The arena where the underachieving and not very entertaining professional basketball team in Phoenix plays its home games has recently changed its name. Again.
The venue opened in 1992 as America West Arena and was big news at the time. The Suns had been in the old Veterans Memorial Coliseum (aka the Madhouse on McDowell) for decades and the new arena helped spark a revitalization for downtown Phoenix.
The hometown airline name stuck until America West bought US Airways and the arena took that name for another nine years (US Airways later transitioned to American Airlines but that’s another story). Then began an era of confusion when it became Talking Stick Resort Arena.
Talking Stick Resort is an enterprise of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. It’s a successful casino, hotel, golf course, etc. in the Scottsdale area and an awesome economic asset for this Native American community.
The confusing part is that, as casinos often do, they also host live entertainment and concerts. That means if you were interested in seeing, say, comedian Ron White or the legendary Bob Seger when they came in town, you had to differentiate between it being at The Talking Stick Resort in Scottsdale or 20 miles away at The Talking Stick Resort Arena. Clear as mud? It gets worse.
An Arizona company called Footprint soon emerged as the next naming rights sponsor, which included numerous signage, advertising and activation opportunities both in the arena and during broadcasts of Suns games. City-wide head scratching ensued when the introductory advertising failed miserably in conveying what Footprint did/made/sold. One early spot that ran for quite a while featured an overhead shot of the interior of their large facility. My main take-away was that they had a shuffleboard table for their employees.
If the action during the game was poor (a recurring theme in recent seasons) and you were interested in learning more, you could find out that Footprint made sustainable packaging, food containers, cups, etc. However, they didn’t sell these items to the general public; they sold to businesses. It seems a relatively finite number of people on the planet would be in a position to choose Footprint as a packaging supplier for their company so, unless it was about raising the valuation for a sale or investors, naming a major arena seemed a very odd play from the opening tip-off.
In any event, much like the Suns’ hopes of making a deep playoff run, the Footprint era has come to a close. This once-proud mecca of basketball is now simply the PHX Arena. Let’s hope no one confuses it with our PHX Sky Harbor airport. That Sky Harbor name for the airport was conceived by acclaimed naming consultants Redundant & Redundant Partners. Aside from the name for the airport overall, we also keep travelers on their toes with the names of the facility’s two terminals, which of course are Terminal 3 and Terminal 4.
Welcome to the Valley of the Sun. Heat and quirky venue naming are two of our specialties.
