GroupM doubles down on women’s sports, with support from major brands

Dive Brief:

GroupM is establishing a dedicated media marketplace for women’s sports as interest in the category soars, according to a press release.
Adidas, Mars Wrigley and Unilever are among the advertisers GroupM is working with to hunt for first-look and first-to-market deals around the 2024-2025 upfront season. The launch is part of the WPP media agency’s commitment to double its annual spending on women’s sports.
GroupM’s upfronts approach will include traditional broadcast TV sponsorships, bespoke packages and grassroots investments in leagues and athlete-owned entertainment brands. WPP sister shops Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom are invited to participate in the initiative.

Dive Insight:

Rising star athletes, changing rules around collegiate sponsorships and exposure driven by streaming and social media have helped women’s sports find wider audiences and fresh purchase in the advertising arena. GroupM is capitalizing on the moment by introducing a dedicated media marketplace for the category, sensing a lucrative opportunity as women’s sports are projected by Deloitte to rake in more than $1 billion in revenue this year. At the same time, the rollout aims to bring better parity and simplification to an often overshadowed area of the sporting world.

“Beyond prioritizing investing in women’s sports as a whole, we need to challenge the way advertising and sponsorship packages are bought and sold,” said Martin Blich, executive director of sports and live investment at GroupM U.S., in a statement. “For many years, there has been disparity between men’s and women’s sports advertising, but today there are increased opportunities across women’s sports. We hope our commitment will help brands execute a more holistic investment strategy centered around audience, while increasing overall sports advertising.”

The new marketplace, part of a larger pledge by GroupM to double its overall investments in women’s sports, will play a key role in the agency’s upfronts discussions this spring, which will be supported by blue-chip clients including Adidas, Ally Financial, Coinbase, Discover, Google, Mars, Nationwide, Unilever and Universal Pictures. GroupM will lean on its media partners to identify areas to “drive the discovery, promotion and monetization of women’s sports,” per the press release. The upfronts are a media-buying bonanza where brands and media agencies lock in TV advertising deals for the months ahead, though the occasion’s prominence has diminished somewhat amid the acceleration of cord-cutting and tightened advertiser budgets.

Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer first raised the prospect of creating such a marketplace to GroupM in 2023, and women’s sports have only continued to climb in the conversation since. Momentum has been backed by prodigies like college basketball star Caitlin Clark and cyclical events like the Women’s World Cup last summer. The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris could be another stepping stone on the upward trajectory and invite sponsorship activity.

Publishers have also pushed to get a stronger foothold in this emergent field. Last year saw the debut of Women’s Sports Network, a free ad-supported streaming service that claims to be the first of its kind dedicated exclusively to women’s sports coverage. Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Michelob Ultra was a launch sponsor for the platform.