WNBA CMO on Caitlin Clark marketing opportunities and Wieden+Kennedy ads

Coming off a big increase in viewership and attendance last year, the WNBA is now inheriting the record-breaking momentum of the NCAA tournament as it welcomes its newest stars—headlined by Caitlin Clark—with tonight’s WNBA Draft. The league is well aware it has a phenomenal marketing opportunity in Clark, who is expected to be the first pick of the Indiana Fever when the draft, broadcast live from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, gets underway at 7:30 ET on ESPN. The WNBA regular season runs from May 14 to Sept. 19. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Determined to capture the multitude of new fans Clark will bring with her, the WBNA will broadcast 36 of the Fever’s 40 games on its national or streaming networks this season. The WNBA’s TV package includes games on ABC, ESPN, ESPN, CBS, CBS Sports Network, Ion and Amazon Prime. The league is seeking a significant increase in its next media rights deal, currently estimated at $60 million annually; it is in joint negotiations with Disney along with the NBA, but the WNBA might seek its own deal, Front Office Sports has reported. The goal this season isn’t just to showcase Clark’s basketball skills but to make sure Clark’s fans also become fans of the WNBA, Phil Cook, chief marketing officer of the WNBA, said in an interview with Ad Age. Also read: Why Women’s March Madness was in marketing demand Welcoming new players to the WNBA has been a theme of a series of offbeat humorous ads (below) that ran during the NCAA Tournament. A 60-second ad, set to run during the draft broadcast on ESPN, shifts the focus to welcoming new fans. The ads come from Wieden+Kennedy which began working on the account in January. The draft is a new beginning for more than just the Fever. Angel Reese of LSU, Kamilla Cardoso of NCAA champion South Carolina, Cameron Brink of Stanford and Aaliyah Edwards of UConn will also hear their names called, and “there’s a tremendous amount of energy around the incoming rookies in the next two, three, four years as well,” said Cook WNBA viewership on national broadcast partners last year was up 21% over 2022, according to the league. ESPN reported that viewership on its platforms, including the postseason, averaged 453,900 viewers, the most watched season in 18 years. But if the Clark momentum spills from the NCAA to the WNBA, the league could significantly increase its viewership. Last week’s NCAA women’s basketball championship between Iowa and South Carolina on ABC drew 18.9 million average viewers, beating the men’s final (on TBS and TNT) by 4 million viewers. WNBA game attendance last season was up 16%, to an average of 6,615 fans per game, the highest since 2018, according to the league. Women’s basketball is breaking through beyond sports programming—as evidenced by Clark’s April 13 appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” Caitlin Clark (@CaitlinClark22) stopped by Weekend Update! pic.twitter.com/SSmbUcIOJl— Saturday Night Live - SNL (@nbcsnl) April 14, 2024 In the following interview, Cook addresses how greater access has opened eyes to women’s sports overall, the many avenues brands are taking to connect with the league and its players, and how it will welcome new fans. This interview was edited for length and clarity. How is marketing playing into the WNBA's current trajectory? We’re on the receiving end of pretty heavy winds at our back, and as a marketer, this is what you dream of—having all these opportunities to tell amazing stories. And this isn’t a flash. It’s been going on since I started, three and a half years ago. We’ve just been at the right time for the league to really be accelerating. And what’s complimenting it is all the other amazing activity around women’s basketball and women’s sports in general over the last three years. What’s going on in the world that has made the public so receptive to women's sports? Making it easier to consume the game has been a big strategy for every women’s sports platform, and it’s what we’ve been doubling down on since the day I joined—making it easier to be a fan. Those of us who are close to it all recognize just how good a game it is, and we know our players are the best in the world. … It’s been our responsibility to unlock what we see every day so that the casual fan—not just the one who’s the devoted to the W—have access to see what we've been seeing for 28 years. Another change is we have partners willing to showcase our content on their platforms, both streaming and broadcast, to unlock the brilliance of the game. And once you get a taste of it, the conversion of awareness to fandom is very fast, as Caitlin Clark has demonstrated. Her prolific talents are unlike anything we’ve ever seen at the collegiate level, and it’s the quality of her play and how she makes those plays, which draws the audience. We saw Sabrina [Ionescu, the New York Liberty guard] at the NBA All-Star game take on the greatest shooter in the history of the game [Stephen Curry] and make him earn it just to beat her. This game is really good, and people are finally getting access to see that. And I think once they're given that opportunity, they become fans. Caitlin Clark will arrive in the WNBA with her own State Farm deal. Could you discuss the degree to which the league has been able to translate its momentum into brand deals? What makes the WNBA a very unique platform is our athletes are the very best in the world—that’s unarguable. We have the best 144 basketball players in the world playing. Our athletes are also influential in the world of culture. Through fashion, sneakers, makeup, hair care—platforms that in sport have often been ignored on the women’s side—there are partners who recognize the level of influence our athletes have in those spaces. So you’ve got a second lane for