Dive Brief:
- Advertisements that air in women’s sports deliver 20% higher engagement and impact on average than ads in non-sports broadcast and cable environments, according to a new report from WPP Media in partnership with EDO, Adverteyes and VideoAmp.
- “The Women’s Sports Playbook” details the growing impact of women’s sports and demonstrates how a focus on authenticity, cultural relevance and platform-native creative can improve advertiser outcomes in the space.
- The report analyzes the performance of over 200 ads across five verticals, including ads from Google Pixel, which reported 192% higher search engagement for ads that aired in women’s sports compared to the brand’s overall average.
Dive Insight:
Women’s sports have entered a new era, with viewership rapidly increasing and advertiser dollars following suit. Ad spend in the space increased 69% year over year in 2025 to $127 million, and impressions increased 79% YoY to over $15 billion during the same period, according to WPP Media’s latest report.
“The Women’s Sports Playbook” asserts that the audiences women’s sports attract are crucial for brand building and often hard to reach via other means. Women’s sports viewers are 20% to 68% more likely than the general population to have household incomes of $200,000 or more. Within linear datasets, cord-cutters significantly overindex, indicating that viewers who have turned away from traditional cable are still engaged with live women’s sports.
WPP Media’s report was created in partnership with TV outcomes company EDO, creative intelligence company Adverteyes and measurement firm VideoAmp. For the report, EDO analyzed ads from five national advertisers that aired a minimum of 10 times between Sept. 1, 2024, and Aug. 15, 2025, and measured the performance against each participant’s own brand average across all placements. Adverteyes used artificial intelligence-powered gaze tracking technology to score emotional resonance of the ads against a database of over 200,000 ads.
As brands boost their investments in the space, WPP Media’s report includes five principles designed to lift attention and engagement. First, authentic, athlete-driven storytelling was identified for delivering some of the strongest performance lifts in the study, with one sportswear brand seeing a 426% engagement lift when athlete-led creative aired in women’s sports versus non-sports programming. The report also recommends narratives be rooted in empowerment, with such themes sustaining higher engagement on average.
Third, the report highlights the importance of platform-narrative creative, noting that 15-second connected TV executions outperform 30-second cuts in high-energy contexts. Social-first vertical executions also scored highly for attention performance, and simplified storytelling delivered up to three-times higher attention than fast-cut formats. Fourth, the report emphasizes the importance of earlier brand cues and clarity of focal point to improve performance, asserting that micro-level creative decisions significantly influence performance.
Last, the report doubles down on the value of the women’s sports environment itself for consistently driving engagement relative to non-sports placements, with one automotive brand seeing a 75% higher engagement on average for ads airing in women’s sports than in non-sports linear programming.
Specific brand results highlighted in the “Women’s Sports Playbook” report include how Google Pixel ads performed in women’s sports environments, with such placements achieving nearly three-times higher impact when compared to the brand’s overall average. Women’s professional basketball placements delivered a 284% lift in performance versus its non-sports TV benchmark. Creative featuring dynamic game action resonated most, indicating the importance of contextually relevant storytelling.
“For us, the takeaway was clear. Women’s sports audiences will respond to brands with loyalty and action. When brands contextually meet the moment, they sustain attention longer and drive stronger action — ensuring brands, leagues, audiences, and athletes win,” said Kate Johnson, global director of sports and entertainment marketing partnerships at Google, in the report.
The report also includes results for financial services company Ally, which saw 85% higher engagement for ads aired during women’s sports in comparison to its broadcast and cable average outside of live sports. Additionally, a single ad that aired during professional women’s basketball delivered 3.4 times the impact of a typical non-live sports ad, per the report.
WPP Media’s report supports the company’s commitment to build a dedicated women’s sports marketplace. In 2024, the company announced that it exceeded its pledge to double annual media spend in women’s sports advertising, with over 20 brands across its portfolio — including Adidas, Target, Unilever and Mars — expanding their investments in the space.
