Professor Michelle Roehm Applauds BB&T’s Partnership with the ACC

BB&T partners with Atlantic Coast Conference
Reposted from SportsProMedia.com
22 October 2010 | By Rahul Bhatt

American banking corporation, Branch Banking & Trust (BB&T) has become the official bank of the collegiate athletic league, the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).

Under terms of the deal, BB&T replace RBC Bank to become a corporate partner of the league. BB&T will have exclusive television and marketing links with football and basketball, along with the conference's championship events. The bank also will sponsor the Players of the Decades featured on the ACC website.

Steve Wiggs, the bank's chief marketing officer, said that the sponsorship made good business sense taking into account that it has a branch presence in every ACC state except Massachusetts. Wiggs said BB&T will be able to "take advantage of full TV advertising of all ACC football and basketball games, which complements our overall TV media plan."

Commissioner of the ACC John Swofford, also expressed his delight stating that BB&T "is a natural fit" as a corporate sponsor given the "great importance for corporate support within intercollegiate athletics."

"BB&T will benefit from the broadened definition of success that is associated with the ACC. The ACC's academic and athletic accomplishments dovetail nicely with BB&T's position as a bank that helps individuals accomplish important goals,” said Michelle Roehm, a marketing professor and a senior associate dean of faculty at the Schools of Business at Wake Forest University.

"NCAA college sports and Nascar are our largest sports-marketing initiatives," Wiggs said.

Founded in 1953, the ACC sanctions competition for its twelve member universities in twenty-three sports in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The ACC football champion receives an automatic bid to one of the Bowl Championship Series games each season.

Founded in 1872, BB&T recorded assets of US$165.3 billion in June 2009. In February, the bank acquired the naming rights to the downtown Winston-Salem baseball stadium as part of a 15-year deal for an undisclosed price, resulting in the stadium now named as the BB&T Ballpark.

BB&T is also in the third year of a ten-year deal with Wake Forest University for its football stadium, known as BB&T Field. A plus to the football-stadium naming rights is that BB&T Field gets regional and periodic national exposure from television broadcasts of Wake Forest games. In addition, the bank also has the top sponsorship on the Nascar Sprint Cup car driven by Clint Bowyer and run by Richard Childress Racing when it competes in the bank's territory.
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