vitality, American Express, Barclays, Principality Building Society and Coventry Building Society all have stadiums and/or music venues renamed after them.
Brand and sponsorship directors believe these multi-year commitments to secure a company’s name as the title, prefix or appendage to iconic arenas are delivering value in multiple fronts.
How to amplify the social impact
Within the financial services sector, Aviva has led the most prominent naming rights deal that supports live music and the arts.
The insurer spearheaded a partnership with Manchester City Council and Factory International – the organisation behind the Manchester International Festival – that led to the creation of a new-build music and cultural venue, Aviva Studios, which opened last year in the city.
The partnership, worth £35m, marked the largest investment in a national cultural project since the opening of Tate Modern in London almost 25 years ago and the venue, which Factory International operates, has welcomed 700,000 people in its first year.
Tom Whiteside, group head of sponsorship at Aviva, explained to Financial Promoter the wave of marketing activities that amplify value from the partnership.
“The first 12 to 24 months of any naming rights partnership is about building the venue’s profile and starting to deliver our commitment to long-term social impact. Our challenge is – how do we take that venue and give people an experience of it at home, and hopefully stimulate them to want to go at some point in future?”
One way Aviva has addressed this is through a partnership with Amazon Music on a programme called
City Sessions.
Through this, four intimate, one-off live shows are being live streamed from Aviva Studios across Amazon Prime Video and Twitch through 2024 and 2025.
“That’s an hour-long performance, with pre-recorded interviews with the artists, and it helps show off various parts of the venue,” Whiteside explained.
Social impact has been another strand of Aviva’s activation planning, and key to this is a programme called The Factory Academy, of which the insurer is a principal partner. This free, year-round training programme helps upskill young people, with the aim of diversifying the workforce going into the arts and entertainment.
“This programme has just celebrated its 1,000th graduate and we’ve got relatively grand ambitions to grow that in the coming years,” Whiteside said.
To widen accessibility to events at Aviva Studios, the insurer also runs an ‘Aviva £10 tickets’ programme – which 21,000 punters have accessed.
“We don’t want to be a brand that interrupts an experience but equally, we don’t want to be a brand that’s just plastered on the side of the building. We want to be a positive contributor in this relationship with the people who run Aviva Studios,” Whiteside said.
Aside from the financial services sector, the telecommunications industry has for some time derived huge amounts of brand value from naming rights with music venues, with O2 securing the most well-known of these deals. The mobile network operator has a (reportedly £70m) deal in place until 2027 that includes naming rights for venues such as the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Brixton Academy and Manchester Apollo, along with 10 other venues across Britain.
Despite Aviva’s and O2’s major programmes, naming rights deals in the music and arts space remain relatively rare, though the trend is gathering pace.
Whiteside acknowledged that in these cultural spheres, people are “understandably reticent” of the commercialisation of the arts.
But he added: “Investment in the arts, both public and private, is of the utmost importance. Manchester City Council saw that and did its due diligence on us for Aviva Studios. We presented how we wanted to be a positive partner with them. We needed to make sure our presence was positive for us, but more importantly, that we contribute to the positive role these venues naturally play in the local communities.”
Price your name
For financial services groups, ventures into the live music industry have followed successes from naming rights of sports stadiums.
As they grapple with legacy debts, crumbling infrastructure within their stadiums and spiralling player wages, football clubs are showing a greater appetite to leverage the considerable value of their sacred grounds.
Back in 2019, financial advisory firm Kroll (in its previous incarnation as Duff & Phelps) published a report on the nascent but sluggish development of naming rights deals for UK football stadiums. By not exploiting these lucrative sponsorships, the report said, English Premier League clubs were missing out on almost £100m of revenue.
In the intervening years, the reported sums that have changed hands present a showreel of opportunities for brand directors within financial services, but even more so for clubs and sports associations themselves.
Due to the nature of these complicated partnerships, the terms and numbers aren’t always transparent, but specialist reports and broader media coverage indicate their value.
Both Arsenal and Manchester City have long-standing deals in place for naming rights, with their grounds labelled The Emirates Stadium and The Etihad Stadium respectively.
