Ladies’s sports activities funding is rising, and it’s scoring huge for advertisers.

In a brand new “Ladies’s Sports activities Playbook” report from WPP Media, in partnership with EDO, Adverteyes, and VideoAmp, which goals to be a information for manufacturers to spend money on ladies’s sports activities, the businesses reveal that latest advert progress in ladies’s sports activities is driving outcomes. That features discovering a 79% year-over-year enhance in advert impressions for ladies’s sports activities and 20% larger engagement with adverts than on non-sports broadcast and cable. 

Showcasing the affect, whereas analyzing adverts from main manufacturers, the report discovered that Ally Monetary’s adverts delivered 85% larger engagement when aired throughout ladies’s sports activities in comparison with broadcast and cable common exterior of stay sports activities.

“What it illuminates is what we now have been saying for the final 5 years that we’ve been closely investing in ladies’s sports activities, which is that that is good enterprise,” Andrea Brimmer, CMO, Ally Monetary, advised ADWEEK. “It makes distinctive sense as a marketer, and it drives actually accretive enterprise outcomes. And I feel {that a} report like this brings the receipts.”

And people receipts are leaving an impression.

In line with the report, funding in women’s sports is estimated to be up almost 70% yr over yr, with the entire spend reaching about $127 million. In the meantime, advert airings have elevated almost 30% to just about 30,000.

Moreover, audiences watching ladies’s sports activities are particularly engaging to advertisers, as followers overindex for households with incomes of $200,000 or extra. In the meantime, reaching these audiences authentically with athlete-led, human, and culturally aligned artistic drives larger emotional engagement, consideration, and model recall than generic artistic, the report states.

Martin Blich, government director and U.S. head of sports activities partnerships and funding, WPP Media, mentioned the report comes on the again of WPP’s previous pledge to double client investment throughout the ladies’s sports activities market, a pledge it made and rapidly surpassed in 2024.

“That is about taking what was, three plus years in the past, a cultural motion, and now, lending credit score to the truth that it is without doubt one of the highest rising efficiency environments inside media,” Blich mentioned.

Getting within the sport

Curiously, as the ladies’s sports activities market grows, it additionally brings out the aggressive facet of manufacturers.

“On one hand, I’m actually pleased about it,” Brimmer mentioned of the rise in model curiosity. “Then again, it’s going to be tough for these of us, like Ally, State Farm, AT&T, and Google, who had been the early traders, as a result of we’re going to get priced out of issues that we’ve traditionally held onto.”

In fact, Ally isn’t going wherever and continues to make strides in newer ladies’s sports activities leagues, not too long ago teaming with Scripps Sports activities to carry the Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League’s first-ever nationally televised sport within the U.S. on March 28.