Exclusive: Verizon, Subaru and Walmart Kick Off ACC Football on The CW

Riverdale and college football are officially on the same network—and major brands are ready for it.

Ahead of The CW’s kickoff for its first season of ACC college football this weekend, featuring the Cincinnati Bearcats taking on the Pitt Panthers, the network landed major sponsors such as Verizon, Subaru and Walmart.

For its latest live sports venture, the Nexstar-owned network partnered with Verizon as the presenting sponsor for ACC football, and Subaru will sponsor halftime for the entirety of the season.

The network has added more than 15 new advertisers, driven by sports, and also recently signed Walmart as the season-long sponsor for the ACC Player of the Game.

“All of these advertisers, folks that have never aired on CW entertainment, but your typical big sports players have made the move over to us with the ACC,” Todd Braverman, evp and head of national sales for Nexstar Media Group/The CW, told Adweek. “The response from our advertising partners and agencies and clients has been unbelievable.”

According to Braverman, the strongest categories include QSR, pharmaceutical and telco.

“We’ve had very little direct response,” said Braverman, adding that The CW has sold out all of the fiscal third quarter games with national brands. “We’ve had demand from the national brands to be part of this.”

Football is just the beginning for The CW.

The network has already locked down a halftime sponsor for ACC basketball, and its sports deals have come together quickly.

Though the CW has the exclusive broadcast rights to 50 ACC college football and basketball games through the 2026-27 season—a conference that will soon be joined by SMU, Cal and Stanford in 2024—the network only landed the deal in July, a timeline that would usually exclude it from being sold as part of this year’s TV upfront.

“This came fast and furious at us,” Braverman said. “The benefit we had was a slower moving upfront. If this was one of those quicker moving upfronts, where everything was done by Memorial Day, we might have been in a little bit of trouble.”

The CW officially closed its upfront in August, seeing “basically flat” dollar volume and unit rates up mid-single digits. But the addition of live sports has been a high point for the broadcaster, with sales “surprisingly very good.”

“In this marketplace we’re in, with the writer’s strike, live sports is becoming so much more important,” said Braverman. “We lost dollars on our broadcast prime entertainment inventory, because those dollars were either shifting out of prime, or they were going to live sports or digital.”

New players in town

The CW will look to build on its sports presence in 2024, with basketball airing through the beginning of March Madness and LIV Golf beginning early in the year and running through the remainder of 2024. Meanwhile, NASCAR’s Xfinity series arrives on The CW in 2025.

“We’ve learned each sport has their own little upfront, and right now is the football window,” said Braverman. “While ACC is very powerful in football, the ACC is known to be a basketball conference, and we expect to see the same success in basketball that we’re seeing in football.”