partnerships to come in and say we don’t need to just lean into the performance. We can also lean into the culture. Editor’s note: Last week, the WNBA announced a multiyear sponsorship deal with Perrigo Company, maker of a daily birth control pill. The third lane is our connection to purpose and social justice that our 12 teams and 144 athletes demonstrate authentically day in and day out. And those brands looking to align themselves with influencers who share the same values, give our athletes another tremendous platform to align with. The aperture is very, very wide open for partners to say I want to play in this lane around performance, and/or culture, and/or purpose and social justice. [Sign up for Ad Age’s influencer marketing newsletter here] Ads you ran during the NCAA tournament might have been a lighthearted warning to the Caitlin Clarks that there are no easy wins in the WNBA. I think what made that campaign effective was its authenticity. It comes from a true insight. I think every sport has this graduation from one level to the next—high school to college, college to pro—and the rookie class coming in are heralded, they’re coming in with fan bases that are unheard of in our sport. So it was an opportunity for our athletes to welcome those incoming rookies, and remind them that the next step of your journey is not going to be as easy as it’s been, but we’re here for you. We’re here to thicken your skin and to compliment you when you do well and wish you well on your logo threes and your no-look dimes. It was an athlete truth, but conveyed in a way that was not biting or hurtful but welcoming. Wieden+Kennedy did an amazing job of receiving the brief and landing the insights. And then the writers and ad director did a great job of executing ads that served it with a smile on your face. We couldn’t have asked for anything better. The new ad that’s going to air for the first time on Monday night, is another step in this progression. [The first part of the campaign was] a message from our 144 athletes to the incoming rookie class and the message was welcome to the W. We as a league now will convey the same message to the new fans that come into our league. That’s who we’re going after with this campaign. We recognize that the interest in women’s basketball has grown exponentially, and a lot of that growth is due to the rookies coming—the Angels and the Caitlins and the Camillas [Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark and Camilla Cardoso]. They’re going to bring in these fan bases and the ad is a welcoming message to the new fans who maybe didn't spend much time consuming and engaging with the W. As a fan of those incoming rookies, this might be the first time they interact with the W, and we want to welcome them in. So this is our message as a league to the incoming fan base. Welcome to the W. We’re welcoming anyone who wants to come in. It’ll be hard to miss Indiana games on TV this coming year. I mentioned it earlier—we’re making it easy to be a fan. And there’s a massive fan base that’s following Caitlin. There are great basketball fans who want to watch … She’s playing great basketball night in and night out. How do you not watch it? And then there’s just the general fan, who says “I should be paying attention to this because everyone else is and I may as well just jump in so I can be part of the conversation the next morning.” When you have that, you know you have a wave of fandom, and you want to do everything in your power to unlock access to keep that momentum going. Our broadcast and streaming partners recognize that they want to be a part of that incoming fan base who’s doing everything they can to set aside time to watch Caitlin and the other rookies play basketball and with 90% of her games being on nationally broadcast or stream platforms—that’s amazing for us. And it’s amazing for Indiana. It’s amazing for the game because you know she's playing against somebody else every night and having those games on TV unlocks two teams every night and 24 athletes every night. And that’s the goal—show the very best of our league across all 144 players and 12 teams and Caitlin is the Pied Piper that’s bringing the fan. What will you be looking at to gauge the success of your marketing plans and your ambitions for this year? We’d love to have every one of our games sold out, so we know our teams are working aggressively to get out there and sell season tickets, and sell single game tickets and packages. Live viewership or live attendance is a big metric for us. We think average viewership is big across our networks and as we approach a media rights deal in the in the next couple of years, we want to set a new standard in viewership, we recognize that that this is a big opportunity for us to capitalize. Unique viewers are also really important to us, making sure that we’re continuing to try to grow the pie and get more users, get more consumers, get more fans into our ecosystem. Our job is to serve both the devout fan and the new fan. And so we'll look to measure how we do on the uniques, on the new fans. And then, across all of our social channels, are we growing our app? Are we growing League Pass subscriptions, are we growing followers on our social channels? I just had the privilege of reviewing our new merch assortment for this coming year. It’s incredible what our partners have committed to, to serve the new fans that are coming in with this class and the breadth and the depth of product assortments at the team level at the player level is just grown exponentially. So we’re going to measure that as well—are we providing the right merch across our fan wants and needs? All of these things we can measure and learn from. We’ll double down on what’s working.

WNBA CMO on Caitlin Clark marketing opportunities and Wieden+Kennedy ads

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