For sponsors, the ACC is about more than just football

The Atlantic Coast Conference, or the ACC, isn’t the most dominant in college football. But major sports advertisers, like Gatorade, Ally, and Apple, are spending plenty of dollars coast to coast to sponsor the ACC, which now includes a couple of West Coast schools thanks to conference realignment.

The audience for college football is unparalleled by other college sports, consistently averaging about 2 million viewers per game on ESPN, according to Theresa Palmieri, VP of sports brands solutions at Disney Advertising, but sponsors say America’s favorite sport isn’t the only part of the ACC they’re interested in tapping into, focusing also on basketball and increasingly popular women’s sports.

“A lot of times, when brands enter college sports, it’s anchored by men’s football and men’s basketball,” Stephanie Marciano, head of sports and entertainment marketing at Ally, told Marketing Brew. “That will give you the scale, that will give you the visibility, it gives you a lot of fandom on campus and among alumni, but these other sports deliver a lot, too.”

Brains and brawns

With universities like Stanford, Duke, and Notre Dame in the conference, several network and brand execs told Marketing Brew that academic prowess is a selling point for getting involved with the ACC.

Jeramy Michiaels, senior director of programming and acquisitions at ESPN, who oversees the network’s relationship with the ACC, said that those schools’ academic excellence combined with “the elite level of sports that they play,” is “probably the single most exciting part about being with this league.”

Regionality also comes into play for some sponsors, including the North Carolina-based supermarket chain Food Lion, which is one of the longest-standing ACC partners (in addition to Duke, UNC and NC State play in the ACC). Jennifer Blanchard, Food Lion’s director of community relations, said she appreciates the strong tailgate culture that’s a hallmark of the conference, too.

“In the south, folks come dressed for games,” Blanchard said. “Not dressed in athleticwear—dressed up to go to games. You’ve got the bands, and you’ve got the dance teams…tailgating outside, and it’s just a really special experience.”

Touchdown TV

Some ACC sponsors activate at games in-person, but ESPN’s ACC Network helps add reach to those partnerships. The linear network debuted five years ago, when cord-cutting was well underway, but has found ways to continue to increase its viewership, Michiaels said.

This year, for example, represented the network’s most-watched first four weeks of the football season ever, with the ACC Huddle studio show in particular growing “week over week and year over year,” he said.

It’s also been the best college football season since 2016 for ABC, with viewership up 32% year over year, Palmieri said. Major ACC matchups like Clemson-FSU on October 5 have helped fuel that growth, she said, and overall, one-third of the most-watched games across ESPN platforms in the first month of this season featured ACC teams, according to ESPN.

“Live sports is the one thing that continues to drive traditional pay-TV packages,” Michiaels said. “It is something that sponsors get behind, it’s something distributors really look for, and I would say that the ACC Network has probably outperformed our expectations from a revenue standpoint.”

Double-double

Basketball is another boon for ACC sponsors. T. Rowe Price recently signed on as the title sponsor of the ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament, including ACC Network coverage, according to Kelly Fredrickson, the asset management company’s head of global brand and PR. The company sponsored the first round of that tournament this year, and expanded its commitment after that partnership “exceeded our expectations in terms of return on investment and brand impressions,” Fredrickson said.

While Food Lion consistently sees the highest levels of engagement with its ACC activations in football and basketball, other sports are “equally important in our involvement,” Blanchard said. ACC schools like Stanford and UNC have particularly strong women’s soccer programs, for instance, a space that Food Lion has recently begun pushing further into.

Michiaels pointed to women’s volleyball as “a big driver” of ACC Network viewership, and the sport has been on the rise at the pro level in the US, positioning it as another potential area of interest for brands.

Women’s sports are a lynchpin of Ally’s ACC sponsorship: In 2023, Ally became the first title sponsor of the ACC Women’s Basketball Tournament, the Women’s Soccer Championship, and the Women’s Lacrosse Championship. The brand has activated against other sports, including football, gymnastics, and men’s basketball, but those women’s championship events are “the biggest thing” for Ally, Marciano said. T. Rowe Price, too, is looking to get involved on the women’s side, Fredrickson said.

“From a college standpoint, women’s sports is taking off,” Palmieri said. “The interest is there, and brands are specifically asking about how to partner in that space.”