Cooper Tire stays on gridiron

Cooper Tire and Rubber Co. will be a sponsor of ABC's College Football Halftime Show again this fall, a move that could generate millions of dollars in publicity for the Findlay tire manufacturer.

This will be Cooper Tire's fifth year sponsoring the network's Saturday afternoon halftime show, which the company said is viewed by about 4 million homes each week.

ABC and ESPN, its partner network, will begin airing their college football programming on Thursday, and the schedule runs through late October.

"This sponsorship ... offers a meaningful opportunity for Cooper to continue enhancing its marketing support for our dealer network," Julie Smalstig, the company's director of consumer and channel marketing, said in a statement.

Representatives for Cooper Tire could not be reached to speak in more detail yesterday.

National sports sponsorships are highly valuable for companies, said Eric Wright, vice president of research and development for Joyce Julius & Associates Inc. in Ann Arbor. The firm measures the impact of corporate media sponsorships.

"It's going to generate millions of dollars of exposure value," said Mr. Wright, whose firm does not work with Cooper Tire.

The value of national sports sponsorships can vary widely, Mr. Wright said.

The benefit of such deals is that they provide consistent screen time and large audiences that sponsors can count on to generate awareness about the company.

"It's a very predictable type of result with a sponsorship like that, which can be very advantageous," he said.

Cooper Tire said last year that it garnered 36.7 million "impressions" of the Cooper name and logo as a result of the sponsorship. The company declined to disclose at that time how much it paid for the halftime show spotlight.