Do you use public transportation? Ever took the bus, the train, or the subway? (As we’re international: think of the Underground, the Tube, the Metro, the U-Bahn…) If you did, you might have experienced this already: a stop or station named after a commercial company.

Almost everywhere, mass transportation carriers are selling the names of their subway stations away for branding to corporations, even their most frequented and often historic ones. The brand isn’t placed above the line… but written on the station’s walls and on the network maps, fully embedded into the corporate identity of the carrier. Additionally, the stations are announced by the driver or by a more pleasant and somewhat sensual, recorded voice which is female.

Hundreds of thousands of people take the subway each month and get to read the station signs and hear the announcements.

London, Paris, and LA…

Station sponsoring isn’t new. Take the London Tube. The station “Gillespie Road”, a little outside of the city center, was opened in 1906. When the soccer club FC Arsenal moved into their new stadium in 1913, which was next to Gillespie Road, they urged the Underground carrier to rename the station. They finally succeeded - nine years later, when the station was given the name “Arsenal (Highbury Hill)”; with the brackets and its content disappearing in time.

More sponsored station names: Paris (France), “Carrefour Pleyel”. Bonn (Germany), “Deutsche Telekom (T-Com)“. Geldern (Germany): “E-Dry Club”. New York City (USA), the “47th-50th Streets Rockefeller Center“. The list goes on.

What is fairly common with public institutions like stadiums (Allianz Arena, Porsche Arena, Daimler Stadium, FedEx Field, Staples Center, Minute Maid Park…), theaters (the Ford Center for the Performing Arts), museums (the General Motors Hall of Transportation in the Smithsonian) and even hospitals (the Hasbro Children’s Hospital), is used more and more for public transportation stations.

The Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany (photography: Helmut Reitberger)

Time is everything

These days, with ad blindness increasing, we learn that people are very much aware of ads and their nature; wanting to decide when to consume them by themselves. In the struggle for the consumer’s attention and brand omnipresence, station branding is a rather unrecognized way of creating brand awareness. That’s why it can act far more influencing than ATL ads ever could in subway stations: it stands above of all the posters, stickers and billboards. In the consumer’s view, it lifts the brand up towards becoming an institution. Very subtly, very sovereign, very remarkable.

And it doesn’t have to be that expensive. It all depends on the market. You can buy a station for no more than one thousand Euros per year in Bonn (Germany). In that time, you could also spend 2.9 million Euros for a station at the Las Vegas Convention Center like Nextel did. Well, ok, they did get one of the trains along with their station.

Last but not least: have you ever heard about Long Acre Square? That was the name of a big train station in the city of New York, before a nowadays quite famous newspaper moved their headquarters there. In 1904, the station was renamed in their honor. It’s the Times Square.