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Sears tower11/11/2023 3 UNITED TOWERĪt 850,000 square-feet, the largest tenant at Willis Tower isn’t its namesake - it’s United Airlines. After all, no one wants to risk making another Time Magazine list of history’s Top 10 Worst Corporate Name Changes. Perhaps Aon will decide to run out the clock on their current deal. The twin-antennaed skyscraper is simply known by its address: 875 North Michigan Avenue. More than two years later, there’s still no new naming deal. In February 2018, the Hearn company decided to remove the John Hancock branding from the famous tower named in 1969 for the insurance company. “There’s still a lot of prestige to have your name on a building like that.” 2 233 SOUTH WACKER “It’s a very valuable asset in an expanding market in the South Loop,” Masi says. “People start to give up once you do this naming roulette that never seems to stop,” says Pete Herrnreiter, vice president of strategy and planning at Motion, a Chicago-based brand and strategic communications agency.īut without a clear-cut secondary option, Aon may still decide that a few bad headlines are worth the added value of naming rights to one of the most iconic buildings in America. Many fans have rebelled and settled on New Comiskey or simply Sox Park. The Cell), and now, as of 2016, Guaranteed Rate Field. Over the past few decades, it’s been called Comiskey, U.S. The more a name changes, the less impactful it’s likely to be. There’s also the problem of diminishing returns. “If they have two big buildings in the same downtown, would they change the Willis Tower to Aon 2? From a brand standpoint, I think that’d add more confusion,” says Kevin Masi, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Torque, a real estate marketing and brand management firm. The existence of the Aon Center adds an extra wrinkle here. Back then, the white-stone clad building was named for Amoco, though many Chicagoans still called it “Big Stan” in honor of former tenant Standard Oil Company of Indiana. Then again, the potential for bad publicity didn’t stop Aon from stamping their name on 200 E. A company that calls itself the world’s leading provider of risk management may not want to risk Donald Trump’s business strategy of “bad publicity is better than no publicity at all.” Nearly 100,000 Facebook users joined the People Against the Sears Tower Name Change group and 50,000 more signed the online petition It’. Following the 2009 Willis deal, local media dedicated an entire news cycle to angry residents who had a skyscraper-sized chip on their shoulder about the loss of the Sears branding. Well, for one: The reigning heavyweight champion of the city’s skyline comes with plenty of baggage, and Aon may not want to relitigate a messy breakup. If they’re paying for it, why wouldn’t Aon etch their name on their new 1,451-foot-high steel-and-glass trophy? Plus, they’re inheriting a $1 million-a-year contract for the tower’s naming rights through March 2025 along with two five-year renewal options. It should be a no-brainer: Aon just spent big bucks to vanquish their rival and declare the Willis brand dead. In the meantime, let’s rank the most likely possibilities. That’s why the only question anyone seemed to care about last month when Aon announced the $30 billion deal to acquire Willis Towers Watson, the Willis Group’s successor, was: Whose sign will hang above the entrance of 233 South Wacker Drive? Aon isn’t saying, and we may not know until the mega-merger closes early next year. To reply “Oh, you mean the Sears Tower?” to any mention of Willis Tower became a matter of provincial civic pride. Eleven years have passed since the Willis Group, a London-based insurance broker, purchased the naming rights to the 110-story skyscraper, but the change never truly registered with locals.Įven after the initial outrage quieted to a murmur, many Chicagoans took up passive resistance by pretending the deal never happened.
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