By Mollie Cahillane | May 20, 2024
The momentum around women’s sports doesn’t start or stop with Caitlin Clark. As Clark’s rookie season in the WNBA gets underway, networks and brands are increasingly investing in women’s sports as a whole. The key for women’s sports will be to move beyond recent heady viewership numbers for top events in basketball, softball, gymnastics, volleyball, soccer and more, and maintain the across-the-board consistency that networks and leagues can sell against.
Media giant Scripps is among the media companies betting on the potential of women’s sports. Scripps acquired ION Media for $2.65 billion from Black Diamond in 2020, and when Brian Lawlor was named president of sports in 2022, he immediately set out to make sports a priority for the network.
“We spent some time looking at the asset and saying, what do we see as the future of this?” said Lawlor. “And as we were looking at the network, one of the things we were asking ourselves is if the four biggest networks [ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC] all have significant sports, do we have a place to play in sports?”
After several months of research, Lawlor presented to the board that his team saw an opportunity for sports on ION, particularly women’s sports.
“Our interest was really trying to get into sports that [were] underexposed and had a good growth trajectory,” said Lawlor. “Every year the audience was growing: the WNBA, the NWSL, but also women’s college basketball, women’s college gymnastics, women’s college volleyball, all the women’s sports. … We were seeing more engagement there. But what we told the board was, it’s really hard to be a women’s sports fan in America. It’s just hard to find, and there’s no consistency on where to find these games.”
That led to an initial three-year broadcast deal with the WNBA in 2023 and continued with a four-year NWSL deal late last year.
“We told them [the board] what’s holding back women’s sports from really exploding is the visibility and reach and consistency; no one can find it,” said Lawlor.
Lawlor and team then laid out a strategy centered around women’s sports, starting with the WNBA. That began with franchise nights for the basketball league, followed by the media rights deal, which is worth $39 million over those three years.
“I would love to tell you I gave some brilliant presentation about Caitlin Clark, [she] was going to change the world,” said Lawlor. “There’s no way. We knew the trend was there. The assumptions are right, people are interested in women’s sports and with visibility, it had the ability to engage a lot more people. But it’s not just her, it’s all the other women.”
When Lawlor and his team started negotiating for the NWSL, he was initially met with skepticism. According to Lawlor, NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman called WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert to ask about working with ION.
“Even as we’re talking to the NWSL, many of the owners of the NWSL kept saying, ‘Who is ION, we don’t even know who these people are.’ Yet the league was saying, ‘No, these guys actually were a major player with the WNBA, and we think they’re a really important part of our strategy,’” said Lawlor.
Demand for women’s sports is high even when the games aren’t televised. A preseason WNBA game between the Chicago Sky and Minnesota Lynx on May 3 was livestreamed by a fan from their phone on X (formerly known as Twitter), reaching 40,000 viewers within a few minutes.
Chicago’s next preseason game was quickly made available on WNBA League Pass.
Brand support
Brands and media buys have been a major player in women’s sports, and that didn’t change coming into the 2024 upfronts.
“You’ve got to get the reach and visibility, and then if you can solve for that, you need the brands,” said Lawlor, who cited brands such as Capital One, CarMax, DoorDash and State Farm as major supporters of women’s sports. “If you can get the brands to support, then you get the viewers, then it works. That’s the three things that need to work together for this thing to take off.”
As for growing women’s sports? For Lawlor, it’s expansion in the WNBA specifically. Speaking before the league announced last week that it would expand to Toronto in 2026, Lawlor said, “We would like to see more cities. Your fandom and passion increases if you get to go to games. If there’s only 12 cities in America that have WNBA games, there’s a whole lot of people who are never going to be able to get to a game and connect to the fans. Salaries and just parity is really important. Companies like ours and the other broadcast networks have to make investments, brands need to sponsor and support the teams.”
The WNBA’s biggest media partner is ESPN/Disney, and ad sales chief Rita Ferro specifically cited the long-standing partnership with the WNBA, which the company entered around 25 years ago, as a highlight for Disney. That deal is up in 2025, and commissioner Engelbert has been vocal about chasing a larger media agreement, a development that is being watched closely by the sports industry.
“For the last few years, we’ve been very intentional about the windows and the amount of content of female sports we put across all of our platforms in the right time periods,” said Ferro. “You want to not only have women’s sports, but you want to give it windows where audiences will find it and watch it — and that has been a slow build over time, for many reasons. Brands wanted it, but didn’t necessarily show up.”
Ferro noted a shift in the last 24 to 36 months of brands coming to the table to commit to women’s sports.
“That’s because it drives results. It drives business outcomes, it drives intentional investment and it drives really performance, ultimately, which is what they want,” said Ferro. “Brands are going to come and spend money on things that matter, but they ultimately are contributing to the bottom line. What’s been exciting to see is what was probably two or three brands has really turned into many brands this past year, and we fully expect in this account, we’re going to see even more coming to the table.”
Those brands are driven largely by Ally Financial and its CMO Andrea Brimmer, who is leading the charge to bring equity to media spend in sports.
“Andrea texted me, ‘I think people get pissed that I mention you all the time on stage,’ and I said, ‘I mention you all the time’ because she pushed us,” Ferro said. “Andrea showed up at a meeting and said, ‘I want to partner with you, I want to make sure I have your commitment to make this happen.’ And she showed up. It’s exciting to see what one person has pushed a marketplace to do, and now you’re seeing many others.”
Those conversations led to a deal between Ally and Disney that put gender equity front and center, including a 90% media investment, solely in women’s sports, that included coverage of game highlights, branded content and features across ESPN, along with regular, in-episode “SportsCenter” segments. The remaining 10% is invested in men’s sports advertising.
Media buyers take notice
During this year’s upfront season, media buyers were also looking for the opportunities that women’s sports can give.
Optimum Sports handles 25%-30% of all sports advertising spend per given year, and expects that to be the same this year.
“We’ve talked to a lot of clients who have actually been doing women’s sports for a long time, and have always wanted to do more, but there hasn’t been opportunity,” said Amy Adelbush, managing director at Optimum Sports. “It’s a trend that’s happening in a good way, where brands are able to now really redefine their role within women’s sports and reshape their approach, or for some clients, even coming in for the first time ever.”
“Clients have invested into this space previously where maybe they pick one activation element to go and support, where there’s such a bigger breadth of activation points,” added Kristen Gray, managing director at Optimum Sports. “It’s not just about buying a couple units here or there in the women’s NCAA Final Four, but it’s more about bringing in an athlete, using their NIL, supporting the players, the teams. Rising tides raise all ships.”
Daniel Cohen, executive vice president of global media rights consulting at Octagon, sees more attention coming for women’s sports. “There’s finally a spotlight put on them, not just from a broadcaster perspective, but from a mainstream, cross-the-cultural-divide perspective,” Cohen said.
Cohen referenced NWSL and USWNT star Trinity Rodman (an Octagon client) as an example of an athlete able to capitalize on the advantages of social media, as well as gymnasts Simone Biles and Aly Raisman.
“You’re crossing that sport divide into mainstream culture; social media plays a role in that, broadcasters have played a role, brands supporting these initiatives played a role in that,” said Cohen. “The other piece is investors in sport, whether that be bankers or individual high-net-worth folks or broadcasters, are always looking for growth. On the men’s side, at least on the U.S. domestic side of things, growth is incremental, it’s smaller. We’re talking like individual percentage points of growth of NFL viewership per year, NBA viewership per year. But on the women’s side, the ceiling is much higher, there’s so much more to go. So let’s invest in that growth, that small-cap which is women’s sports, and we can see 100x return versus the men’s side.”