CES 2024 Highlights the Growth of Women’s Sports

Women’s sports have seen a meteoric rise in both popularity and attention over the past few years and as those have increased, so has the dollar signs associated with television rights, social media clicks and tickets sold.

The CES 2024 session titled “From Buzz to Business: The ROI of Women’s Sports” took a look at how women’s sports continue to grow and what large companies are doing to support that growth, highlighted this month with the the Professional Women’s Hockey League opening on the heels of multiple expansion teams coming to the National Women’s Soccer League this season and two professional volleyball leagues also planning to start in 2024.

The session was moderated by Gina Waldhorn, chief marketing officer of Sports Innovation Lab. The panelists included Andrea Brimmer, chief marketing and public relations officer of Ally; Andrea Hopelain, general manager and senior vice president of publishing for EA Sports and Electronic Arts; Brian Lawlor, president of Scripps Sports; and Harish Sarma, global head of sports at TikTok.

Ally has been just that to women’s sports. In May 2022, the company announced The 50/50 Pledge, a commitment to reach equal spend in media across men’s and women’s sports within the next five years. In October 2022, Ally partnered with CBS to move the NWSL Championship game to primetime, which continued with this season’s championship game in San Diego.

“What we’ve seen since we launched the 50-50 Pledge is that in the two years since then we are at the highest point of brand awareness in our company’s history,” Brimmer said. “And we’re at the highest level of likability in the history of our company. We grew in 2023 faster than any banking brand, so the pledge is working in every metric we look at.”

Ally also sponsored the Ally Tipoff in Charlotte featuring Iowa against Virginia Tech earlier this season.

“It’s not just women that are watching women’s sports, especially with the younger fans,” Brimmer added. “There’s a duality of male and female fans that are flocking to women’s sports and I think it’s important to break that myth that women’s sports are only watched by women. I looked around that crowd, purposely, and I would say 60–70 percent of the crowd were young boys… who all wanted Caitlin Clark’s autograph.”

Hopelain pointed out that Electronic Arts has been in the business of sports video games through its EA Sports brand for several decades and it has seen double-digit growth in terms of revenue and engagement over the past decade, driven by the representation and growth of all the teams and athletes in the games.

“In the past year, we introduced women into one of the most competitive modes inside our EA Sports FC game, our global (soccer) game,” Hopelain said. “There are 19,000 athletes across 700 teams and we were a little nervous about how adding women into that fantasy mode would go. In the real world, you don’t see men and women competing against each other on the global pitch but in our game, you can do that. We’ve seen more than 40% of our players equip at least one woman on their fantasy teams and in some cases multiple women, because they see the competitive value to help their fantasy team’s success.”

More Live Sports on Networks

The success of women’s sports is not just in video games. Lawlor and Scripps acquired television network Ion, which had never had live sports before securing first a deal with the WNBA and now with the NWSL ahead of the 2024 season. Ion delivered almost 10 million WNBA viewers over the course of last season and Lawlor says fans of the WNBA, who had never watched Ion before, came to the network.

“At the end of the season, our audience profile was 50% male and 50% female, and it was younger and more diverse than the typical Ion audience,” Lawlor said. “It was a win-win for us and the WNBA and the reach of the WNBA increased by 26% last season. Now we have a full season behind us and a full season ahead, and we’re establishing these Franchise Nights on Ion and that’s helping get people used to the idea that we have women’s sports on our channel, and it creates brand consistency every week.”

The Franchise Nights concept is slated to include both WNBA and NWSL games. As part of a new television deal, Ion will carry 50 NWSL matches as part of 25 Saturday doubleheaders. Ion will also air a 30-minute studio show before each doubleheader.

TikTok has become one of the biggest social media platforms in the world and is a natural place for sports content to exist. Sarma says the company got into the women’s sports world when it made a deal to help English soccer club Burnley’s women’s team find a sponsor for their jerseys.

“They were looking for sponsors and funding,” Sarma said. “We sat down with them and said, ‘let’s build a plan that will ultimately get you to this desired outcome.’ And even if we weren’t the logo on the jersey, we were going to do everything we could for them to gain awareness. We built a strategy of how they would launch on TikTok and we took that content and helped them build profiles for all of their players. Because people really care about you when they know who you are. The vast amount of consumers aren’t looking at sports content as, ‘is this a man or a woman,’ they’re looking for elite athletes.”

The campaign worked, as the Burnley women had AstroPay as a main sponsor, with a TikTok logo on the sleeve, during the 2021–2022 season. In July 2023, both the Burnley men’s and women’s sides signed a deal with betting and online casino operator W88 as its latest shirt sponsor.