City vehicle stickers are easy to forget once they are pasted to car windshields. However, for the 2012–2013 year, a new idea could attract millions of dollars in new revenue to Chicago.

Currently, vehicle stickers bring in $100 million to the city every year. Everyone who has a car in Chicago for more than 30 days must purchase a vehicle sticker. This is a wheel tax on Chicago drivers, said Kristine Williams, media contact for the Office of City Clerk Susana Mendoza.

The new idea is to bring in a corporate sponsor to keep the fee from being raised.

“Clerk Mendoza’s goal is to not raise city sticker fees while she is in office,” Williams said. “There have already been proposals by aldermen to raise city sticker fees and her goal is—hopefully—by bringing in new revenue on the city sticker, she can hold off.”

To Mendoza, finding new ways to bring in revenue to the city is key. Fees cannot keep being raised, she said.

“The city of Chicago is seriously in need of new forms of revenue, and offering sponsorship opportunities is an effective strategy, yet one that should have been considered years ago,” said Kevin Christophersen, associate professor in the Marketing Communication Department at Columbia.

Zeline Kelly Bates, adjunct faculty member in the Marketing Communication Department, agreed with Christophersen.

“I think this is absolutely a way where the government says we’ve got to do something a little bit different because we are losing revenue off of this,” Bates said.

Currently the stickers depict an image designed by a high school student on the front. A contest is held every year and the winner’s work is printed on the stickers. Bringing in a sponsor for the stickers will not alter this.

“On the back of the sticker is where [Mendoza] would envision a sponsor,” Williams said. “It could be a logo, a tagline, perhaps a QR code [a barcode scannable by smartphones] that you scan to get sponsor information, and this is the portion of the sticker—the portion that faces into the vehicle not out of the vehicle—that would have the logo.”

The City Clerk’s Office has requested feedback from potential sponsors, Williams said. The responses to these requests for information were due on Sept. 19. The next step is to issue a request for proposals from interested parties.

“[Advertising] agencies review the proposals and determine if they have a client that would be best suited to appear on Chicago city stickers,” Christophersen said.

Responses for the Request For Information and the Request For Proposal should be out in October, Williams said. “When you release an RFP, you are asking people to do something,” Bates said. “From a marketing standpoint, I’m thinking that you are absolutely looking at some kind of agency to say we will do this as a support mechanism.”

If an agency thinks it has a client suited to appear on the sticker, it will bid for that position, Christophersen said. The time of year when the sticker is bought and the size of the car determines the fee. New residents have 30 days to buy their vehicle sticker before they are charged a late fee. The stickers, which are placed in the lower right-hand corner of the windshield, expire June 30 of every year.

“We are hoping this will open doors for other sponsorship between the city and corporations,” Williams said.