SOON IT WILL BE "BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY CLEAR CHANNEL MOON"NEW YORK - Sports teams do it; colleges do it; hospitals and even some playgrounds do it. Almost anyone with a prominent venue is eager to sell its naming rights to businesses looking to trumpet their trademarks.
Tacking company names onto important places isn’t anything new. Both Times Square and Herald Square in New York, for example, were named after major daily newspapers.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had never given the concept of naming rights any thought until he was driving to work across the Brooklyn Bridge last April and heard a radio ad for the “International Star Registry” which purports to allow ordinary people to name stars for $54.
“I thought to myself, what a sweet gift that would make for my mother in Ghana,” Annan said. “This led me ponder, who owns the naming rights to the moon? Well, I thought to myself, since the moon revolves around the earth, in that sense the earth controls the moon, so -- I nearly wrecked the car! The U.N. must own the naming rights to the moon, I decided! And that's how the whole damn thing started."
Annan says that several companies have expressed interest in paying more than a billion dollars for the rights. Although he wouldn't name them, it is believed that San Antonio's Clear Channel Communications, Inc. is among the front runners.
Clear Channel's CEO Mark Mays said that if his company consummates the deal, Clear Channel's lawyers likely will insist that references to the moon in all commercial media include the Clear Channel mark. "We're going to have them go back to the old Honeymooner shows and change Ralph Kramden's dialogue so that he says, 'You're going to the Clear Channel moon, Alice.'"
Kofi Annan, for one, doesn't care if people actually call the moon by its paid name. "What the hell do I care what the people call the moon, so long as I get the money?" he bristled. "Do you think the International Star Registry cares if anyone actually calls the stars by the names people choose for them? That little company is going to be the U.N.'s model."
Mays said that Clear Channel is exploring eventually sending morning hosts Jim Krenn and Randy Baumann to the Sea of Tranquility for a week of broadcasts.
Kofi Annan said that the U.N. would also look into selling naming rights to international bodies of water. "One thing is for sure, we ain't making any money calling them the 'Atlantic' and 'Pacific' Oceans."
But first, he said, the moon. Tomorrow, the world.
