When Ellie the elephant, the viral mascot of the WNBA’s New York Liberty, dressed up as Barbie for the blockbuster release of the Warner Bros. movie, she not only stole the show at one of the team’s games but drummed up thousands of likes on social media on a video of her dancing in the pink costume.

Ellie is an influencer in her own right; she’s often seen dancing at games, she’s accrued over 12,000 followers on Instagram and has even made headlines for her twerking. She’s usually joined at games by a posse of celebrities and influencers invited by the team—what The Liberty calls its “CeLIBERTY Row.” 

Her viral fame is part of The Liberty’s strategy to engage with Gen Z and boost brand partnerships this year.

“Ellie is one of our biggest attractions beyond our players when we think about attracting a Gen Z audience,” Liberty Chief Brand Officer Shana Stephenson said. “Ellie is a trendsetter. She’s had so much viral success this season.”

One-third of The Liberty’s fans are now Gen Z, and the team has grown its brand sponsorships with companies wanting to reach this cohort—it now boasts 30 such deals from just one at the start of the 2019 season, Stephenson said.

Also read: A guide for marketing to Gen Z

Leagues and brands are finding unique opportunities to engage coveted Gen Z audiences through women’s sports as younger generations increasingly watch these games and consume content around them on social platforms. This also comes as more media coverage is dedicated to women’s sports and ratings grow.  

Earlier this month the National Women’s Soccer League struck a landmark media rights deal with CBS Sports, ESPN, Prime Video and Scripps Sports that will lead to national airings of 118 games a year over four years. The pact is worth $240 million, ESPN reported, up from the $4.2 million of the league’s previous deal with CBS.

Three out of 10 U.S. sports fans are watching more women’s sports now than they have in the last five years, driven by Gen Z audiences—39% of Gen Z sports fans reported watching more women’s sports, compared to 29% of millennials, 23% of Gen X and 19% of baby boomers, according to a report this year from The National Research Group and Ampere Analysis.

Brands are noticing the “huge audience appetite” in women’s sports and using it to connect with younger audiences, said Damian Areyan, VP and group account director for Publicis Groupe agency Team One. “On the agency side, we’re seeing a spike in brand inquiries about how they can tap into this zeitgeist and help develop the next generation of female star athletes,” he said. 

The Liberty is one team that has found its way into the hearts of younger fans.

The team successfully infiltrated one of the biggest Gen Z pop culture moments of the year, for example, collaborating with Xbox and Warner Bros. on a “Barbie” movie integration. At one of its games around the blockbuster movie’s release last summer, The Liberty’s dance team wore “Kenergy” t-shirts, while dancing back-up to Ellie the elephant dressed as Barbie; there were giveaways of Barbie-inspired Xbox consoles; and actors Margo Robbie and Ryan Gosling sent a special video message to the team.

“That’s one of the very intentional partnerships we leveraged to interact with Gen Z,” Stephenson said of the team’s ongoing partnership with Xbox, through which it has also activated on Roblox.

The Liberty also has found success with Gen Z, in part, because it hired a Gen Z marketer to run its social channels. Charlie DeSadier is the team’s social media coordinator and Stephenson praised her as helping to perfect the brand’s “voice” on social. “She makes our brand voice in a tone [Gen Z] can resonate with, and it doesn’t feel forced,” she said.

How Gen Z audiences are coming into play

Not only are women’s sports franchises looking to woo more Gen Z fans, but brands including Gatorade are looking at ways to reach the demographic by sponsoring women’s sports—specifically as it watches on social platforms. 

“Half of Gen Z is on social while they’re watching sports, no matter what sport it is,” said Carolyn Braff, Gatorade’s head of brand strategy. “Highlights, documentaries and social [posts] are just as important to Gen Z as live [games], if not more.”

Braff said Gatorade is specifically rethinking what that “sideline” brand strategy is in the new digital world. She said Gatorade still wants to be seen on the sidelines of live games but it should be showing up “in all those other moments,” as well.

These are all key areas Gatorade’s social team, which didn’t exist a few years ago, focuses on, Braff said. “They're focused on understanding where our core consumer is going. For that Gen Z cohort, that’s active fairly frequently, we know social is critical for them,” she said.

Braff said women’s sports fans are also twice as engaged on social, compared with men’s sports fans.

