NEW CANAAN TO SUGARDADDY.COM?

 

New Canaan, Connecticut today, is a lot different from the place I started to call my hometown
when our family moved there in the late '70's. It's still a bucolic New England town that's long
been known as the "next station to heaven", because of its charm, beauty, and well, perfection.

But now, this small town about 45 minutes from New York City, wreaks of money, power,
entitlement and Wall Street bankers. A nice home starts at $2 million and high school students
drive BMW's, Range Rovers, and Audi's to get to where they want to go. The athletic facilities
on campus rank among the best in the country and most of the teams bring home state
championships with great regularity.

The rich and famous call New Canaan home as NBC's Brian Williams, Harry Connick, Jr, Jim
Nantz, Mike Lupica, ESPN chairman George Bodenheimer, hundreds of CEO's, and more than
a few sugar daddy's reside there.

Perhaps, it is the latter that caused an on-line dating site to make the town an interesting offer.
Sugardaddie.com has put $10 million on the table for New Canaan. If it changes their name to
Sugardaddie.com, USA, the cash is theirs. The deal would last for 10 years and require the town
to use Sugardaddie.com in everything from town hall to the school system.

In this day and age of Facebook, tweeting, and a million news sites on the Internet in search of
eye-opening  content, this is nothing more than a publicity stunt for a company in search of free
attention. Sugardaddie.com has already gained a good amount of it as this article goes on-line. Anybody who googles "New Canaan" is bound to see the article about Sugardaddie.com to
follow. That in turn leads to more hits and traffic for its site. I'll admit, I checked it out.

Next week, I'm sure the executives at Sugardaddie.com will boast that traffic to the site was
up 154 percent since making their offer to New Canaan. That's how the game is played today,
isn't it?

For the people in New Canaan, this offer barely caused a smirk, snicker, or even a yawn. $10
million? That's about half of the bonus that most Wall Street bankers in town bring home. It's
about the sum of a home in New Canaan and a second one in Nantucket. In short, $10 million
is not chump change, but it's nothing to make people in that town even blink when it comes
to changing its name to Sugardaddie.com.

But Sugardaddie.com, USA would have been interesting for this New England town, even if
was for just a day.