Verizon is Out as Sponsor of Harbour Town Event

Earlier in the week, Jon Show was reporting that the PGA Tour was working with the organization behind the event at Harbour Town to identify a new sponsor to replace Verizon for the event after the 2010 season.

Tour officials are quietly shopping a new deal to replace Verizon, whose five-year contract estimated at $7M annually expires after the event next April.

Today, the PGA Tour announced that it was true that Verizon will be moving on from sponsoring this tournament and that it is actively courting future title sponsors.

Becky Carr, senior vice president of marketing for Verizon Business, said, "Although we’ve enjoyed an outstanding partnership with the Heritage, we decided that given the global scope of our business, it made sense to restructure our future involvement with the PGA Tour to focus on select PGA Tour events that will provide Verizon Business with more opportunities for business development throughout the year."  

The move makes sense for Verizon, whose saturation with its products are more catered to small- to mid-size businesses.  They can get more bang for their buck as a secondary sponsor, giving spectators a chance to experience their services on tournament site, as opposed to having their name on a banner and a skybox at 18 green.

This is the first chatter around title sponsors leaving in some time, but Verizon is now the eighth title sponsor to announce that they will not return to the Tour.  Verizon joins Chrysler, Buick, Stanford Financial, FBR, US Bank, Crowne Plaza, and CA in this category.  In contrast, the Tour has locked up long term deals for the Greenbrier event, replaced Mercedes-Benz with SBS to start the season in Hawaii, and extended sponsors on four other events.

In this case, the talk seems to have been initiated in a manner that will work out well for the Tour.  With the better part of nineteen months' time to lock up a title sponsor for 2011, the Tour should be able to identify a company to pick up the title sponsorship.