• Lot 49, Friday, November 18, 2005 12:30 PM

Relying on the adage that word of mouth is the most powerful form of communication, EchoStar Communications Corp. has persuaded the 125 residents of Clark, Texas, to change the town's name to DISH, which is the name of the EchoStar's satellite-TV service. In exchange, the citizens of DISH will receive free satellite TV. According to the company, and as reported in the blog Lot 49, the deal is worth about $4500 per home. The ad model is novel, if not new. Truth or Consquences, N.M., was rebranded in order to take advantage of the game show by that name in the 1950s. More recently, Halfway, Ore., became Half.com for a year in 2000. That deal was engineered by Mark Hughes, head of Buzzmarketing, who saw the ploy as a way of generating low-cost publicity for the then-new dotcom. "The opportunities for renaming [communities] appear boundless," says Lot 49, which then proceeds, tongue-in-check, to offer some worthy candidates.

Read the whole story at Lot 49 »