Let’s Go Play on the Coca-Cola Swingset
Feb 20th, 2007 at 12:20 pm by PSoTD
How long until schools have the Nike and Adidas locker rooms?
Tomorrow’s public parks may be brought to you by your favorite snack, health food or athletic shoe company.
Broward County officials are considering letting sponsors place ads and name amenities at county-owned parks.
“We’re talking about major advertisers with the ability to put their names on facilities: Nike, Reebok, big-name companies,” County Mayor Josephus Eggelletion said.
Officials see an opportunity to reel in millions of dollars for parks and recreation programs by starting a marketing strategy for the county’s 16 regional and five neighborhood parks.
Probably the biggest problem I have with this is that the determination of “client” gets blurred in this process. Yes, there is still the “play client”, but now there is the “advertising client” as well, and eventually what happens is that future development goes to meet both. Are community parks destined to go the way of “amusement parks”, where every moment of fun also serves to upsell another item? Is that what we want our community parks to be? Do kids have to be bombarded with advertising everywhere they go? Will parks eventually only be situated in areas which are literally surrounded with shops and fast food places that are meant to sell to kids? We’re heading towards Disney here, on the public dime.
Marketing Parks…
I wrote yesterday at Suburban Guerrilla about a similar situation in Florida.
It’s a trend, though, so …