For a deal that catapults the Atlanta Braves’ new ballpark among the leading naming-rights deals in all of U.S. pro sports, it was breathtaking in its speed and secrecy.
The Braves’ deal with SunTrust Banks is worth more than $10 million a year over 25 years, according to industry sources, good for the second biggest in baseball and comparable to many recent NFL deals, but it required just three months to conduct formal negotiations this past summer.
To get that sum, the Braves cast a very small net to solicit bids.
Rather than putting the naming-rights opportunity out in the marketplace through a request-for-proposal process, the club made invitations to a small collection of large companies. Club officials declined to specify the number, but most were Braves sponsors.
The private process was designed to more efficiently yield a partner willing to play a major role throughout the creation of the ballpark and mixed-use development, which will cost more than $1 billion and is slated to open in 2017 in Cobb County, Ga.
“We didn’t have dialogue with too many folks on this,” said Derek Schiller, Braves executive vice president of sales and marketing. “The idea was deliberately to not flood the market and instead have a series of conversations with some select people about what the opportunity was. And from there, we landed on SunTrust pretty quickly. My sense is that it’s pretty unusual to get something like this, and of this scale, done so fast.”
The Braves and SunTrust then kept the news quiet for more than a month in order to announce it last week at a groundbreaking event that included MLB Commissioner-elect Rob Manfred and team icon and hall of famer Hank Aaron, among others.
SunTrust sponsored the team’s club area at Turner Field, and will in the new ballpark in an expanded form. Other activations include signs inside and outside the ballpark, and a retail banking presence in the mixed-use development. The deal technically begins in 2017, but the early announcement allows SunTrust to be involved in the design-build process of what will be SunTrust Park.
SunTrust sponsors more than two dozen pro teams, college athletic programs and events, but the deal for SunTrust Park represents its first facility naming-rights deal.
“It will be great for our brand,” said Jenner Wood III, chairman, president and chief executive of the Atlanta/Georgia division of SunTrust Banks, to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, an affiliated publication of SportsBusiness Journal. “We like everything the Braves stand for. Their fan base and our customer base overlap like a glove.”
Schiller credited Van Wagner for helping complete the deal so quickly.
“This was a well-designed process from the very beginning,” Schiller said. “Everybody had the right information coming to the table, and when you have that, you put yourself in a position to move very quickly.”
Staff writer Don Muret contributed to this report.
