It’s no secret that women’s sport is having a moment. Stadiums are promoting out, TV audiences are climbing and landmark victories just like the Lionesses’ Euros triumph and the Crimson Roses’ Six Nations win are gaining new followers. For the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), the problem now could be to show that momentum into one thing deeper and lasting.
“We’ve massively grown curiosity in girls’s sport over the previous 5 to 10 years,” says its advertising director, Jen Vile. “However the subsequent section is about deepening that keenness and dedication amongst these individuals who have already got an curiosity. That’s the true alternative.”
It’s this considering that impressed the ECB’s main marketing campaign for the Girls’s T20 World Cup. The grand ambition isn’t just promoting tickets however constructing a model.
“As a way to ship on these huge attendances and ticket gross sales, we additionally must do a model job as a result of that’s what’s going to hook individuals in,” Vile says. “Doing model work is all about creating connections with audiences and that’s the job to be executed for girls’s cricket.”
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Promoting the game, not the progress of ladies’s sport
Final 12 months, the ECB refreshed its viewers segmentation to know who its present followers had been and the place to recruit new ones from the broader cricket fandom. “It was actually encouraging that we discovered that there’s a passionate core of followers who’re already engaged in girls’s cricket and a large group who’re open to it however who we haven’t fairly pulled in but,” Vile says.
It sounds easy, however the important thing perception the ECB bought from its viewers analysis is that followers of cricket, be it male or feminine, simply wish to watch nice sport. To promote girls’s cricket, Vile says: “We actually want to speak the ability, the drama and the competitors. We simply must make individuals see it, really feel it, join with it.”
The ECB tasked company House337 with creating its T20 World Cup 2026 marketing campaign. Vile discovered the pitch “compelling” because it inspired the ECB to “cease promoting the progress of ladies’s sport” and begin promoting the game. The ‘Catch the Spirit’ advert tries to seize the “infectious” vitality {that a} nation feels when a World Cup is on dwelling soil.
The advert exhibits a dad making use of sunscreen to his daughter’s face after which revealing two cricket stumps drawn with the white lotion. It additionally encompasses a man knitting at a bus cease, with the digital camera panning to point out him knitting cricket pads into his legs. Then, the advert cuts to a few buying in a market. The boyfriend tosses his girlfriend an apple, which she then bats away utilizing a baguette. “The way in which that House337 has gone about it’s actually good and enjoyable and joyous,” Vile says.
The marketing campaign rolls out in two phases, the primary working from now till Christmas and the second within the run-up to the match. For the reason that ECB is aiming for model consciousness, nearly all of the media plan includes mass-reach channels, with broadcast and streaming TV and extra premium digital areas. Vile has additionally included the viewers segmentation analysis into the media plan for “sharper” concentrating on.
Advertising and marketing for the collective effort
The match in 2026 is prone to be boosted by the England girls staff, the Lionesses, successful the Euros earlier in July. “Every time girls’s sport does these wonderful issues, whether or not it is the Lionenesses, whether or not it is the Crimson Roses or whether or not it is the England girls’s cricket staff, it strikes the entire class,” Vile explains.
Girls’s cricket has been going from energy to energy since selling out Lords stadium for the 2017 T20 World Cup closing to record-setting attendance in the 2020 closing between Australia and India drawing 86,174 spectators. These figures aren’t nearly a full stadium, Vile says, however a “highly effective sign” that there’s a true urge for food for girls’s sport.
The entrepreneurs behind girls’s sport are all the time working collectively each straight and not directly, Vile says. “There’s an actual collegiate nature to girls’s sport and we positively all really feel {that a} rising tide lifts all boats on the subject of girls’s sport,” she provides.
Every sport is marketed in several methods as a result of every of the sports activities are distinctive and have their very own promoting factors, nonetheless, entrepreneurs consider within the “collective effort” of elevating the profile of ladies’s sports activities and “driving structural progress”, Vile tells The Drum.
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