Acrisure’s financial strategy in renaming Heinz Field

PITTSBURGH — It’s been 18 days since Heinz Field officially became the Acrisure Stadium. The switch has been met with mixed reviews, to say the least.

The move is reportedly worth more than a hundred million dollars over the next 15 years.

Is it possible for a company to get bang for that kind of buck?

“It’s good exposure for a brand; good exposure for a company that people didn’t know a lot about,” Ari Lightman, Professor of Digital Media and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon said. “I imagine it’s fairly important for them to connect to a certain type of consumer as well as a new prospective consumer.”

The naming rights are a point of entry to the Steel City market. But is the cost worth it?

“It’s really hard to put sort of a return on investment,” Lightman said. “There’s a variety of different things that go into how people resonate with a brand, remember it and consequently act upon it, seek more information and eventually utilize them for the services they are looking for.”

He says the buy is likely to be part of a wider marketing strategy. Even though at least some of the attention has been negative so far, in this case any publicity could be good publicity. It all depends on where the company goes from here.

“This is a company I didn’t know anything about before and now people are talking about them quite a bit. They’ve gotten a lot of exposure.”

The Steelers open the pre-season at the Acrisure Stadium on August 13.

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