Year of giving dangerously

With February upon us, it may sound stupidly self-evident to say that the holiday season is over. But being American, I can justifiably extend my seasonal cheer well into January via the miracle of US college football and its 35 ‘bowl’ games. These lucrative crunch-fests begin around Christmas and go on for weeks, effectively extending a kind of mass holiday cheer throughout my homeland (and via the Internet, to me).

This season, I watched the bowl games in a new light: that of Government’s intention to make 2011 the Year of Corporate Giving. What this means is anyone’s guess, particularly considering that 2010 might be called the Year of Corporate Skiving, with corporate donations to UK arts dropping to their lowest level in seven years.

Ok, so maybe that’s a bit harsh: if businesses are making less money, we can hardly expect them to keep doling it out at the same level. Still, the signs for a CSR renaissance here aren’t encouraging, beginning with the failure of Project Merlin and the attendant question mark that failure places next to the Coalition’s much-ballyhooed Big Society Bank. And yet Government seems hell-bent on pushing companies to give more.

What does this have to do with American college football? It has to do with what UK companies might, with global precedent, demand in return for their increasingly precious cash. You see, every college bowl game is named, sponsored and thus practically owned by a big corporate patron.

Predictably, the results range from funny to perverse. Chick-Fil-a, Tostitos, and Outback Steakhouse are all named sponsors of bowl games, during which they presumably also vend their carb-and-fat rich chow to the world’s most obese fan base. At the irony-free other end of the spectrum, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl sounds admirable enough, although it’s unlikely that the hunger in question extends to the Cadbury employees Kraft put onto the dole when it recently closed a big plant near Bristol.

It’s easy enough to dismiss such corporate heavy-handedness as one of those scary-weird American quirks that elicit nervous chuckles here. But the UK is a past master of such schemes. The Tate museums, the Wellcome Collections, various schemes and venues named Clore…you get the picture.

Giving the current climate, one wonders not if we’ll see an onslaught of big-ticket corporate branding, but when. The future might find us buying tickets to the National (Tyre) Theatre or settling in for a screening at the BMI BFI. No institution would be too rarefied for a bit of corporate-sponsored image re-management (ROHSBC, anyone?) Education is fair game, too—since Lord Harris already sponsors a named federation of schools, can the Virgin Academies be far behind?

All that said, the current Capitol One Bowl (result: Alabama 49, Michigan State 7) offers a salutary tale here. What began as the Tangerine Bowl—because it’s played in Florida—was previously the CompUSA Bowl and the Ourhouse.com Bowl, before US banking giant Capitol One stepped in.

The other sponsors? They went bust.