Inside the rise of agencies dedicated to women’s sports marketing

GroupM is the latest agency to open a dedicated women’s sports practice, adding to a growing list of shops finding opportunities to better package and sell their expertise in this booming area. The WPP media investment group started a marketplace for advertisers to invest in women’s sports and committed to double investments in these games. It joins newer players in the space such as performance-based full-service shop Rain the Growth Agency, which opened its HypeHer division to connect brands with women’s sports media opportunities last June. Giant Spoon Partner Laura Correnti founded Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment in December with the backing of her full-service independent shop, aiming to create a leading agency of record for women’s sports. Former WNBA star Sue Bird is Deep Blue’s first partner and chief strategy officer. More established players include Omnicom’s Optimum Sports, which built a dedicated women’s sports practice in 2021. Wasserman’s The Collective is one of the earliest entrants in the space focused on women in sports, music and entertainment, including a $1 million pledge at the time of its 2019 launch to support women’s advancement in sports. Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here Marketers are finding the need for these practices as they pour more dollars into women’s sports and are looking to their agencies to help them show up in the right way. They’re seeking specialized expertise to help them navigate challenges including limited inventory and confusing deal structures that they face when advertising in this space, in some cases, for the first time. “Women’s sports used to be a little bit of a side hustle,” said Christine Guilfoyle, president of SeeHer, the ANA’s global initiative to champion the positive representation of women and eliminate gender bias in marketing, media and entertainment. “[Marketers thought] ‘How do I manage my WNBA inventory that comes from my NBA sponsorship?’ But now, it means big business. As someone who played sports and the mother of two girl athletes all the way through to the collegiate level, it’s amazing.” Brands on average were spending about 9% of their total media budgets on women’s sports in 2023 and 83% of them said they planned on increasing that spending up to 10% of their budgets in 2024, according to a report from fan intelligence firm Sports Innovation Lab last October. That’s due in part to more stars than ever driving bigger audiences and brand interest in women’s sports. Major marketers including State Farm and Nike have signed endorsement deals with University of Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark, for example. Clark has been breaking records left and right this year, including for most points scored in a single season by a NCAA Division 1 women’s athlete during her team’s victory over West Virginia in the NCAA Tournament—the Hawkeyes now advance to the tournament’s Sweet 16 on March 30. Two of the four most-watched regular-season women’s college basketball games since 1999 happened in March thanks to Clark: Iowa’s win over Ohio State (which drew 3.39 million viewers on Fox on March 3) and Iowa’s win over Nebraska in the Big Ten tournament final (which drew 3.02 million viewers on CBS on March 10), as tracked by the The Athletic. Nike and State Farm are examples of major marketers that have long invested in women’s sports. Now, the momentum is causing a gold rush of newer brands to hop in, including Oofos footwear and skincare brand Curology. They’re quickly trying to carve out marketing strategies and navigate deals around women’s sports as movement happens fast in the space and they’re turning to these new agency divisions to help them do so. The agencies that are first movers in opening these divisions could create a winning position for themselves as more brands crave the type of expertise they’re delivering. What’s driving shops to open these divisions “It’s the marketer that drives the money,” said Guilfoyle. “And then the agencies, as they are so apt to do, jump on that bandwagon providing the goods and services that the marketers are looking for.” While Guilfoyle said the market is clearly hot, she questioned the Sports Innovation Lab stat from last October, noting that what 10% actually amounts to is unclear. “It’s slightly misleading, [because] it’s 10% of what?” Still, the stat signals growing investment. Guilfoyle predicts that more brands will flock to invest in this space especially ahead of this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris, where the International Olympic Committee said there will be an equal number of female and male athletes competing for the first time. It follows, then, that marketers will flock to agency divisions to help them advertise there. Guilfoyle said brands are really looking for full-service solutions from these agencies, which means handling everything from setting up the right sponsorship deals with athletes, to creating tailored creative campaigns, to forming the right media plan around women’s sports. “As a performance