Snap Inc.'s Global Head of Content and Partnerships on the metric brands keep missing

Your Women's Sports Business Digest

July 02, 2026

In 2015, Snap Inc. had five sports publisher deals and a pitch deck the NFL didn't take seriously. A decade later, the platform sits at 340+ sports partnerships and reaches 75% of 13–34 year-olds across 25 countries.

Anmol Malhotra, Snap's Global Head of Content and Partnerships built that portfolio by spotting a pattern incumbents missed: a credible product, an existing audience, and a closing window for the partners willing to move before the market repriced.

He sees the same setup right now in women's sports — and a familiar mistake from the brands still waiting for “cleaner” data.

🤿 Below the Surface

Here's what's on deck this week:

  • Signal Strength: Why relevance — not reach or revenue — is the women's sports metric that compounds

  • In the Current: Trinity Rodman fronting a men's World Cup campaign, ESPN's Sunday night shift, and college athletes pushing back on Capitol Hill.

  • Blue Zone: Our 2026 Cannes recap 🦈

  • Shark Bite: Laura Correnti on why Trinity Rodman is worth more than a men's national team.

⚡️ Signal Strength  

Reach and Revenue Get the Deal Signed. Relevance Decides If It Lasts.

Every CMO conversation about women's sports ends up in the same spot: “show me the ROI.”

It’s a fair ask. Reach and revenue have to defend themselves to a CFO. But if you judge the whole decision on what you can measure right now, you miss the real risk.

Malhotra builds Snap's pitch around three things: reach, revenue, and relevance. 

Relevance determines whether a sport — or a brand — is still commercially viable ten years out.

Relevance means your brand is part of how young fans find and follow a sport. When those fans start making spending decisions in ten years, will they think of you at all?

By the numbers:

  • Snap reaches 75%+ of 13–34 year-olds across 25+ countries

  • Nearly 1 billion monthly active users globally

  • Snap's sports portfolio: 340+ publishers, up from 5 in 2015

  • 12–18 month lead times required for athlete and creator partnerships ahead of the 2027 Women's World Cup

What he's saying: "The reach and revenue piece are measurable in a very clear way. The relevance piece is the X factor — and one of the hardest things to measure directly in the short term." — Anmol Malhotra, Snap Inc.

Why it matters for brands: You can't buy relevance after the fact. Once another brand connects with the next wave of fans, you can't win that spot back at the old price. Look at MLB's pitch clock. The league fought the change for years. When it finally happened, games got 20–30 minutes shorter, and more people showed up and tuned in. The wait cost the sport years of connection with the casual fans it needed most.

Bottom line: Brands that got in early are building fan connection that latecomers will pay a premium for — if it's even still for sale. The window Malhotra saw in 2015 is the same one in front of brand leaders today. And it's closing fast.

Want the full breakdown, including the three structural conditions making this window genuinely time-limited? Read the full playbook.

📰 In the Current  

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

🦈 Blue Zone  

Deep Blue x Cannes

Global women's sports revenue is projected to top $3 billion in 2026, per Deloitte. The WNBA's new media rights deal is more than triple its old one, the largest in women's sports history. Sponsorship deals climbed 22% in 2024 and another 12% in 2025.

Last week we were at Cannes turning those numbers into real conversations.

We opened with our annual Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment x Autodesk Tastemakers Dinner, in partnership with Axios.

The room: brands, investors, entrepreneurs, execs, and media leaders already building in women's sports. Sara Fischer moderated conversations with Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder and Snap Co-founder & CEO Evan Spiegel.

We also brought the Business of Women's Sports Summit to Cannes for the first time, in partnership with TeamSnap and iHeartMedia:

→ A CMO roundtable on three different reasons to invest in women's sports now, with Marisa Thalberg (JCPenney), Dara Treseder (Autodesk), and Arianna Orpello (GEICO)

→ Allyson Felix and Wes Felix talking about the road to LA28, and building Saysh and Always Alpha

→ WNBA Hall of Famer Sue Bird sharing how she’s building businesses across sports in her post-playing career

Off our own stage, Founder + CEO Laura Correnti joined a panel at 3C Ventures Plage with Arianna Orpello and Jason Schulweis on Deep Blue x GEICO's partnership, and gave a keynote on the Cannes Lions Sport main stage on five signals that women's sports is up and to the right.

Nine new women's sports leagues have launched since 2020, building fan bases and revenue from zero, with no legacy infrastructure to lean on. Closing that gap between the pace of the deals and the pace of the industry catching up is why Deep Blue exists.

🌊 Shark Bite

“Women inherently have done these brand deals and capitalized on these opportunities out of necessity. Now that’s changing. We’re entering the individual-over-institution era. People aren’t asking, ‘Am I a fan of the men’s national team or the women’s national team?’ They’re saying, ‘I’m a fan of Trinity Rodman.'”

-  Laura Correnti | Founder and CEO, Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment

Reach and revenue prove the quarter. Relevance protects the decade.

– Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment

Interested in learning what Deep Blue is up to? Have an idea?  

Reach us at info@dbse.com.

Rising Tide is published by Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment, the first-of-its-kind firm designed to identify, create, and influence business models and growth opportunities in women's sports for forward-thinking brands.