Bryant Lin, co-founder and CMO of Gen Z marketing agency NinetyEight, said the new ways teams, brands and media personalities are interacting with women’s sports fans on social media are in turn driving more engagement.

“From a fan level, seeing clip compilations of epic things happening in sports either on YouTube or TikTok has given people more exposure towards women's sports, and has definitely contributed interest towards them,” Lin said. “Additionally, online sports analysis personalities have begun making narratives and commentary towards women's sports, pointing out statistical anomalies or the dominance of a certain player or team, all garnering massive amounts of views.”

The Liberty is connecting fans more deeply with its players through its YouTube series, “Liberty Unlocked.” In the series, the team goes in-depth on different players and their contributions to the game. Stephenson said Liberty has seen views on these videos over the last year go from a couple thousand to more than 50,000.

Stephenson said the team has experimented with different formats for the series and found that when they are longer in length, they are more successful. The team uses the series “as a tool for storytelling,” which she said has resonated well with Gen Z. Plus, some of the players are part of the Gen Z generation so they can speak authentically to those fans, according to Stephenson.

A recent report from Wasserman’s female-focused division, The Collective, found that 74% of 18 to 24-year-olds (men and women) engage with sports via social media, and are twice as likely to do so than those 55 years and older.

“Fans of women’s sports are younger, more affluent and better educated,” said Thayer Lavielle, executive VP of Wasserman’s The Collective. “Because they’re native to social media and because women athletes are native to pushing themselves out on social media, because they have to make 80% of their living off the field, there’s a relationship there and a loyalty and relationship.”

College sports are another way to connect with Gen Z.

Ally sponsored last week’s NCAA women’s basketball game between the University of Iowa and Virginia Tech at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The “Ally Tipoff” event, in partnership with Charlotte Sports Foundation, included a full-court, plum-colored takeover by Ally. The financial company is a big supporter of women’s sports and that partnership is part of a pledge it took in May 2022 to reach parity in its paid media investments across men’s and women’s sports in five years.

“Gen Z are loyal to the brands and personalities they love,” said Ally Chief Marketing and Public Relations Officer Andrea Brimmer, “and they are vocal about it. In sports, that’s exactly what you want. A big part of this has to do with the rise in women athletes' presence on social media platforms."

Brimmer pointed to Gen Z athletes including professional soccer player Sophia Smith, who has gained a mass following on social media. Smith is part of “Team Ally,” the company’s collective of female athletes and creator partners, which is aimed at bolstering their visibility and “help make women's sports hard to miss.”

Still, Gen Z marketer Branda Statman, media agency advertising and Imagen Insights consultant, said brands could still do a lot more when it comes to partnering with influencers who are athletes to promote specific and relevant products.

“I still feel like it’s a very untapped market but a good way to find different audiences you wouldn’t find otherwise with traditional advertising,” Statman said. “This would still entirely depend on the product and that the company has a good interest [in] Gen Z prior.”

The larger role brands play in support female athletes

The interest in women’s sports is also being helped by an increase in media coverage of the leagues.

The Collective’s study found media coverage of women’s sports jumped to 15% (of all sports coverage) over the last five years, from just 4% in 2018, according to a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization report. That 4% was the figure the marketing industry relied on for the last five years.

Gatorade’s Braff said The Collective’s landmark study will allow even more brands to invest in women’s sports.

“This is a really great proof point to say ‘the number that the industry has been relying on for so long is wrong and has changed,’” Braff said. “That 4% was really belittling when you’re going into an investment discussion looking to help push the game forward, meet viewers where they are and get more consumers to focus on our brand through partnership. When that number is in the single digits, it makes it really hard to justify the investment.”

The Collective’s study expanded the definition of media coverage by including streaming platforms and social media. The study found that 26% of sports coverage on streaming TV was dedicated to women’s sports and 18% of sports coverage on social platforms was dedicated to women’s sports in 2022.

The Collective’s Lavielle said her research team took a more “modern approach” to evaluating media coverage in terms of looking at how linear TV, streamers and social media platforms talked about women’s sports games. That’s important because more media coverage means more marketers can make the case for investing ad dollars to support women’s sports, she said.