marketing agency, we see sports in general as being a really critical part of our clients’ go-to-market strategies,” said Robin Cohen, Rain the Growth Agency’s HypeHer lead and executive VP of integrated media investment and planning. “As we were evaluating women’s sports, we were seeing so much momentum in rights deals that were being done and in the social followings that the athletes were having, but it was really confusing for our brands to kind of figure out what’s the best way to start to participate.” Rain also saw the investment as “the right thing to be doing; as an agency, [we] are very passionate about this space,” Cohen said. HypeHer has been helping Oofos build out a performance marketing campaign around women’s sports for the past two years, the results of which have been noteworthy. (The partnership started before HypeHer officially launched, but that work has now been shifted under the division’s remit.) The agency created a cross-channel approach for the brand around key athletes including World Champion Boxer Alycia Baumgardner, women’s basketball star and coach Dawn Staley and Aerial Ski World Champion Ashley Caldwell. Their efforts spanned linear TV, digital video and social. In 2023, results included a 177% rise in Oofos website traffic, a 191% increase in sales growth and a 223% jump in new customers from the year before. In some cases, results from the brand’s women’s sports campaign outpaced those of its men’s sports efforts, according to Oofos Head of Marketing Darren Brown. “We saw not only much stronger response rates and action and engagement, but even conversion come from the women’s college basketball Final Four than we did from the men’s,” Brown said in a case study shared with Ad Age. Cohen said the more HypeHer finds success like it did with Oofos, the more brands will test and increase investment in women’s sports. The agency also works with Curology and water brand Cirkul. Correnti, founder and CEO of Deep Blue, also said she was driven to start a shop dedicated to this space because of her passion for sports. A Division 1 college soccer player, she said “sports were a part of my identity for the first 20-something years of my life.” Watching as the U.S. women’s soccer team won its fourth World Cup in France in 2019 and hearing “Equal Pay!” chants overpower those of the usual “U.S.A!” from the crowd, was a “pivotal moment in women’s sports history,” Correnti said, solidifying her ambitions to dedicate more of her career to women’s sports marketing. Look back: FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 marketing She said the moment after the World Cup felt “different” than in the past where support for female athletes was fleeting … “[I thought] ‘We have momentum.’” There were only five brand partners for the National Women’s Soccer League—Cutter bug repellent, Nike, health and wellness company Thorne, TV network Lifetime and Budweiser—for the women’s World Cup 2019, Correnti said, which prompted her to put her “media hat on. I started digging into what we’ve uncovered as a systems challenge with respect to how women’s sports is bought and sold.” It’s a system that Deep Blue first and foremost has set out to change, she said. The shop’s clients include MassMutual, Ally and UCLA Women’s Basketball. Recent news: Ally plans Wrexham AFC women’s US tour Navigating confusing deal structures Helping clients navigate the sometimes confusing deal structures and less inventory around women’s sports events is one area of expertise shops Rain and Deep Blue are focused on providing. There are still a lot of what many see as unfair disadvantages preventing brands from investing more of their dollars in women’s sports. For example, media companies often say women’s sports games don’t rate well and, as such, do not put them in the prime-time broadcast slots that are drawing in more ad dollars. Carol Stiff—the president of Women’s Sports Network, the only platform dedicated exclusively to female athletes, and a former 30-year veteran of ESPN Programming and Acquisitions—argued in an earlier interview with Ad Age, though, that if these games are not rating well, it’s because they are not in prime slots. To that end, Correnti said “last year’s NCAA Women’s Basketball Final Four [round] broke viewing records, but what we leave out of the narrative is that [the championship game] was on a Sunday at 1 p.m. What happens when a championship women’s basketball game airs in prime time?” Those are the types of systemic challenges Deep Blue is trying to overhaul, Correnti said. “The currencies in which women’s sports were being bought and sold in the mass media marketplace are not necessarily reflective of the product,” Correnti said. “As a buyer, if you’re largely tasked with driving reach and doing it efficiently, women’s sports are not necessarily delivering on that. How you look at it in its current state is a brand engagement play.” She gave the example of a buyer who knows a sports offering such as “Sunday Night Football” can drive reach and efficiency but would need to justify spending at this moment on something like the WNBA playoffs. Correnti said