‘i' blinks on name of Mark
WHEN i wireless announced more than a year ago that it had secured the naming rights for The Mark of the Quad-Cities in a $4.25 million, 10-year contract, myself and many others were bracing themselves for a corporate name atop the Moline arena.
Yet, The Mark’s name has remained intact for the past 13 months. There are signs on the Mark marquee and entrance floor for i wireless — the Urbandale, Iowa, cell company that doesn’t believe in using the shift key — but not a name change.
And, apparently, it’s going to stay that way at least into the near future.
“It’s kind of in limbo until they decide what they want to do,” said Mark executive director Scott Mullen. “They’ve accomplished the goal of making sure they’re the ones to name the building. They just haven’t pulled the trigger yet.”
And, i wireless’ Gary Baron says, that trigger won’t be pulled for a while.
“It will happen, I just honestly don’t know when,” he said. “We just haven’t put it on the front burner.”
Mullen and Baron said i wireless has paid its part of the deal since it was announced in August 2005, and has received several perks and benefits connected with the deal.
Everything but naming The Mark.
Isn’t that kind of like buying, say, a cell phone and not activating it?
“That’s the one part of the agreement we haven’t taken advantage of,” he said.
One concern, Baron said, in changing the name is that Baron has heard there might be complaints from the Quad-City market about changing the name.
“There was a little concern that it was a public landmark, and we didn’t want to create any (bad) impression of the public’s perception of the renaming,” said Baron, who joined the company in December, months after the deal was reached.
Besides, Baron said, should i wireless change its name — as it did from Iowa Wireless a few years ago — in the near future, the company wanted to save the hassle of changing the name of the arena yet again.
But as long as i wireless is making its payments to The Mark, it keeps the right to change the name of the facility.
Or not to change it.