GroupM plans to double its women’s sports spend this year

GroupM is planning to double its annual advertising spend on women’s sports starting with this year’s upfront, the WPP media investment agency announced.

To achieve the goal, GroupM is putting together a “dedicated marketplace” that will allow its clients to get more involved with women’s sports, according to Martin Blich, the agency’s executive director of sports and live investment. The marketplace will include opportunities like broadcast sponsorships, league-level partnerships, and deals with athlete-owned media companies.

“When you look at the sports marketplace, it’s really large, and the women’s sports marketplace is only a small portion of that, so there’s a lot of space there,” Blich told Marketing Brew.

Planting the seed: The idea for the initiative took root at the end of last year, when GroupM was talking with some of its clients that were already leaning into women’s sports, Blich said. Those conversations heated up in the past three or four months, he said, leading up to the agency’s commitment to double its 2023 spend on women’s sports on behalf of its clients this year.

Some brands that work with GroupM, like Ally Financial and Google, already have established track records of deep investment in women’s sports. Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer was one of the execs who started “imploring the agency to establish an advertising marketplace for women’s sports,” last year, according to a GroupM press release. Other GroupM clients are newer entrants to the space, Blich said; but the marketplace is designed to be inclusive of them all.

Teaming up: Several brands have already signed on, according to GroupM, including Ally, Google, Adidas, Coinbase, Mars, Nationwide, Unilever, Universal Pictures, and Discover. The marketplace is also open to clients affiliated with the GroupM agencies Mindshare, Wavemaker, and EssenceMediacom.

When GroupM brought the idea to Discover a few weeks ago, “it was an easy yes,” Discover VP of Media Amy Adams said, especially because the brand has been organically leaning more into women’s sports in the past few years “just by way of where the eyeballs are.” As an existing sponsor of the Big Ten conference, the financial services company activates across both the men’s and women’s tournaments, according to Adams, and it’s both a sponsor of the NHL and an inaugural partner of the Professional Women’s Hockey League.

Heading into this year’s upfronts season, Discover is “looking to increase our investment in women’s sports,” Adams said, and she expects GroupM’s marketplace will enable the brand to do just that.

“It’s not always easy to just go overinvest in certain places in media—places that are underrepresented, or that are only getting smaller percents of the total investment,” she said. “You really need partners like GroupM that have this scale that can create marketplaces that enable it for advertisers to go buy with more ease.”