she’s been having conversations with media networks to measure women’s sports more on the increase in favorability it could bring to a brand, the likelihood of a viewer to tell one of their friends about a product, “all the way through to [finding] that lifetime value customer … we know women’s sports fans are two to three X-ing that of general sports fans across every brand metric in the book,” she said. Correnti said she’s had conversations with various major broadcasters over moving away from the standard, reach-focused CPM pricing model, or cost per 1,000 impressions, since Deep Blue’s founding. “That certainly requires a deep dive into the revenue models and how these sports can be packaged and sold,” she said. “That looks wildly different than what we’re accustomed to in terms of filling 30-second spots.” Media measurement blog Tracking TV, social and digital updates Click here Rain’s Cohen said CPMs can cost anywhere between $10 and $40 for women’s sports inventory, depending on the platform and buy. CPMs around men’s sporting events are somewhat comparable and will be lower when bought as part of an upfront package, but can push into the $50 range for something more premium, she said. The biggest challenge for brands buying women’s sports inventory is that there isn’t as much of it and it isn’t necessarily sold as a package, according to Cohen. “Women’s sports isn’t always sold as just women’s sports, especially in the streaming space,” she said. “So you can’t buy a streaming women’s package and that’s your whole activation plan. You really have to understand the nuances of where you can test to fall into that inventory. The space is very convoluted in that way. As an example, if you’re working with certain partners like Disney, they’re going to sell college basketball typically as college basketball altogether.” Cohen said Rain’s HypeHer helps clients have conversations with media networks so they understand the goals of their campaigns and can assist in tailoring their campaigns accordingly. She said media networks “want to see this area grow, they see that opportunity, but they also understand some of the characteristics that make it challenging.” Correnti pointed out, though, that now is the time to invest, because the price of inventory for women’s sports will only increase as interest grows. Prices have already started to rise, she said, noting that “a 30-second ad in [this year’s] Women’s March Madness costs around $500,000, when it used to be $100,000 several years ago." Thayer Lavielle, executive VP of The Collective, said women’s sports do present a unique opportunity for non-endemic brands looking to break into this space, especially, “because women’s sports has this opportunity to be far more nimble; [we can] test and learn alongside brands more quickly and more nimbly than I think within men’s sports, which is exciting,” she said. Other ways divisions work with clients Strategy across media and creative is the main product clients are looking for from the women’s sports divisions they work with at agencies, people interviewed for this story said. “Many clients are really looking to develop dedicated strategies in and around the women’s sport space,” Correnti said. “That looks like everything from 18- to 24-month strategic platforms in terms of why they’re showing up in the space, to creative briefs, to longtail creative platforms, to more deliberate investment [and] intentional partnerships.” MassMutual increased its media investment in women’s sports to 10% in 2024 from 5% in 2023 across NCAA basketball, golf and tennis, and “will also have a media presence in the Paris Olympics this summer,” it shared in a statement. MassMutual spent $40 million on measured media in the U.S. in 2023, according to Vivvix, including paid social data from Pathmatics. Deep Blue is helping the company create a women’s sports platform and communications strategy, “which will include potential athlete partnerships, an assessment of the full sponsorship landscape and custom content,” according to the insurance and financial firm. More specifically, Deep Blue is MassMutual’s women’s sports agency of record, working alongside its agency of record, Giant Spoon, as well as creative partners such as Grey, to shape and inform “strategy and media planning along with stewardship of media partnerships in this space,” according to Deep Blue. “We understand the financial inequities female athletes are faced with alongside the other challenges they encounter given that women tend to make less, live longer, need more for retirement and are less likely to be insured,” Jennifer Halloran, MassMutual’s head of brand marketing, said in a statement. “The goal of teaming up with Deep Blue is to help the next generation of female athletes secure their futures by offering financial planning solutions and expertise that meet their needs.” CarMax Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Lane said the used vehicle retailer has worked with Wasserman, and now The Collective, on women’s sports campaigns for nearly a decade. (The Collective formally launched in 2019 after Wasserman already had