“Media is the biggest revenue driver in women’s sports—and we know that revenue trickles down to the teams, it impacts players’ salaries, etc,” Ally’s Brimmer said. “When we saw the statistic that less than 4% of media was dedicated to women’s sports, we knew brands had the power to change that and whatever we did, it would need to create lasting change.”

Some brands have been credited with getting networks to put women’s sports games in more prime slots, which drives more viewership and media coverage. For example, AT&T insisted last year that the WNBA draft be aired on ESPN, not ESPN2.

“There’s been tremendous growth in viewership for both the WNBA and NWSL, which is something we’re really excited about,” said CarMax CMO Sarah Lane. “Both leagues experienced significant growth after strategic investments from partners, who guided their commitments to getting more WNBA and NWSL games on primetime.”

While Gen Z attention has helped foster investment in women’s sports, it’s not the sole reason why marketers are showing up around these games. Since 2020, many have made it part of an increased commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in sports.

Also read: The state of DE&I media investment

While CarMax leverages women’s sports campaigns on social media to engage Gen Z, it has been working toward increasing investment around these games and athletes because it wants to help “elevate the visibility of these incredible athletes even further and create opportunities for them to get the recognition they deserve.”

CarMax renewed its commitment as the official auto retailer of the WNBA in 2023, after first coming on as such in 2020, and signed onto the league as a “Changemaker,” a collective of companies dedicated to elevating women in sports. Over the last two years, the company said it has added six new women’s sports partnerships across the WNBA and National Women’s Soccer League, which it also supports as the official auto retailer.

Still, there’s more to be done.

Studio shows are still missing the opportunity to cover women’s sports games with deeper dives and analyses, allocating less than 5% of coverage to these games over the last five years, per The Collective’s report.

And, as Front Office Sports pointed out on X recently, “Despite a record 10 million viewers, the NCAA Women’s CBB National Championship will still not get a primetime slot this season.”

The game will air at 3 p.m. ET on April 7 on ABC.

“It’s disappointing,” said Carol Stiff—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—commenting on the NCAA Women’s National Championship slot.

Stiff said media companies often say women’s sports games don’t rate well and that’s why they’re not in prime slots, but she argued that if they are not rating it’s because they are not in prime slots. 

Meanwhile, it seems, that even when they do rate well, a lot of women’s games are still in non-primetime slots (as is evident with the NCAA Women’s National Championship slot). As sports writer Stewart Mandel pointed out on X, more people watched last year’s NCAA women’s national championship between LSU and Iowa (9.9 million) than the first game of MLB’s World Series (9.2 million).

As she witnessed firsthand at ESPN, Stiff said advertisers have long had to be the ones to demand change and visibility for women’s sports. “You need advertisers to come to the table and demand better windows for their ads, for their sports and demand to see the women’s sports portfolio,” she said.

Stiff said she’s hopeful that studies like the one released recently from The Collective, as well as Gen Z continuing to vocalize the change they want to see, could finally move the needle. The fact that more advertisers have been reaching out to the Women's Sports Network to invest is also a promising sign, she said.

Fox has found success airing NCAA women’s volleyball matches in National Football League-adjacent Sunday windows as ratings grow in the sport. An Oct. 29 match between Nebraska and Wisconsin on Fox set a record of 612,000 viewers—that’s compared to the average 142,000 viewers each match is drawing so far this season (up 13% from 2022). “How many times have we seen when you give opportunities to elite women’s sports that they show up?” Minnesota head coach Keegan Cook told the Star Tribune.

In college hoops, stars such as Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese are proving to be massive draws, including for brands, which are showering them with name, image and likeness deals. An NCAA rule change in 2021 has allowed college athletes to monetize their personal brands through endorsement deals and sponsorships, and more audiences and media attention will fuel even more of these deals for female college athletes. A charity exhibition game pitting Iowa against DePaul last month drew 55,646 fans at Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium, setting a record.

“For a long time, the sports world has been stereotyped to be ‘for the boys,’” NinetyEight co-founder and Gen Z marketer Celine Chai said. “It's evident in so many ways from the level of coverage men’s sports receive, salary gaps between men and female athletes and even the types of ads served towards men and female viewers of major sporting events are so stereotypical (i.e. women clean and men order pizzas or drive trucks). Gen Z is a driving force behind the increased investment and interest in women's sports. We all know that this generation values diversity, equality and inclusivity and seek out every opportunity to support these values.”