For nineteen years, the arena at the corner of Marietta Street and Centennial Olympic Park Drive carried the Philips name. On August 29, 2018, the Atlanta Hawks made it official: the building would be called State Farm Arena, the centerpiece of a 20-year naming rights partnership with the Bloomington, Illinois–based insurance company.
The name change was not a rebrand for its own sake. It arrived alongside a $192.5 million renovation — funded jointly by the Hawks and taxpayer dollars — that had gutted and rebuilt the arena's interior over the previous year. The Hawks called the project the most extensive renovation of an existing NBA arena ever undertaken, and the numbers supported the claim.
What Changed Inside
The renovation touched nearly every part of the fan experience. Concourse layouts were redesigned. A Topgolf suite — one of the first of its kind in a professional sports venue — let groups play simulated golf while watching the game from above. A barber shop overlooking the court offered cuts during live Hawks games. Food pricing was restructured under a fan-friendly model that dropped the cost of concession staples, a direct response to years of complaints about arena pricing across the NBA.
The arena reopened in October 2018, in time for the Hawks' regular season. The physical transformation was unmistakable — the same concrete shell on the outside, but a materially different building on the inside.
The Philips Era
Philips Arena had been the building's name since 1999, when the Dutch electronics company signed the original naming rights deal. During those two decades, the arena hosted NBA All-Star Weekend, NCAA tournament games, major concerts, and — starting in the 2007–08 season, when the Hawks rebranded the arena as the "Highlight Factory" — a deliberate effort to make Hawks games an event rather than an afterthought in Atlanta's crowded sports calendar.
The Highlight Factory campaign worked well enough to shift perception, but the building itself was aging. By the mid-2010s, the Hawks' ownership group — led by Tony Ressler, who purchased the team in 2015 — concluded that a full renovation was the only way to keep the arena competitive with newer NBA venues in other cities.
State Farm's Play
State Farm CEO Michael Tipsord framed the deal in community terms: "This is about how we can engage with the Hawks organization in community efforts." The company, which maintains a regional hub in nearby Dunwoody, positioned the partnership as more than signage — a long-term investment in Atlanta's downtown sports and entertainment district.
State Farm Arena sits directly across from Centennial Olympic Park and within a five-minute walk of Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Georgia World Congress Center, and the CNN Center building (now The CTR). Together, these venues form the densest cluster of major event spaces in the southeastern United States — and State Farm Arena, with its new name and new interior, is the one that hosts basketball, hockey, concerts, and events more than 200 nights a year.
Original reporting by GPB News, Georgia Public Broadcasting, August 29, 2018.