experience in women’s sports marketing.) The Collective’s data and resources have informed Dentsu, CarMax’s media agency of record, in its efforts to negotiate buying plans around women’s sports with media networks. All three of its agency partners work together as a team: Wasserman as its sports marketing agency, Martin Agency as its creative agency and Dentsu as its media agency, according to CarMax. “We’ve really leaned on Wasserman to guide the development of that strategy and the resources that The Collective has provided have been essential to that process,” Lane said. “When CarMax sought to develop our first women’s sports strategy a couple of years ago, we leveraged the resources and information The Collective was able to provide to discuss the historical barriers women’s sports has faced and identify key areas of opportunity for brands. These resources were instrumental to pushing our women’s sports strategy forward and gaining the buy-in necessary to build excitement and understanding of the women’s sports landscape.” Lane said CarMax was “minimally involved in women’s sports, especially at a national level,” before 2020. “Over the last four years, we have dedicated significant resources to growing that investment,” she said. “In 2020, we announced our first partnership with the WNBA … it has become increasingly important to CarMax to invest in women’s sports.” That partnership has since evolved into national sports campaigns with WNBA stars Bird and Candace Parker and the creation of the WNBA League Pass Test Drive, “which provides fans with complimentary access to all WNBA games on League Pass during WNBA Tip-Off, which helped the WNBA see a 400% increase in app downloads last year,” according to Lane. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sue Bird (@sbird10) CarMax spent $133 million on measured media in the U.S. in 2023, according to Vivvix, including paid social data from Pathmatics. Competitive advantage? HypeHer is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage for Rain, said Cohen, noting that the division is now often being brought into new business pitches as a unique offering “we bring to the table that's going to help this brand break out.” “And the fact that we can help both on the media side and the creative side because we're a full-service [agency] is really of interest,” she said. “We do all forms of media including the traditional, linear and social, and everything in between. It tends to be a good way to frame up the service offering.” Todd Cohen, VP of national video for Undertone at ad tech company Perion, which works with brands including Kroger, Nike and HBO on women’s CTV sports campaigns, said the space is “red hot right now. Everyone wants to be part of something that is growing.” If agencies are not thinking about opening these dedicated divisions or having these conversations with their clients, they are missing out, he said. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here Investment on the part of the agency Shops shouldn’t just get into this space on a whim, though. Lavielle said it is important for agencies to set up these divisions for the right reasons, and not just as a money grab—brands will, after all, likely see right through that. “Women’s sports for the past five years has been nothing but on the rise,” Lavielle said. “And that’s amazing news that there are agencies being formed to help, come in and capitalize on the opportunities. I would say that the opportunity is also there for everyone to continue to put forward solutions to [systemic] issues, and not just capitalize on them.” Agencies should think about how they’re going to staff these divisions if they are considering opening one, Lavielle added. These divisions should be diverse and reflective of the women athletes they’re representing, Guilfoyle said. She praised some of the agencies including Deep Blue for having a board of women athletes they consult with (along with Bird as an executive and partner). “When we talk about sports, we obviously have the full diversity of race, religion, body types,” Guilfoyle said. “How do we bring forth players, past players, announcers as experts and authorities, and who’s going to hire them? How are these women showing up? It’s important.” Talent should also be experienced in the space and passionate about helping it grow. “From our perspective, it was really important to be the smartest in the room on women as consumers, women as athletes, women as executives within the sports lens, to be able to therefore advise [clients],” Lavielle said. Rain’s HypeHer has a dedicated staff of eight sports marketing experts who get into the weeds on how to market in this space. “There’s a lot of homework to be done,” Rain’s Cohen said. “This is a very exciting space and the people that thrive in it are the ones that succeed in it.” ~ ~ ~CLARIFICATION: This story was updated to add the name of the National Women’s Soccer League and timing details of the 2023 NCAA women’s basketball championship game.

Inside the rise of agencies dedicated to women’s sports marketing

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