Financial services firm Ally is partnering with Disney for a sponsorship package that puts gender equity front and center.

The agreement, announced Monday morning, features a 90% media investment, solely in women’s sports, that will include coverage of game highlights, branded content and features across ESPN, along with regular, in-episode SportsCenter segments. The remaining 10% will be invested in men’s sports advertising.

According to Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer, when companies go to market to buy an allocation of sports media, it’s mostly men’s sports. And when companies hit a certain threshold within men’s sports, women’s sports are thrown in as a “value add.”

“We don’t want it as a value add. We want to pay for it, and we wanted it to be the primary portion of our media package,” Brimmer told Adweek.

Women’s sports receive less than 10% of overall media coverage compared to men’s sports. And when it comes to advertising, that gap can be even greater simply because the availability of media just isn’t there.

“As a result, the leagues are undervalued. As a result, the players are underpaid,” said Brimmer. “The ice breaker on that are brands. For us and ESPN to come together in this way, it breaks that first big block of ice on that vicious cycle.”

Last year, Ally pledged a 50/50 paid media spend across men’s and women’s sports within the next five years, and the new sponsorship with Disney puts the company well on its way.

ESPN has steadily been increasing its coverage of women’s sports, and has rights to sports and leagues like the WNBA, college softball, March Madness and plenty more.

“One of the biggest points of pride at Disney has been our inclusive and diversified approach to sports, specifically,” said Rita Ferro, president of Disney Advertising. “Everywhere we can, we look for opportunities to highlight the accomplishments of female athletes. Collaborating with Ally on this initiative was an obvious choice as we both share a common passion and shared ideals for promoting women’s sports.”

Game time

Disney and Ally have had a long-standing relationship. This deal came about through months of conversations between Brimmer and Ferro.

Disney CreativeWorks and Ally will collaborate to build custom creative, including segments that will run exclusively in two SportsCenter episodes during the Women’s World Cup.

“There will be a lot of storytelling and content that we’ll be working through with them,” Brimmer said. “They’ll tell the stories of the athletes, probably talk a lot about women’s sports parity and the things that we’re trying to do to close the gap.”

SportsCenter will also have a monthly shortform feature presented by Ally called “Moments Worth Saving,” and it will run on all SportsCenter programs during the respective day, beginning Feb. 24.

“We leaned into the assignment and worked with Ally to create an intentionally inclusive sponsorship package with gender equity at its core,” said Ferro.

As well as commercials in women’s live games, there will also be monthly social women’s highlights of all sports running across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

“I’m hoping to see more media platforms really think differently about how they sell women’s sports,” Brimmer said. “I’m hoping that this is going to start to be a tipping point of putting women’s sports in more prime slots and giving them bigger stages when they see that brands are willing to come off the sideline and make a very substantive media commitment.”

In the fall, Ally substantially increased its media investment with CBS to bring the National Women’s Soccer League championship game into primetime for the first time.

And that investment paid off. The Oct. 29 match-up between the Portland Thorns and the Kansas City Current averaged 915,000 viewers, the most-watched game in league history and up 71% over 2021.

Onto the ACC

Ally also became the official bank of the ACC, holding media branding and activation rights across all conference championships and the first-ever entitlements across women’s basketball, lacrosse and soccer championships.

That partnership kicks off in early March at the women’s and men’s ACC basketball championships with interactive fan activations and co-branded giveaways. The ACC and ESPN are in the middle of a 20-year rights deal, and those games run across the ACC Network and ESPN’s slate.

This is also Ally’s first entrance into the NIL (name, image, likeness) space, as the company has previously worked mostly with professional athletes.

“We wanted to do it in a measured way,” said Brimmer. “Like we did with NWSL, we don’t just sponsor the league. You saw us sponsor the PA [Player’s Association], Ali [Krieger] and Ashlyn [Harris]. We have different partnerships with everybody.”