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Audiences and sponsorship for women’s sports grow in spite of a scattered broadcast landscape, not because of it.
Sports Innovation Lab’s Women’s Sports Club NewFront gave marketers and ad agencies a clearer picture of women’s sports offerings during its event at New York’s NeueHouse Madison Square.
Joining its audience credit and debit purchase data with Trailblazing Sports Group’s Marketplace of sports inventory—including game programming; behind-the-scenes storytelling “tentpoles”; and team, athlete and media partnerships—Sports Innovation Lab’s Women’s Sports Club is trying to simplify the buying process for potential advertisers and “show up where the checks are written.”
“[It’s] being able to get to multiple sports and more women’s sports fans with single buys, versus trying to piece together softball over here and soccer over here,” said Gina Waldhorn, chief marketing officer at Sports Innovation Lab, who began her career buying media at Carat. “Then there was a feeling with a lot of our clients—especially the more savvy digital marketing clients—that what they saw in other areas of media and sports in terms of addressability and data-driven stuff was missing from women’s sports.”
Sponsored by companies including Trailblazing, Ally, EA Sports, Google, Scripps Sports and Morgan Stanley Global Sports and Entertainment, Women’s Sports Club was launched at South by Southwest in 2023 to address disparities in the women’s sports economy. Sports Innovation Lab’s own Fan Project found that women’s sports fans are not only acquired and retained at a 40% higher rate than average sports fans, but they also spent more with Nike, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and luxury and travel brands as a result of being so heavily engaged.
However, women’s sports still only receive a fraction of the sponsorship—and media investment—of men’s sports. A study by Wasserman’s women-focused practice, The Collective, found just a 15% share of sports media coverage dedicated to women’s sports—tiny, considering women’s events comprise roughly 50% of all sports competitions in the U.S. Despite that, professional women’s sports get just 8% of sports media’s attention.