According to another study from Kroll published this year – Why European football clubs should look to stadium naming rights to diversify income – Arsenal rakes in an estimated €10.5m per season for the naming rights.
The same report estimates that Manchester City, which is due to sign a new deal with Etihad Airways following a reported £400m stadium and shirt sponsorship agreement, make around €14.9m each season from naming rights.
Across other clubs in the Premier League, Brighton & Hove Albion has a 10-year deal in place with American Express, reportedly worth more than £100m, though this includes shirt sponsorship and naming rights to The American Express Stadium – known to fans as The Amex.
The value of AFC Bournemouth’s stadium naming rights and sponsorship deal with Vitality has not been reported or disclosed, but the life and health insurer extended the deal last year until 2026.
At the top of the English game, the Football Association has also leveraged its hallowed property. It signed a five-year deal with BT Group in 2019, worth a reported £60m, that included shirt sponsorship of all 28 England football teams and a new appendage to the title of Wembley Stadium, which became ‘Wembley connected with EE’.
According to reports, this deal is close to being renewed though the price is likely to increase substantially given that, since the last deal was struck in 2019, the England Women’s team won the 2022 European Championships, while the men’s team appeared in two successive finals of the same tournament.
The renaming trend is not limited to the higher echelons of English football; it’s cascading down through the leagues to the game’s grassroots, too.
In National League North, the sixth tier of the English football league system, the accountancy firm MGroup recently secured naming rights for Oxford City’s stadium. The partnership aims to deepen the firm’s roots in the community, support the local women’s game, back education programmes and help local charities, all under the banner of The MGroup Stadium.
To raise brand awareness and the company’s profile, MGroup partner Oliver Squire explained, the firm would struggle to find better exposure anywhere else.
“Our launch event was a great opportunity to bring together our team, clients, other partners of the club and our business connections in the local area,” said Squire. “We will work with Oxford City to organise further networking events throughout the season, which we hope to be as successful in bringing businesses in Oxfordshire together.”
Squire explained that the success of the partnership will not be measured on a direct financial return. Moreover, it’s a mechanism to bolster the brand and embed the business in the community, while expanding contacts and connections.
The art and science of ROI measurement
The measurement question is a complicated one, with many marketing teams using a varied mix while having to quantify metrics that don’t lend themselves to quantification.
At Aviva, the starting point was to map the value drivers for its sponsorship of Aviva Studios, which then informed activation plans to extract maximum value from each element.
The primary driver was brand equity, but significant focus was also placed on the ability to provide business-to-business hospitality, acquire first-party data, strengthen ESG credentials, engage colleagues and attract talent.
“You build a 360-degree picture of value that we can generate from the relationship, if we activate it in the right way,” said Aviva’s Whiteside. “That’s how we look at measurement as well. Brand tracking is a critical tool for us to gain a high-level view on the impact on brand health and to identify areas where we may need to place greater focus and resource.”
Aviva also employs econometric models, as does Vitality for its naming rights deal with AFC Bournemouth.
Whiteside noted that Aviva takes brand tracking measures and builds them into an econometrics model, which shows how the sponsorship delivers against the bottom line.
“Here, we can input some of the spend data, to try to draw meaningful links between the activity and what is happening on a business level,” he added.
Aviva has a set media spend against its Amazon Music partnership, and the team can see where there are peaks on awareness, or where brand sentiment lies, and attribute those to the marketing activity and the experiences people have had.
At Vitality, Ian Roberts, marketing director for direct acquisition, explained that the team has been on a data journey in the past 18 months, as it got to grips with how to analyse ROI from its AFC Bournemouth partnership.
“The measurement conundrum is probably not a new one, in that the measurement of brand impact right at the top of the funnel has been a head scratcher for marketing directors for decades,” he said.
“It goes back to that classic question – is marketing a cost or an investment? It’s absolutely an investment. Naming rights is about brand salience, but actually proving it through a data set is very difficult.”
Roberts explained that measurement activity starts with data and, within what Vitality is allowed, where it can share data and land its core message of promoting more active, healthier lifestyles.
“In the last 10 years, the ability has increased to be smart about how we compound up brand perception to an audience overall,” said Roberts. “We’re in a richer data space now where we can start to explore correlations between forms of measurement or to make a pretty good predictive estimate as to the aggregate brand impact of them.
