How brands are evolving their women’s sports alliances for the Olympics

For the first time this year, an equal number of men and women are competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics. 

Coinciding with this moment in Olympics history is an unprecedented boom in interest in women’s sports in the US Women’s basketball is emblematic of this trend:The NCAA women’s basketball tournament had more viewers than the men’s tournament for the first time ever, averaging 19 million viewers, and overall interest in the WNBA rose 29% between 2023 and 2024.

As a result, advertisers are looking to align their brands with this new wave of women’s sports and its rising star athletes; Horizon Media told Reuters that brand campaigns that feature women athletes have doubled this year compared to previous years. 

Indeed, general-market brands like Powerade, Reese’s and Coca-Cola have released ads starring only women athletes, while other advertisers, including Nike, have included an equal number of women and men athletes in their Olympics campaigns.

But are advertisers keeping up with this progress around women’s sports viewership by not just representing women, but giving them equitable, inclusive storylines? And are their sponsorship investments reflective of the influence and rising power of women’s sports?

Christine Guilfoyle, president of the Association of National Advertisers’ SeeHer, believes there has been an improvement in the depth of storytelling around women athletes—but there is still work to be done.

“Every one of those achievements we should celebrate, we shouldn't allow that celebration to stand in the way of continued progress,” she said.

For instance, there is still a huge inequity in sponsorship investment: male athletes receive 90% of all sports sponsorship dollars as of August 2023, leaving only 10% to women athletes, per a 2023 study from The Collective. 

According to Kate Wolff, CEO of Lupine Creative and co-founder of Do the WeRQ, higher investment results in more ads starring men and deeper storytelling around male athletes. 

Gendered inequalities in sports marketing come down to gender divisions of sports themselves, she added, as it divides the infrastructure and operations” around sports marketing. 

“Women athletes just generally don't have as long of a runway” to create deeper stories and drive a more equitable ecosystem, added Thayer Lavielle, executive vice president at Wasserman’s The Collective.

Broadening the scope around women athletes

In categories such as fashion and cosmetics, where women are the dominant consumers, brands are investing more in women’s sports overall, which — this is a smart decision, said Lavielle.. For instance, Knix and Athleta have debuted Olympics campaigns starring US athletes like Megan Rapinoe and Simone Biles.

“For so many women—whether it’s learned or it’s just something we naturally and individually appreciate—beauty and self care is a part of our human experience,” she said. Increasing marketing investment in women’s sports gives these brands’ audiences the feeling that “the brands we use are buying into what we’re interested in,” she added.

But tailoring marketing to a woman consumer is “table stakes” for women’s products, Wolff said. The onus now is on general market brands to invest in  women’s sports and athletes. And there’s good reason for them to do so, since women make up only 46% of women’s sports fans, per The Collective’s 2023 study.

“What has really changed since the last summer Olympics in particular is the power story of women's sports—the trajectory over four years has been unbelievable to witness,” said Lavielle. Excluding women athletes from campaigns, particularly those reaching U.S. consumers, would be a huge misstep, she added.

As women’s sports rise in popularity, women athletes are also “finding their own voices more readily,” Lavielle added. This gives brands an opportunity to “hook into real change for women,” which she added she’s already seeing in the Olympics.

For example, diaper brand Pampers partnered with retired track and field Olympian Alyson Felix to open the first daycare center at the Olympic Village, so Olympians with children need not sacrifice time with their kids to do their jobs.

Guilfoyle added that NBCU, which has held the rights to the summer games since 1988 and the winter games since 2002, has consistently produced “great storytelling to promote and shine a light on women’s sports and the athletes associated.” Brands can learn from NBCU’s approach to create  “authentic, true, intersectional and emotional” storylines around women athletes.

Guilfoyle added that she expects the rise of NIL deals, which give athletes more control over how they market themselves, will lead to “deeper, more personal storylines” around women compared to what they’d see “when employed by their sport or their team.”

Taking sexism out of storytelling

In many cases, women athletes have been presented differently than men athletes in a way that reflects still-dominant sexist stereotypes.

“Men get more nuanced narratives about their characteristics and traits,” while much, but not all advertising for women athletes centers around “a generic women empowerment message,” Wolff said.

Often, men are celebrated for their individual characteristics and athleticism, but womanhood is portrayed as an obstacle to reaching athletic greatness, she added. For example, Tampax’s Olympics ad from this year positions menstruation as an inhibitor to strength.

“Being a woman is something to overcome; the narrative tends to be less about the defining characteristics or qualities of the athletes themselves or the sport. Why is gender the breaker of strength?”

Women athletes are also portrayed as more polished and composed than men in marketing materials, Guilfoyle said. “You see men sweating, dirty, showing the physical grit of the game; typically you've seen women with ponytails, completely composed, mostly of a certain body type and body imagery, usually at the trophy.”

While these gendered stereotypes are changing, progress has typically only been around women who are considered the greatest of all time in their sport, like Serena Williams and more recently, Simone Biles or Linsday Horan.

Still, the dominant viewpoint is, “if you are physical, if you want to be a winner, if you demand more from yourself and everyone around you, if you assign that to female behavior and story arcs, it’s a negative and that is not how they should behave,” Guilfoyle said.

However, women’s basketball, particularly the commentary surrounding WNBA rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, is spearheading a more blanket shift toward celebrating the grittier side of women’s sports.

“The uproar over that physicality would never have happened in the men's tournament — they aren’t at a tea party, basketball is a contact sport,” Guilfoyle said. 

But as interest in women’s basketball continues to rise, and “as [people] see and/or become comfortable with seeing [that physicality] in the cultural zeitgeist, then marketers will feel more comfortable incorporating that and pushing the envelope for that to be included.”

Moving beyond the Olympics

“The Olympics have always had a benefit of putting men and women in the same sports in the same calibers competing for the same things and at the same level of equality,” said Wolff. 

The same cannot be said for sports more broadly. Only 14% of women’s sports are distributed for viewership, said Guilfoyle—and while this is up from 4% in 2019, it's still a slim percentage. 

She said she hopes Olympics viewership will drive demand for more broadcasting of women’s sports: “Surely, the tune-in and audience for the Olympics and women’s categories specifically will spur viewership numbers well beyond the Paris games,” she said.

For advertisers, this means maintaining interest and investment in women’s sports and athletes once they have returned home from the global stage of the Olympics. 

According to Guilfoyle, advertisers should evolve their relationships, whether they’re with the sports themselves, the leagues or the individual athletes 'to become a more always-on marketing vehicle, not just to pop up because it’s soccer or basketball season'.

She added that advertisers with women’s sports relationships are missing an opportunity to broaden their target audience. Campaigns featuring women athletes could easily run during men’s sporting events, which could not only draw more attention to the partnerships, but the women’s sports category itself.