Playboy mansion, Hustler monastery

A few weeks ago, while listening to the car radio, I learned that my traffic report was brought to me by California peaches. Actually, I'm not entirely sure it was peaches because I was so astonished by the notion of any sort of fruit collecting traffic information and broadcasting it over the radio that I found it difficult to concentrate on anything else.\nOf course, I know that what really happened was the company producing the peaches paid the company behind the radio station to mention peaches as the sponsor of the traffic report. In a way, though, this is no less astonishing to me. I seem to recall a time when traffic reports didn't need a sponsor, but now it seems that everything does. Marketing has spread from the confines of commercial breaks into our regularly scheduled ... well, everything. \nPerhaps the most invasive and most dramatically increasing marketing technique is the branding campaign. Schools across the country are auctioning off the naming rights to sports scoreboards, school libraries and even baseball field foul lines. A New York State couple even tried to auction off the naming rights to their child on the Internet for a minimum of $500,000. \nNot finding any takers, they instead named the baby Zane. \nJust last Friday, The Associated Press reported that a Benedictine monastery is also e-selling the naming rights to its property and buildings. The description of the auction on eBay makes it sound necessary, even noble: "It is incumbent upon this Religious Order to use imagination, daring and vision to raise the necessary funds to build the permanent headquarters of the Order." Archbishop Bruce Simpson tries to reassure us that this is simply another opportunity for people "to do good and also have a way to memorialize their family or loved one," and that the order will reject unacceptable names. \n"It's not like Hustler magazine's going to come in and buy up the entire project," Simpson said.\nYet, there still seems something wrong about the monastery's auction: it doesn't jive with our instincts about how monasteries should operate. Tony Reynolds, a CEO who thought up the idea of the auction and is assisting with marketing and publicity, plugs buying the naming rights as "one way (buyers) can say mine is bigger than yours. 'I've got my name on a monastery.' How many people can say that?" \nAren't monasteries supposed to discourage pride, not foster it?\nWe sense that some things simply should not bear a corporate label. When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested in the spring of 2002 that naming rights to the city's parks could be sold to help pay for their upkeep, Gary Ruskin, the executive director of an anti-commercialism (non-profit) organization, protested, "These parks exist to give people a respite from the aggressive hawking of products and huckstering that we are all subject to on a minute-to-minute basis in our society. Naming rights defeats that worthy purpose."\nAs much as we mock sports stadiums named after bankrupt underwear companies, we still buy tickets to games. As much as we ridicule the couple who tried to sell the naming rights of their child, an online poll at www.americanbaby.com found that nearly half of respondents would at least consider doing the same. Hey, at least these parents want to take money for their children to become a walking advertisement, not spend it like all of us who wear clothes splattered with designer logos.\nFor at its heart, prevalent name branding is marketing not a product or even a brand, but an idea:\nEverything must be bought and anything can be sold. \nAnd that is an idea that many of us have purchased willingly -- but at what price?