“Is it perfect? It’s still really hard, but the econometrics and the media mix modelling work helps the ability to do far more data matching across audiences now.”
Through the partnership on the stadium, Vitality can access an ecosystem of connections, which encompasses fans watching at home, or fans reading the matchday digital or print programme, or via the club member emails.
Landing Vitality’s core message consistently through these channels to the same audience is a vital element.
The pushback problem from purists
Beyond football, other sports clubs and associations are showing just as much appetite to cash in on their prized assets.
Allianz signed a deal in 2024 with the English Rugby Football Union (RFU), the domestic governing body for the game of rugby, which included a renaming of England’s home ground Twickenham to the Allianz Stadium. The sponsorship, reported to be worth well over £100m, includes a commitment to support grassroots rugby and raise the profile of the women’s game.
The deal also means that all the domestic rugby associations for Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England now have naming rights in place for their national stadiums.
Allianz is a global leader in the naming rights game, with eight stadiums worldwide now bearing its branding, but as the partnership with the English RFU was announced, there was widespread blowback from fans about selling out.
In the football Premier League, however, supporters now don’t think twice about referring to “the Emirates, ‘the Etihad’, or ‘the Amex’, indicating that brand names can become ingrained in the vernacular of fans, and that purist voices often dissipate over time.
This pushback problem is a common occurrence when brands are seeking to imprint their name on a venue with a lot of history behind it. Carolyn Rich, director of brand at Allianz UK, acknowledged this.
“A particular challenge of the Allianz Stadium in Twickenham is trying to embed the new name after years of it being known as Twickenham,” Rich told Financial Promoter. “A lot of our family of stadiums are newly built and we have been involved from the beginning, but obviously the home of England rugby was built in 1907 and is well established.
“It will take some time for the name to become part of the vocabulary of rugby fans and journalists alike, but we hope that everyone can see the investment in rugby which our sponsorship has brought and the value of that. Embedding the new name is a particular focus for our first year.”
Naming rights are less of a social media/reputational risk when new-build venues adopt the brand name at launch, but when an existing stadium is renamed, companies can alleviate fans’ unease at giving away a part of their club’s heritage by cultivating their confidence.
As Aviva’s Whiteside noted: “When audiences see that you’re there for the right reasons, there’s much less reason to want to push back on that. It’s about establishing trust over the long term.”
Competition for the promotion spots
In the football world, there’s still room for naming rights to expand exponentially in the Premier League and Europe, with several clubs eyeing up how their peers have leveraged these rights for periods of up to 20 years.
Kroll pointed out in its report that, despite the size and largely untapped value across their club stadiums, England and Italy have the least take up of naming rights agreements. The report also found that just 12 of the top 36 teams from Europe’s most significant leagues have a stadium naming rights deal.
Given the evident popularity of these deals, those numbers might change soon.
Everton FC, which moves into a new stadium in 2025, is actively seeking a stadium-name partner. Speaking on
the Football Insider Inside Track podcast, the club’s former CEO Keith Wyness thought Everton could net between £10m and £15m a year for the name alone.
It’s also notable that Tottenham Hotspur FC, which has reportedly been courted by several global brands including Google for the naming rights of its state-of-the-art stadium in north London, has not yet found the right partner, after five years of exploratory talks with suitors.
This extensive search may suggest that even for global, omnipresent corporations, sometimes they walk away where the economics don’t work. It’s worth adding that Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy is famous for driving a hard bargain, but also that no club wants to make a fundamental error of under-selling at the outset.
Walking away is not just about price. All parties have to be aligned on brand values and the social impact of any partnership – particularly when the deals have a prolonged tenure.
For clubs and tenants of music venues, these sponsorships will remain popular, as their sites are the crown jewels of the funding streams available to them,
For financial brands exploring various opportunities (with Manchester United also mulling the prospect of naming rights for a new-build stadium), they might ask their peers at Allianz, Aviva, Vitality, American Express and others: Are naming rights worth it?
It’s a safe bet that the resounding answer will be “yes”.
This article appears in issue 10 of Financial Promoter, published January 2025.