- Last year, Ally Financial committed to investing equally in men's and women's sports media.
- Since then, the brand has gained popularity, fame and recognition among women sports fans.
- The company will launch a commercial featuring female athletes during the Women's World Cup
As the Women's World Cup kicks off today in Australia and New Zealand, US viewers will see a field of top athletes including gender equality icon Billie Jean King and US Women's Team icon Sophia Smith.
An internal audit conducted by Ally Financial a year ago found that the company spent 90% of its sports media marketing budget on men's sports. In May 2022, a marketing team led by former college athletes committed to dividing media spending equally between men's and women's sports.
The company says its investment in women's sports is paying off. Now she is getting airtime during one of the biggest women's sporting events in the world
"Our 50/50 commitment is probably the strongest marketing initiative we've ever done at Ally," Stephanie Marciano, the company's director of sports and entertainment marketing, told Insider. "And it might be a little biased, but it's worked great for us."
From May 2022 to the end of the second quarter of 2023, Ally's preference and awareness among female fans increased by 20%, and brand approval increased by 25% during the same period, according to a US study. Exploitation. Data shows that these favorable consumers are six times more likely to become allied customers, and the company costs 87 percent less to convert, Marciano said.
Recent data from Tubular Labs also showed that women's college basketball fans were 24.5 times more likely to visit Eli's website.
Some of Eli's recent investments in women's sports include its sponsorship of the 2022 NWSL Championship on CBS, which Marciano said has helped bring the game to prime time. The company invests 90 percent of ESPN's spending in women's sports and partners with smaller female-led media outlets such as Just Women Sports, The GIST, Re-INC and Goals. The brand recruited 10 female athletes to create Team Ally, a group that posts about their games and raises the profile of women's sports.
Her latest work, a commercial for the Women's World Cup, will premiere on Fox and air throughout the year. Notre Dame lacrosse player Casey Choma, part of the Allied team, also scored. She told Insider that she remembers getting the "worst bruise" on her leg when she fell on her keeper, who is a friend of the house.
Choma said investment in women's sports has increased in recent years and this has created new opportunities for female athletes. She became one of the first female faces of another brand that sponsored only male lacrosse players for ten years. She said the partnership with Ally was "a no-brainer" as 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 think it's the beginning of something, the beginning of a story, that's really important."
Marciano is a former college athlete. He played basketball at Yale in the mid-2000s, played professionally in Germany and coached in Divisions I and III. She agrees with Choma that recent years have seen an explosion of attention and investment in women's sports that hasn't happened in her entire playing career.
"Women's sports are more popular than ever," Marciano said. "Every metric in women's sports is growing — viewership, attendance, audience size, spending patterns — and this [advertising] needs to capture that momentum and build on it."
