Mercedes-Benz will now sponsor the stadiums for two National Football League teams in the same division.
Steve Cannon, CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA, said the company’s contract with the New Orleans Saints, Atlanta’s NFC South division rival, runs through 2021 and isn’t renegotiable.
“We’re going to deliver on that contract in good faith,” Cannon said Monday in Atlanta, where the automaker signed on as the sponsor of the city’s new $1.5 billion downtown stadium. “It’s not like we’re going to head for the hills just because we did this deal. There’s room enough for us to play that deal through to its logical conclusion and then we’ll evaluate it.”
In the four years since Mercedes-Benz took over as the Superdome’s sponsor, the venue has hosted college basketball’s Final Four championship, college football’s title game and the NFL’s Super Bowl. Mercedes-Benz doesn’t have an option to end its agreement for naming rights with the New Orleans Superdome.
“They get a lot of big events, so we’re very happy with how our partnership has played out,” Cannon said. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know back then. Obviously, having two stadiums is not something we would do normally.”
Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz signed a 27-year deal to sponsor the new 65,000-seat stadium being built for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and Major League Soccer’s Atlanta United.
The stadium is under construction next to Atlanta’s 23-year-old Georgia Dome and is scheduled to open in 2017. Neither Cannon nor Falcons owner Arthur Blank disclosed financial terms of the agreement.
Cannon said the pact is the single largest marketing agreement in the world for Mercedes, which also sponsors Mercedes-Benz Arena in Stuttgart.
