O2 Pays £200m To Keep London Venue’s Identity Crisis Going
A decade-long naming-rights extension will ensure the building remains recognisable, provided nobody asks what it is called next.
LONDON, The O2 will remain The O2 until at least 2038 after O2 signed a 10-year extension with Anschutz Entertainment Group, reportedly worth about £200m. The deal closes several months of uncertainty in which the building was said to be weighing a quiet rebrand, a shorter nickname and, for a brief period, no name at all.
The venue will therefore keep the name of a telecommunications company while continuing to host concerts, sport, comedy and the commercial exchange of snacks at astonishing prices. It is thought to be the building’s longest-running relationship. Several escalators have been there longer.
“This is excellent news for everyone who has arranged to meet somebody there, then spent 25 minutes establishing which entrance they meant,” said Percival Niblock, senior director of Venue Identity Continuity at the fictional Office for Buildings That Have Become Brands. “The confusion now has a stable trademark.”
“A building can survive many things, but not asking people to learn a new name.”
Reports describe the £200m as a record naming-rights deal. In practical terms, it buys another decade in which visitors can say they are going to the O2 while leaving everyone else to determine whether they mean the arena, the leisure district, the nearest Underground station or the enormous spaceship-like structure that has made a firm commitment to Greenwich.
That certainty has its paperwork.
A committee comprising three fictional branding consultants and one laminated pass has decided that the identity crisis has reached its “premium retention phase”. A name change, it concluded, would require replacement signs, revised maps and the emotional labour of correcting people who have spent years calling the place something else.
“A building can survive many things,” said the committee chair, Dr Marnie Quill, from inside a filing cabinet. “Weather, queues, a performer telling the crowd they are in the wrong city. Asking millions of people to learn a new name is where society draws the line.”
The extension keeps the O2 name on the London venue until at least 2038. Future generations will inherit the same mild uncertainty their parents enjoyed. By then, organisers expect thousands more events and enough branded cups for the building to qualify as a minor telecommunications network.
Analysts at the fictional Institute of Naming Things After Other Things said modern identity is renewed annually, preferably with a large cheque and a logo visible from billboard distance. The venue declined to comment because it is a building. A nearby turnstile described the arrangement as “structurally reassuring.”