Countless articles and video tributes have been produced recently about the history of the Big East conference, now that the conference has lost many of its original schools and will soon be renamed.
One nugget, however, caught our eye. In the Alexander Wolff article published in Sports Illustrated, “Pearl, In the Lane, With the Kiss,” Wolff describes how the conference got its original name, way back in 1979:
“Soon the fledgling league had a couple of employees working out of the back of a Providence advertising agency, where one of the partners, Jim Duffy, had stumbled upon a name: ‘It’s going to be big, right? And it’s going to be in the East.”
And thus the conference became the Big East, courtesy of an ad man in Providence.
This is just one of the many surprising ways that advertising agencies contribute to organizations. It’s not always the video you see on TV, the audio on radio, or the copy appearing on a website; Davis Advertising is in the naming business as well.
So, anyone starting a new basketball conference?
