Logos Taking Over Floor and Field

     It is clear that big time college sports are big time businesses. The revenue comes mostly from men’s football and basketball. Most of the revenue comes from ticket sales, television, and apparel. With big time revenues comes big time marketing. I am not a marketing expert by any means, but I know that keeping the brand top of mind is a huge obsession of the marketeers. Perhaps this explains why the logos have gotten much larger on football fields and basketball arenas. It is quite noticeable, at least to me.
     Consider three Big Ten teams: Michigan (duh), Michigan State, and Ohio State. Here are photos of their basketball floors from the 1980s and 90s and this year. The simple M, S, or O used to be inside the tip-off circle. It defined the home floor in what was a tried, true, and understated view. 

     It was clear whose arena is was.  The school colors were prominent and one letter in the circle.  That was it.  Simple.
     Let's take a look at some more recent photos of the sames three schools.

     Look at how much larger the logos have gotten. They have gotten huge and take up to a third of the court. The Michigan Block M, the Spartan Helmet, and the OSU logo are on screen during at least 50-70% of the game air time. It is pure, big and bold, marketing. The logo is there, front and center. It is subliminal. It is liminal. Given the size, I would argue it is super-liminal. It is marketing and advertising of the brand throughout the entirety of the game. I only wonder why it took them so long to come up with this idea.
     The same has happened in football but nowhere near the degree that it has happened in basketball. In this case we will only look at Michigan Stadium.  This first photo is from the 1969 Michigan - Ohio State game.  Note that the Block M logo is barely visible and incredibly small.  It barely spans 2-3 yards.  There is no contrast, at least in this photo, in the colors.

 

     Look at Michigan Stadium today.  It is bigger, spanning maybe 10 yards, vivid, and clearly visible.

 

     Clearly, I captured these photos off of various youtubes and websites.  I wish they were all the same perspective to give a better idea of what I am talking about, but, I am sure you get the idea.  

     Needless to say, I did a Google search to see if this phenomena of the growing logo had been covered.  Being a kind of esoteric topic, I had to search several variations of the topic to find just one reference, a slide-show, in the USA Today of 2-27-13.  I will close this post with a photo from the USA Today slide show of the massive Kansas Jayhawk logo (you're welcome Ann Hicks!).