New Jersey: Your Brand Here

Less than three years before New Jersey's New Meadowlands Stadium hosts Super Bowl XLVIII, “serious negotiations” are under way for the $1.6 billion shared home of the Giants and Jets to land a naming-rights sponsor, with MetLife potentially the leading contender, reports the Newark Star-Ledger.

Elsewhere in the Garden State, another stadium is getting a new corporate sponsor. High Point Solutions, a New Jersey supplier of routers, switchers and servers, in March agreed to a five-year, $1 million deal with Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, also according to the Newark Star-Ledger. Quinnipiac is home to close to 6,000 undergrads.

Now the owners of High Point, two brothers who the Wall Street Journal points out never got college degrees themselves, are sticking their company’s name on another university stadium in their corporate home state. This time it’s at NJ's Rutgers University, which has close to 40,000 undergraduates. 

"We're making up for lost time," said cofounder Tom Mendiburu to the Journal.

The Star-Ledger reports that this one will be a little more expensive than the previous. For 10 years of naming rights of the stadium, High Point will shell out “$650,000 annually for the naming rights in an agreement that includes escalating financial clauses that could raise the deal closer to $1 million per year.”

The Star-Ledger also notes that High Point must have a thing for sports because “the company is also an IT partner in the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn,” where the New Jersey Nets plan to move to start the 2012-13 season.

As for what's next: selling naming rights to the entire state? New Jersey, according to the Wall Street Journal, "is running low on cash and is seeking a temporary loan as big as $2.25 billion to plug the hole." Might Viacom pony up for "MTV's New Jersey Shore"? Stay tuned.