Next Is Now Women’s Sports Docuseries Wants More Brands on Its Team
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Getting women’s sports a larger share of overall sports coverage is a team effort, and Religion of Sports, Ensemble, Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment, and Roku have combined forces to attack that goal.
This week, the group announced its launch of the Next is Now women’s sports anthology docuseries on The Roku Channel later this year. The series will be both funded and executive produced by brand partners, with Deep Blue founder and CEO Laura Correnti noting that it has already drawn “expressed interest from a handful of both endemic and nonendemic brands to the women’s sports space up through the CMO ranks.”
The project tips off with The Fastest Six Weeks in Sports, a series looking at how women’s basketball draft prospects and veteran athletes spend the weeks between the end of NCAA Women’s March Madness and the start of the WNBA season. For perspective, the 18.9 million fans who watched last year’s NCAA women’s final was not only a bigger audience than the men’s final (14.8) but the largest non-football sports audience of 2025. Last year’s WNBA draft, meanwhile, drew 2.45 million viewers—the most for a WNBA broadcast since 2000.
Religion of Sports—founded by Tom Brady, Michael Strahan, and Gotham Chopra—will lead production on Next is Now content. Issa Rae’s branded entertainment company, Ensemble, will focus on social media content creation and distribution, while Deep Blue consults on media and creative ideas while driving brand partnerships and activations.
All Next is Now programming will appear on the Roku Sports FAST channel and in Roku’s Women’s Sports Zone. The game plan isn’t just to give women’s sports fans what they increasingly want but to remove the excuses that women’s sports content is too hard for fans to locate or for brands to purchase.
“Why we decided to go this route was to also guarantee what is [now] a continued barrier for scale and for discovery, which is promotion,” Correnti said. “By bringing brands in to finance the production and contribute media funds to ensure that there is discovery of the content, we felt that that was the quickest and most efficient way to ensure we’re not just telling and scaling these stories, but that consumers and viewers can find them.”
Brands off the bench
According to Wasserman’s women-focused practice, The Collective, women’s sports accounted for 15% of all sports viewing in 2023. Even with last year’s gains and the emergence of new leagues, including the Professional Women’s Hockey League and League One Volleyball, Wasserman predicted that women’s sports would still account for just 20% of sports audiences in 2025.
But even as the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and WNBA see expanded media-rights deals, brands have been slow to buy in. According to a 2024 report from Gather, just 6% of Fortune 500 companies invest in women’s sports—a number Correnti called “abysmal”—compared to 20% for men’s athletics.
“There’s clearly a need as well as an opportunity to engage the other 94%,” Correnti said. “Who are they, what drives their business, and how can we ensure that the women’s sports ecosystem can address their business needs to create productive, collaborative outcomes?”
When those Fortune 500 companies have participated, it’s been a game changer.
For example, Morgan Stanley, which is ranked No. 41 on the Fortune 500, was heavily involved with the popular ESPN+ docuseries In the Arena: Serena Williams, thanks to its collaboration with Religion of Sports.
Plus, State Farm, which is the Fortune 500’s No. 39, used the time between its NIL partner Caitlin Clark’s last collegiate appearance in the NCAA final and her No. 1 pick by the Indiana Fever at the NBA Draft to partner with ESPN, Disney Advertising, and Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions on their “Full Court Press” docuseries for ABC featuring Clark and other soon-to-be WNBA rookies.
The brands and demand are out there, but the challenge is providing women’s sports inventory at a scale they can use and tailored to the audiences they want to reach. That’s where Roku and its 90 million households of “built-in scale” enter the equation.
“It’s free and accessible for consumers. There’s the ability to promote across tune-in, data capture, and collection,” Correnti said. “[It’s] all of the bells and whistles that we know advertisers are looking for to justify not just an investment, but an increase in investment in 2025.”
Recruiting new players
Next is Now partners also want to involve brands that typically haven’t ventured into women’s sports.
Correnti said that while brands like State Farm, Google, and Ally have been dependable supporters, she predicts that much of the increased brand spending in women’s sports this year will come from brands considered “nonendemic” to the game. Whether they’re drawn more to stories of athletes parenting while playing, transitioning into retirement, or navigating NIL, those nonendemic brands might be more likely to find their women’s sports consumers well beyond the field or court.
“Women’s sports have taken pop culture by storm, providing unforgettable moments on and off the field of play,” said Ian Schafer, president of Ensemble. “While the stories are timeless, those moments travel straight into our social media timelines, where pop culture thrives.”
While the Next is Now partners see great potential in Roku’s ability to help measure, target, and reach audiences—which Roku will also use in its first live women’s sports partnership with the Pro Volleyball Federation this year—they view its platform as only a portion of the storytelling process. By giving brands a role in production, Correnti envisions a partnership where Next is Now content is run on brand channels, turned into ad campaigns, used in college campus activations, and debuted at premiere screenings.
“As opposed to going with that traditional model where you make something, you sell something, and it’s at the mercy of a sales team that wasn’t involved in the origin story, involving brands from the onset helps to create more contextually aligned messaging, which everybody benefits from,” Correnti said.
https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/next-is-now-womens-sports-series-brands/