‘Don’t Be Left Out:’ How the WNBA Is Building a Don’t-Miss Opportunity for Brands

This fall, the WNBA wrapped its most-viewed season in 21 years, announced an expansion for the first time since 2008 and saw its highest attendance in 13 years. And that’s just the start.

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert told Adweek she has a game plan to keep the exponential growth going, especially considering a recent Sports Innovation Lab study showing 83% of brands plan to increase their investment in women’s sports media in 2024.

“That’s a very, very compelling statistic for corporate partners to say, ‘Don’t be left out, join this rising women’s sports momentum,’” Engelbert said. “It’s just good business.”

In a year of unprecedented WNBA growth, which included 205 out of 240 games broadcast on national platforms, the league also brought its total number of corporate partners up to 42—the highest in WNBA history. That number rises to 44 at the start of the new year, following the addition of Skims and Peloton.

And it’s no secret that women’s basketball is a place where brands want to be. The NCAA tournament saw the most-watched women’s college basketball game of all time with the final between LSU and Iowa in 2023, with 9.9 million average viewers tuning in—a 103% year-over-year increase—and the numbers topping out at 12.6 million.

“We’ve worked hard on capitalizing on the momentum from the NCAA viewership in Final Four and March Madness, trying to do two things: build household names and rivalries,” said Engelbert. “Corporate partners are noticing, and [they’re] seeing the benefits of partnering with the WNBA, because our fanbase has a demographic and psychographic that they’re after for their consumer brands.”

As an example of this sports marketing strategy, the WNBA’s draft lottery—which saw the Indiana Fever draw the No. 1 pick for the second year in a row—aired Dec. 10 amid an NCAA triple header on ESPN, which Engelbert confirmed was a deliberate way to capitalize on college basketball’s popularity.

Changemakers are changing things

The WNBA’s rapid brand growth can trace its roots to the Changemakers program, a partnership and sponsorship program Engelbert launched in 2020 as a way to help the league overhaul its business.

To date, the WNBA has six partners in the Changemakers program, and it has seen an immediate impact.

For instance, Deloitte (where Engelbert formerly served as CEO) overhauled the WNBA’s digital presence, helping the league see a 390% increase in WNBA App downloads over the regular season.

“Deloitte really helped us do our digital transformation, and Nike continues to help us from a marketing perspective and exposure with their big marketing brand,” Engelbert said. “We’re hearing more than ever from brands expressing interest in the W, which I think is key.”

Google, another Changemaker, extended its partnership with the league through 2025, most recently adding Pixel. In just three years as a Changemaker, Google has worked with Disney and ESPN to add 173 hours of women’s sports programming to broadcast TV, including 48 hours of new live games and 17 hours of new pre-game show content on WNBA Countdown.

When the WNBA looks for a brand partnership, Engelbert focuses on innovation and a brand’s willingness to work with and build players’ brands, pointing to campaigns like Deloitte’s and Google’s.

“How do you innovate inside the partnership? How do you activate it?” Engelbert said. “[Google] has done an amazing job.”

Media rights are moving

When Adweek last caught up with Engelbert, the league’s upcoming media rights negotiations were top-of-mind.

The WNBA’s deal with Disney, its largest broadcast partner, runs through 2025 and was worth $27 million in 2021. Last year, the league also signed a three-year deal with Scripps’ ION, making Friday nights appointment viewing for fans and bringing an additional 5.9 million viewers to the WNBA this year, according to Engelbert.

“We do have a great bridge here to get us to a really good, best value possible [deal], one that’s long overdue,” said Engelbert. “We’d all like everybody to do the right thing here and raise women’s sports, but I think we’re coming from a really strong position from a digital, linear, social, partnership support.”

To Engelbert’s point, Major League Soccer, which has a 10-year, $250 million per year exclusive streaming deal with Apple, averaged 343,000 viewers in the 2022 season. Meanwhile, average viewership for the WNBA 2023 season came in at 505,000 viewers across CBS, ESPN and ABC.

And in comparable leagues, the National Women’s Soccer League just struck the largest-ever broadcast deal for women’s sports—a $240 million agreement over four years.

“We’ve been building out our exposure through all of our partners. We’re working very hard up until ’25 because there’s never been a truer adage of ‘if you build it, they will come’ than the WNBA is going through right now,” Engelbert said. “We’ll continue to double down on what we’ve been doing already with marketing, branding, storytelling, building those household names.”

Just getting bigger

For the first time since 2008, the WNBA will have a new team, with the Bay Area adding a franchise in 2025 and the Golden State Warriors paying a reported $50 million record in expansion fees over 10 years.

“Bringing in a market like San Francisco, Bay Area and Oakland, which is one of the biggest media markets in the country where we didn’t already have a team,” Engelbert said. “I came in and I couldn’t believe we didn’t have a team, because in my prior life we had such a large business opportunity there.”

Engelbert added that broadening fandom and exposure requires being in more than 12 cities in the country and is looking for more growth in the future.

“We’re excited that this is the first one we’ve announced,” the commissioner said.