And Now, a Really Big Message from Our Sponsors

Driving along the 10 or the 110 freeways through downtown Los Angeles, you’re jarred by the two towering structures advertising the Staples Center arena and its partners and think: “Those babies are way too big.” They are, by normal standards. Too big by a magnitude of three. Scraping the sky, one at 143 feet and the other at 135 feet, the two “marquees,” as the developers call them, are at Figueroa Street next to the 10 Freeway, and at 11th Street next to the 110.

If you’ve read Chapter IX of the city municipal code, you know that for a property with 100 feet or more of street frontage, the maximum height allowed for “pole signs,” like the ones at Staples Center, is 42 feet. So what about the enormous $1.7-million signs now looming over the 400,000 motorists who drive by each day on the Harbor and Santa Monica freeways?

The City Council approved them, in February, in an ordinance about Staples Center exterior signage. The marquee signs could be 150 feet tall and carry 3,700 square feet of advertising, including the rotating advertisements for the center’s 10 founding partners: Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America, DirecTV, Los Angeles Times, McDonald’s, Pacific Bell, Pepsi-Cola, Toyota Motor Sales, Sempra Energy and United Airlines. Those companies paid $2 million to $3 million each to join that inner circle. Among their rewards is signage far more prominent than any allowed to their competitors. In between the advertisements are electronic message boards that announce upcoming events.

Other new arenas across the country are adorning themselves with colossal signs. But Ted Fikre, executive vice president and general counsel for the center, says, “We like to think we’re doing it a bit bigger. . . .”