Last year, Women’s Sports Club began chipping away at that divide by forming partnerships between brands and women’s sports teams. It paired online gaming site PrizePicks and the National Women’s Soccer League’s North Carolina Courage, and also forged a sponsorship between NYX Professional Makeup (through agency Octagon) and the Women’s National Basketball Association’s New York Liberty.
Trailblazing Sports Group founder Sara Gotfredson noted that during her 18 years buying media and overseeing sales teams for ESPN, one of her proudest moments was building the first-ever WNBA Countdown studio with help from a partnership with Google.
I believe in the power of the purse with brands … brands can make things happen in women’s sports.
Sara Gotfredson, Trailblazing Sports Group founder
While Gotfredson noted that there was never a problem scaling up sponsorships at ESPN, she started Trailblazing and entered a partnership with Sports Innovation Lab to ensure that women’s sports receive similar opportunities no matter where they’re broadcast.
“I believe in the power of the purse with brands, so brands can make things happen in women’s sports,” Gotfredson said. “If I can play a role in helping brands invest in a lot of different properties within women’s sports beyond the big linear folks or big digital properties, then I feel like we are a firm with a mission.”
Teaming up on a brand playbook
The Women’s Sports Club NewFront is an attempt to escalate sales of women’s sports media packages and get more brands involved in the buying process. Focusing on athlete-driven, culture-driven and community-driven content packages, the NewFront used Sports Innovation Lab’s purchase data to determine fan behavior in addressable audiences: People who have bought tickets to Angel City FC NWSL matches, WNBA League Pass subscribers, USA Volleyball members who play in leagues, etc.
According to Jennifer Pelino, Sports Innovation Lab’s chief commercial officer and president of data cloud, consumers’ buying habits are 60% more accurate when classifying an audience than when using demographics, surveys or interest groups.
By pairing that data with content in Trailblazing’s Marketplace, Women’s Sports Club hoped to present more than 25 entities—including Just Women’s Sports, Shannon Sharpe’s Hang Media, Togethxr, Bleacher Report, OneTeam Partners, She Media, The Gist, Darius Rucker Intercollegiate golf, data firm Tradable Bits and Naomi Osaka’s Hana Kuma—a clear picture of which audiences most valued certain content.
“Couple the right audience with a great storytelling creative, making it relative to the consumer, and you have a winning team improving the ad’s effectiveness,” Pelino said.