It was just another luncheon speech for director of athletics Ted Leland. But when he finished his spiel for alums in Los Angeles, they stood up and applauded. "You usually don't get a standing ovation for anything but going to the Rose Bowl or disciplining the Band," he says. "I never would have believed that taking the signs down would have the same impact."
Leland is talking about the 10-by-30-foot advertising billboards that used to be displayed at campus sports venues. The signage received a flurry of media attention last summer when San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Simon admiringly described the decision by Stanford officials to remove the corporate ads as "a move that runs counter to the trend at most American college sports programs." The Chronicle of Higher Education ran with the ball, noting that Stanford was the first university with prominent athletics teams to make such a decision.
In fact, the billboards have been disappearing gradually -- over the past four years, by Leland's count. In 1996, corporate ads were removed from the University's baseball and soccer fields. Then they came off the tennis scoreboard. By fall quarter, they will be gone from the football stadium and the scoring tables in Maples Pavilion. "We've been phasing out the signage for some time, as contracts with our corporate partners ended," says Leland, PhD '83. "We had a lot of signage for a while, and our success in selling became our own worst enemy. We just felt the signs had gotten out of hand."
Under the terms of their contracts, however, radio stations and networks that broadcast Stanford games will continue to display some small signage near their broadcast booths in Maples and at the stadium. Commercial ads also will continue on the Cardinal's website, and the Nike "swoosh" -- the logo of the firm founded by Phil Knight, MBA '62 -- will still be visible on the uniforms of Stanford's varsity teams.
The earliest conversations about removing the billboards began five years ago, when President Gerhard Casper invited Leland to lunch at Hoover House. Casper was concerned about the growing commercialization of sports and saw the big signs as a major distraction. "I am pleased with the progress Ted Leland and his staff have made in removing advertising from our sports arenas," says Casper, who stepped down August 31. "Although the financial realities of collegiate sports probably make some corporate sponsorship inevitable, I look forward to a day when this is no longer true. In the meantime, at Stanford we will always make a point of saying that ours are student-athletes, with the emphasis on students."
University administrators also vetoed the athletics department's exploration of virtual advertising with Princeton Video Image Inc., a New Jersey company that markets video technology to major league baseball broadcasters. Stanford considered leasing equipment that would have electronically superimposed computer-generated corporate logos on the playing floor at Maples Pavilion. The virtual ads would have been visible only to the potential Bay Area viewing audience of 5 million who tuned in to men's and women's basketball games -- not to ticket holders inside Maples.
But University officials ruled that the "no billboards" policy meant no virtual billboards, as well. "The direction that we were given [by administrators] was that we wanted to get rid of the signs," Robert Carruesco, director of marketing for Stanford's athletics department, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We are all on the same page now." Carruesco added that the University and the athletics department have "great assets to work with" and suggested that "there are other ways to support the [athletics] program without being overly commercial."
Leland agrees that it's a fine line to walk. "Some people would argue that we're a big business in the athletics department, and that if we are, we should have all the 'signs' that a big business has," he says. "But the reality is that we're an educational enterprise that sometimes looks like a business. If you're a university president or an athletics director, you're concerned about where the business function of your job starts and ends, and where the educational function starts and ends."
The department of athletics, physical education and recreation has more than 45 national and local corporate sponsors, including soft-drink manufacturers, brokerage houses and dot-com companies. Together, the firms consistently contribute about $3 million of the department's annual $48 million in revenues -- money it relies on to fund its activities.
So far, Leland says, only three corporate sponsors have canceled in response to the billboards' being pulled. The rest have accepted other perks, including free tickets and tailgate parties, and Leland is forecasting sponsorship revenues of some $2.8 million in 2000-01.
It's unlikely that Stanford will start a trend, says Jim Host, president and CEO of Host Communications, the marketing agency for the NCAA. Because Stanford is such a "unique, heavily endowed institution," he predicts that the University's decision to remove advertising will have little effect on other schools. "The majority of schools in Division I are public institutions that are getting more and more tax dollars removed," Host says. "I see them trying to generate more ways of gaining revenues, as opposed to reducing them."
Leland concurs. "I see this as the right decision for Stanford, but I'm not sure we're a national model for anybody else," he says. "Only the rich can afford to be moral; and so, in some ways, we're not a model for other people. If the choice had been either to have advertising or drop sports, we might have come to a different decision."
