Rising Tide 🦈 May 14, 2025

🤿 Below the Surface

Here's what's on deck this week:

• Signal Strength: How to build the infrastructure for women's sports ROI

• In the Current: Essential market signals for CMOs and marketing executives

• Blue Zone: ICMY, Deep Blue's third annual Business of Women's Sports Summit

• Wave Watch: What's your biggest barrier to investing in women's sports?

  reading time 5 minutes

⚡️ Signal Strength  

How to Build the Infrastructure to Drive ROI in Women's Sports

When it comes to women's sports, the business problem isn't what you might expect. Despite featuring extraordinary athletes and compelling narratives, women's sports aren't struggling with product quality—they're wrestling with systems failure.

The glaring challenge: infrastructure. Women's sports faces three critical deficits that create both risk and opportunity for forward-thinking marketers:

1. Data collection hurdles: Women's sports faces significant challenges in efficiently gathering and leveraging audience intelligence. Most teams operate with underdeveloped marketing tech stacks that can't effectively traffic ads, measure campaign effectiveness, or demonstrate fan engagement. According to Deloitte, women's sports is set to grow from just under $1 billion in 2021 to approximately $2.35 billion in 2025, yet many organizations still struggle with basic audience data collection and measurement capabilities to fully capture this potential.
   

2. Venue control limitations: Beyond Kansas City Current, most women's teams operate as tenants rather than owners of their facilities. This creates significant operational challenges: limited scheduling flexibility, restricted sponsorship activation opportunities, and inability to capture revenue streams that come with facility ownership. With Deloitte’s $2.35 billion projection by 2025, infrastructure investment will be one of the most substantial growth opportunities in the space.
   

3. Media rights fragmentation: Women's sports content is scattered across multiple platforms, creating discovery challenges. Despite growing to 15% of all sports coverage (up from just 5% historically), this fragmentation restricts efficient audience targeting and inventory creation, undermining women's sports' true commercial value.

For marketers looking to gain advantage in this emerging space, consider following these principles from our Brand Marketing Action Framework:

1. Act with urgency: Secure your first-mover advantage while premium inventory remains available. What you should have secured at a fraction of the rate yesterday will not be available tomorrow—at any rate.

2. Invest for long-term value: Yesterday's price is not today's price. The current market represents a unique value opportunity with exceptional growth potential. Build multi-year investment approaches rather than one-off activations.

3. Tap into audience loyalty: Women's sports fans demonstrate exceptional loyalty that translates directly to customer lifetime value. Research shows 25% of men watch women's sports weekly, making these investments valuable for brands seeking diverse, engaged audiences.

4. Build partnerships, not transactions: The most successful brands aren't just providing capital—they're offering critical business capabilities and services that support systemic growth.

5. Integrate women's sports into core strategy: Rather than siloed initiatives, forward-thinking brands like MassMutual are incorporating women's sports directly into their overall marketing mix.

The results are compelling: According to CNBC, TV advertisers invested $244 million in women's sports in 2024—a 139% year-over-year increase—delivering a 40% effectiveness premium compared to average prime-time advertising. Companies like Ally Financial are pioneering innovative approaches, as CMO Andrea Brimmer demonstrated in a recent interview about their collaborative work with ESPN that created prime programming slots for women's sports.

For forward-thinking brands, this represents a first-mover opportunity before the market catches up. It's a chance to establish foundational and efficient category leadership in what will likely be one of the defining sports business trends of the next decade.

“Women’s sports can do at least one thing men’s can't, experts say: Get bigger.” - Washington Post, April 2021

📰 In the Current  

We monitor the current so you can ride the wave. Here's what you need to know this week:

• Chase lands an Icon:  JPMorgan Chase’s partnership with 2x WNBA Champion A'ja Wilson proves that brands can evolve their women's sports investments beyond visibility to create authentic connections with audiences. 

• The tide keeps rising: Deloitte's latest projections show women's sports revenues hitting at least $2.35 billion (£1.88 billion) in 2025—a 240% increase in just four years. Basketball ($1.03B) overtakes soccer ($820M) as the commercial heavyweight, with North America generating 59% of global revenue.

• Cross-fan value beyond gender: Sky Sports' newest research reveals fans following both men's and women's sports spend 5+ more hours on sports content monthly and are 10% more likely to be paid subscribers.

• PWHL grows west: The Professional Women's Hockey League has announced expansion to Seattle and Vancouver for the 2025-26 season, bringing the league to eight teams.

🦈 Blue Zone  

On April 22nd, we hosted the third annual Business of Women’s Sports Summit in New York City. Decorated athletes, league executives, and industry leaders packed the Chelsea Factory to discuss the future of women’s sports and the necessary investments to fuel continued growth

Conversations explored breakthrough partnerships like Chase and the Golden State Valkyries, the power of telling authentic athlete stories of preparation via MassMutual’s “Stay Ready” campaign, and the evolving NIL market for female athletes including discussions with college basketball stars Flau’jae Johnson, Azzi Fudd, Lauren Betts, and Sienna Betts

The Summit closed with a live recording of Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe's podcast, A Touch More LIVE, featuring Chelsea Clinton for a conversation on how women's sports drives change.

Thank you to Summit partners Invisalign, Bumble, Shopify, DIG, Gainbridge Super League, and Canopy Team along with the support from PopUp Bagels, Sequel, Glamsquad, and Hot Plate Brewing. This year’s event was live-streamed via our partnership with CNBC. 

 🌊Wave Watch