- Ally Financial made a pledge last year to invest equally in men’s and women’s sports.
- Since then, the brand’s likeability, preference, and awareness among women’s sports fans is up.
- The company is dropping a commercial featuring female athletes during the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
When the Women’s World Cup kicks off today in Australia and New Zealand, US viewers will see a commercial jam-packed with star female athletes including gender-equity icon Billie Jean King and US Women’s National Team standout Sophia Smith.
A year ago, an internal audit by Ally Financial revealed the company had spent 90% of its sports marketing budget on men’s sports. In May 2022, the marketing team, whose leadership includes former female college athletes, pledged to split its media spending evenly between men’s and women’s sports.
The company says its investment in women’s sports is paying off. Now, it’s buying air-time during one of the biggest female sports events in the world.
“Our 50/50 pledge is arguably the strongest market initiative we’ve ever done at Ally,” Stephanie Marciano, the company’s head of sports and entertainment marketing, told Insider. “And I could be a little bit biased, but it’s delivered tremendously for us.”
Among women’s sports fans, preference and awareness of Ally are up 20% from May 2022 to the end of the second quarter of 2023, and likeability of the brand increased 25% during the same period, the company found through surveys it conducted and commissioned. The data indicates these favorable consumers are six times more likely to become Ally customers and would cost the company 87% less to convert, Marciano said.
Recent data from Tubular Labs also found women’s college basketball viewers are 24.5 times more likely to go to Ally’s website.
Some of Ally’s recent investments in women’s sports include sponsorship of the 2022 NWSL championship on CBS that Marciano said helped the game move into prime time. The company put 90% of its spending on ESPN toward women’s sports, and it partnered with smaller, women-run media outlets like Just Women’s Sports, The GIST, RE-INC, and GOALS. The brand also signed 10 female athletes to create Team Ally, a group that posts about one another’s games and increases visibility for women’s sports.
Its latest effort, the Women’s World Cup commercial, will premiere on Fox and run throughout the year. Notre Dame lacrosse player Kasey Choma, who’s also part of Team Ally, is featured scoring a goal. She remembers it vividly for giving her “the nastiest bruise” on her leg as she fell over her defender, who is a good friend from home, she told Insider.
Advertiser interest in women’s sports is up
Choma said she’s seen more investment in women’s sports in the past few years, which has created new opportunities for athletes. She became one of the first female faces for a different brand that had only sponsored men’s lacrosse players for a decade. She said partnering with Ally was a “no-brainer” because the company shares her values of empowering women in sports.
“For my daughter in the future,” Choma said, “I want her to feel special. And I feel like this is the start of something, start of history, which is really important.”
Marciano is a former college athlete herself. She played basketball at Yale in the mid-2000s, competed professionally in Germany, and coached on the Division I and Division III levels. She agrees with Choma that the last few years have brought an explosion of attention and investment in women’s sports that were unseen during her playing career.
“The popularity of women’s sports has never been greater,” Marciano said. “Every metric in women’s sports is up: viewership, attendance, audience size, consumption patterns, and this [commercial] is just supposed to take all that energy and piece it together.”
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