What the women’s sports upswing means for advertisers in 2025
Illustration by Reagan Hicks / Shutterstock / The Current
From the WNBA to the Olympics, women’s sports finally shattered — or at least dramatically cracked — the glass backboard in 2024.
The year was marked by surging ticket sales, increased TV viewership and, for the WNBA, a landmark media rights deal. In fact, the basketball league was named the fastest-growing brand of 2024 by Morning Consult.
Further, women’s sports media coverage has dramatically grown. Women’s sports will account for 20% of all sports coverage in 2025, projects Wasserman’s The Collective, up from less than 6% in 2019.
Now that women’s sports have jumped into the mainstream, experts say advertisers can truly capitalize on the momentum this year by paying attention to cultural trends, partnering with athletes and engaging with emerging fan bases.
There are more opportunities than ever before for advertisers to take advantage of the surge in popularity thanks to the proliferation of live sports on streaming platforms, and the rise of new leagues. The WNBA will stream on Peacock and Prime Video starting this year; Netflix landed rights to the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cups; and a new three-on-three women’s basketball league, Unrivaled, launched this month, with games streaming on Max.
“This trend is more than just a passing phase or ‘The Caitlin Clark Effect,’” Emily Williams, a senior researcher at MRI-Simmons, wrote in a December report. “It’s a movement that advertisers should not overlook.”
Athletes are influencers
The MRI-Simmons report found that 23% of American adults surveyed were more interested in women’s sports than they were the previous year, with the top reasons being that female athletes were breaking records and that female athletes were inspiring to them.
Clearly, many people are tuning in for the athletes themselves. Mack Leahy, senior director of connections and performance strategy at Ogilvy, notes that Olympic athletes like Simone Biles and Ilona Maher became influencers in their own right during the Paris Games.
Women’s sports fans are more likely to support brands that sponsor their favorite athletes, the MRI-Simmons report found. And WNBA fans are more likely to pay attention and engage with ads during games, Williams tells The Current.
“There is prime opportunity for advertisers to go after WNBA fans,” Williams says. “Compared to the average American adult, WNBA fans over-index on product categories like sports drinks, chewing gum, beer, and nutrition and energy bars.”
Yet, as Leahy wrote in an op-ed for The Current, brands are still underestimating female consumers: “In 2024, women commanded over two-thirds of global consumer spending, and over the next five years are predicted to control a staggering 75% of all purchasing decisions. Yet only 9% of women feel that brands effectively connect with them, according to NielsenIQ.”
Tapping in to emerging fan bases
This isn’t to say that advertisers didn’t catch the women’s sports wave last year. GroupM said in October that it had exceeded its goal to double media spend on women’s sports programming.
But this year could present more opportunities for brands to cultivate relationships with fans from the ground up. The new women’s basketball three-on-three league, Unrivaled, quickly courted brand sponsors last year. As games air on both TNT and the Max streaming platform, it will undoubtedly get in front of more eyes than it would have even a few short years ago.
It’s not just athletes that have turned into influencers, either; Leahy says that women’s sports-focused content creators have burst onto the scene.
She expects the lines between sports reporting, storytelling and content creation to continue to blur, which could open the door for further brand collaboration.
“Sports haven’t provided an opportunity for ‘new fandom’ in some time,” Leahy says. “Fans are more than fans or consumers, they’re stakeholders. There is a ‘I knew this band before they were popular’ spirit we’re seeing. The more opportunities brands can provide that make audiences feel like they’re part of building something bigger, the more authentic and powerful it will be.”