Originally Posted By Rebekah This topic is for discussion of the 1/13/2003 news item <b><a href="http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-bizepcot11011103jan11.story" target="_blank">OrSen: AT&T, SpaceShip Earth will part ways after sponsorship deal expires</a></b> The January 11th <I>Orlando Sentinel</I> reports SpaceShip Earth, the attraction contained inside Epcot's geodesic icon is no longer sponsored by AT&T. Disney World would not comment on any new sponsor for SpaceShip Earth would be sought.
Originally Posted By mrichmondj $50M for a ten year contract is pretty expensive, particularly to only reach 8M+ eyeballs a year. Consider that you can get just as many eyeballs on nearly any hour of network television for only hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you can see that sponsoring a Disney attraction must be a pretty hard sell to the advertising industry.
Originally Posted By Jim in Pasadena CA Interesting that AT&T is still sponsoring 'Indiana Jones' and a larger exhibit in 'Innoventions' at Disneyland...
Originally Posted By mrichmondj Another thing that might consider in AT&T's add spinning is that after the recent spin-offs of Lucent, AT&T Wireless, and AT&T Broadband, the company that remains as AT&T is not the mega-corporation it once was. I'm sure the advertising budget is smaller as well.
Originally Posted By Jim in Pasadena CA When I was at Walt Disney World, GE ended its sponsorship with Horizons. Perhaps they knew the writing was on the wall with the attraction closing, but the biggest reason cited was... GE doesn't really consider the 'lightbulb buying consumer' to be the customer they're trying to reach. With all their various division, they just felt they wanted to use those sponsorship dollars elsewhere.
Originally Posted By BuzzLightyear84 "Interesting that AT&T is still sponsoring 'Indiana Jones' and a larger exhibit in 'Innoventions' at Disneyland..." If I ran a company in the situation AT&T is in and had to choose between sponsoring a ride like SSE and a popular headliner thrill ride like Indy, I would choose Indy in a heartbeat. AT&T isn't the company it was back when it was part of Bell Systems, and it doesn't suprise me at all that they want to stop sponsoring SSE.
Originally Posted By NikkiLOVESMickey On wdwmagic.com today, it has the official statement posted from AT&T and they're dropping sponsorship of SE AND Innoventions at DL.
