- GroupM is establishing a dedicated media marketplace for women’s sports as interest within the category soars, in line with a press release.
- Adidas, Mars Wrigley and Unilever are among the many advertisers GroupM is working with to hunt for first-look and first-to-market deals across the 2024-2025 upfront season. The launch is a component 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 take part in the initiative.
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 within the promoting 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 greater than $1 billion in revenue this yr. At the identical time, the rollout goals to bring higher parity and simplification to an often overshadowed area of the sporting world.
“Beyond prioritizing investing in women’s sports as an entire, we’d like to challenge the best way promoting and sponsorship packages are bought and sold,” said Martin Blich, executive director of sports and live investment at GroupM U.S., in an announcement. “For a few years, there was disparity between men’s and women’s sports promoting, 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 promoting.”
The recent marketplace, part of a bigger pledge by GroupM to double its overall investments in women’s sports, will play a key role within the agency’s upfronts discussions this spring, which will likely 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 discover areas to “drive the invention, 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 promoting 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 making such a marketplace to GroupM in 2023, and women’s sports have only continued to climb within the conversation since. Momentum has been backed by prodigies like college basketball star Caitlin Clark and cyclical events just like the Women’s World Cup last summer. The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris might be one other stepping stone on the upward trajectory and invite sponsorship activity.
Publishers have also pushed to get a stronger foothold on this emergent field. Last yr saw the debut of Women’s Sports Network, a free ad-supported streaming service that claims to be the primary of its kind dedicated exclusively to women’s sports coverage. Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Michelob Ultra was a launch sponsor for the platform.
Read the total article here
