For a small start-up, Great Florida Bank thinks big.
Open for just 11 months, the Miami bank has accumulated $500 million of assets and recently announced that it is adding six branches to the five it already has.
And though other new banks might limit their corporate sponsorships to, say, local road races, Great Florida has struck a high-profile deal with the National Basketball Association’s Miami Heat.
Since postseason play began last month, Great Florida has been marketing itself as the “official playoff bank of the Heat.” The bank’s name appears on the team’s official “Red Zone” playoff logo, which is plastered on billboards, game programs, print ads, and signs inside the American Airlines Arena, where the Heat’s home games are played.
Great Florida also receives mention as the Heat’s playoff sponsor during radio commercials and game broadcasts.
The bank would not disclose what it paid for the sponsorship rights, but the investment looks like a good one. The more playoff games the Heat wins, the more exposure Great Florida gets, and at this point the team appears to be the one to beat in the Eastern Conference.
Armed with arguably the NBA’s most dominant player, the center Shaquille O’Neal, the Heat swept its first-round series against the New Jersey Nets and as of this writing is leading the Washington Wizards 2 games to 0 in the second round. If the team advances to the finals, its season would extend well into June.
How a little-known bank aligned itself with one of the NBA’s elite teams is a lesson in sports marketing.
The $9.3 billion-asset BankUnited Financial Corp. in Coral Gables is actually the “official bank of the Miami Heat,” and its contract runs for several more years. But that deal does not include playoffs — a setup that is not unusual in corporate sponsorships, according to Darryl Lehnus, the director of the center for sports sponsorship and sales at Baylor University in Waco, Tex.
Melissa Gracey, a spokeswoman for BankUnited, said that the Heat approached her company first about being the playoff sponsor.
“They presented us with the sponsorship deal, but it was a lot of money,” Ms. Gracey said. “We just didn’t think it was worth it for 28 games.” (That is the number of postseason games a team would play if it advanced to the finals and all four rounds of competition extended to the maximum seven games.)
The Heat then approached Great Florida, which already had a smaller sponsorship deal with the team. Eve Greenbarg, a spokeswoman for Great Florida, said it jumped at the chance.
Money was not much of an object. Though Great Florida has yet to turn a profit, it is flush with capital, because of the $50 million it raised before it opened its doors.
Great Florida’s chief executive officer, Mehdi Ghomeshi, was BankUnited’s CEO from December 1998 to April 2001. He is credited with cleaning up that bank’s mortgage portfolio and establishing business and private banking divisions.
But Ms. Greenbarg dismissed any suggestion of a budding rivalry between Mr. Ghomeshi and his former employer.
The playoff sponsorship “made sense for us as a company,” she said. “It had nothing to do with any other outside interests.”
