By Michael Bürgi • August 16, 2024 •
With the news back in March that GroupM was planning to double its planned ad spend on women’s sports, the news was welcomed by pretty much anyone involved in women’s sports. Right around that time, the Caitlin Clark/Angel Reese rivalry during March Madness set the world on notice that women’s college basketball is just as entertaining — if not more so — than the men’s game. And then it translated to the WNBA as both college stars drew new attention to that league.
None of this is or was news to Andrea Brimmer, CMO of financial services firm Ally, who’s been supporting women’s sports for years with her brand’s marketing dollars. Brimmer has been encouraged to see the spotlight women’s sports have enjoyed in the Paris Summer Olympics — from the gymnasts to the U.S. National Women’s Team in soccer, to even the lesser known sports including water polo and table tennis — but she also believes there’s still room to grow.
To say the least. Brimmer cited a recent article in Front Office Sports that found only 33 out of the Fortune 500 companies invest in women’s sports leagues. And none do so exclusively. In contrast, she also pointed out that if the U.S. women’s Olympics athletes were their own country, they would have ranked third among all countries in medals won.
Brimmer shared some of her thoughts on women’s sports, sports in general and, as a CMO whose digital media investments are handled in-house, her thoughts on the constant changing cookie-deprecation landscape.
This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
As a long time marketing investor in women’s sports, what do you see has changed in the dynamic to make women’s sports reach closer to parity with men’s sports?
I think the primary reason for that is accessibility. The historical issue with regard to women’s sports was that it was not presented in media that was easy to consume — it got lousy time slots. It was put on secondary channels within media ecosystems. As a result, people didn’t have the opportunity to see how great women’s sports are.
Now you have more focus and highlight on what amazing athletes these women are, how competitive these leagues are, the caliber of talent that exists across the ecosystem. And you actually have brands getting behind and spending so that the networks can actually move women’s sports into better time slots. The Caitlin Clark quote that I love is, “Women’s sports didn’t just get good — they’ve always been good.”
Chicken or egg: was the marketing support that Ally brought to the TV networks that made them pay attention, or did improving the time slots attract the money?
There’s this vicious cycle concept that the networks need funding and they need advertising support to put any type of programming in the right time slots. Women’s sports have historically not been in those primary time slots, and so they have not attracted advertisers because audience composition was not great. And your ability to deliver reach and frequency was sub optimized. In that equation, honestly, the only one that could blink first were the brands. We as brands had to assure the platforms that we would bring money over if they moved the programming into the places that it needed to be. So I think it was more of the likes of us and others saying, we have the dollars we will commit them. Yeah, now you do your part.
We’ve had an amazing relationship, for instance, with Disney and ESPN, and that’s a place where we’ve sat down collaboratively. It started with just a dinner with myself and [Disney’s head of ad sales] Rita Ferro. ESPN has always been on the forefront of supporting women’s sports through ESPNW. We sat down and said, “What if we collectively do something that nobody’s ever done before?” And we put together a multi-million dollar media deal which brought with it an assurance of media commitment to ESPN from Ally, and an assurance of prime and better program time slots for women sports for Ally from ESPN. I think it’s the best example that I’ve seen of a marketer and a platform working together. If you talk to Rita and the folks at ESPN, it brought them in a bunch of additional business because a lot of brands pointed to it.
There’s a more general sense that sports is at another inflection point, with the new NBA/WNBA deal. How do marketers embrace it?
The complexity of the media [eco]system is something that I think all of us as marketers are grappling with in a big way. You see media inflation at around 5% year over year. You see the complete explosion of platforms that exists and ways that a consumer can be both reached and distracted. As a marketer, you’re also contending with: what properties are you locked out of because of rights deals? What do I have to pay to unlock premium programming? The amount of planning and brain power that goes into sitting down and trying to figure out how to have the most effective reach and frequency with the incredible splintering of the media ecosystem is, I think, more robust than ever. It’s nearly impossible.
And sports is the golden goose. It’s what everybody is after, and it’s why you’re seeing these leagues command these almost unfathomable amounts of money.
Switching gears, given that Ally handles its own digital media investment in-house, does Google’s change of heart on cookie deprecation present a challenge or an opportunity?
The entire industry, ourselves included, was preparing for the eventual abolishment of cookies. As a result, we’re in a good place in terms of how we’ve organized our data, how we’ve tagged our data, how we have thought about alternative solutions relative to consumer IDs. To me, it’s just kind of kicking the can down the road.
With cookie deprecation, what does it drive in terms of incrementality of cost, [or make it] harder to reach consumers and understand how to give real, personal experiences? Those are the things that we’ve been trying to solve for. We’re working really closely with partners in our data set and even partners like The Trade Desk and others that we’re buying programmatically through and thinking about unique identifiers and how you overcome what’s yet another challenge to the Marketing and Advertising industry.
You know how they say it isn’t rocket science? Well it kind of is.
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