It would be funny if it weren't so tawdry. The White Sox get a whopping $500,000 a year, and the giant retail chain gets to spend some of its pocket change on a sponsorship.

But baseball, economics or the repulsiveness of 7-Eleven Slurpees are not really in my crosshairs. My real target is the marketing community in semiconductors and EDA, to whom I say: Don't get any bright ideas.

Branding campaigns for consumers can only go so far, and ultimately the user/viewer/reader gets tired of them. Look no further than the electronics industry. The "Intel Inside" campaign was once hailed as edgy and visionary. But today the only conclusion you can reach is that it was a colossal waste of money.

At the time, Intel virtually monopolized the microprocessor marketplace. You had to work really, really hard to buy a PC that didn't have an Intel CPU in it (not counting Apple, which has never been a threat). So if you wanted to build PCs, you pretty much had to deal with Intel or you were shut out (at least that's what a few folks have alleged in various investigations in Europe and elsewhere).

So if you own the market, and the operating system doesn't work without your MPU, why do you have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to brand yourself in the eyes of the consumer? Are you doing it for the long run, in case some competition does emerge? Well, that certainly hasn't worked. AMD is building design-ins methodically, including at some major Intel customers, so clearly "Intel Inside" doesn't matter quite as much these days.

Sony was the Cadillac of televisions for a decade, but now "Trinitron" doesn't have the cachet it once did. As a matter of fact, if you can find a big screen for an affordable price (made by the Taiwanese, Chinese or Koreans), you can bet where the consumer's buck will land.

So before you sponsor the puck drop at San Jose Sharks' games or try to get a highway renamed for your latest FPGA, think twice. Things like "This school Xing brought to you by Xilinx" aren't doing anyone any good.