When LG wanted to address concerns around NCAA student athletes’ mental health going into March Madness, it brought in Haley Jones (Stanford), Flau’Jae Johnson (LSU), Trayce Jackson-Davis (Indiana) and Jarace Walker (University of Houston) to talk about their experiences for its Game4Good campaign. With both men and women in college athletics still dealing with residual mental health concerns after the pandemic, LG offered athletes $10,000 for the mental health charity of their choice—with an eye toward equity.
“We tried to keep a broad perspective on bringing as many voices to represent as many people that are affected by mental health as possible,” said Jeanine Lee, LG’s director of brand marketing. “Our main criteria really was to make sure that the student athletes that we partnered with were advocates and already active in the space of mental health.”
The players’ case
While brands make a public push for NIL equity, women in collegiate athletics have strengthened the argument through their own influential brands.
Largely through TikTok and Instagram, athletes in women’s college sports are outpacing their male counterparts for comments, saves and likes. SponsorUnited notes that female athletes engage with social media at a higher percentage than men in softball and baseball (86.8% for female players/13.2% for males), soccer (98.6%/1.8%), basketball (54.4%/45.5%) and golf (51.8%/48.2%). That’s leading to gains for women in NIL brand categories like apparel, where womens’ percentage of deals was 40% higher than men’s.
Despite accounting for just 30% of the athletes in SponsorUnited’s research pool, women make up half of the Top 50 athletes by social media engagement—including six of the Top 10. As SponsorUnited’s Lynch notes, that means female athletes are engaging with their sponsor brands more on social media as well, which has led to an average of 2.4 NIL deals for them compared to 1.8 for their male counterparts.
In March Madness terms, SponsorUnited noted that women’s college basketball players generated 4.1 million social media engagements—or 2.9 times more than the 1.6 million created by their male counterparts. That’s despite having 10% fewer deals, 13% fewer posts, 15% fewer brands working with women than men and 35% fewer female players having deals than male players.
While men’s sports still tend to draw more followers, Lynch said engagement could eventually tip the NIL balance in women’s favor.
