Behind the scenes of the Washington Spirit’s Trinity Rodman campaign

It wasn’t easy for the Washington Spirit to re-sign star forward Trinity Rodman heading into this year’s NWSL season.

Late last year, Rodman’s contract negotiations led to a back-and-forth over league salary caps, which had previously come under scrutiny after several USWNT stars left the NWSL to play overseas for massive transfer fees.

For Rodman and the Spirit, the story has a happy ending. In late December, the NWSL introduced a “high impact player” rule letting teams pay as much as $1 million over the salary cap for top athletes, which has been nicknamed “the Rodman rule” because of how it factored into the athlete’s contract negotiations with the Spirit and the league.

While the Rodman rule remains controversial, facing challenges from the league’s players’ union, the athlete’s decision to remain in DC has given the Spirit cause to celebrate—and celebrate they have. On February 2, the Spirit lit up DC with more than 100 bus-shelter and billboard ads touting Rodman and leveraging her international stardom in an effort to attract hometown fans. It was part brand-awareness campaign, part ticket promotion, and the effort drove a “substantial number” of sales for the Spirit’s home opener, according to Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Kim Bolt.

“As we were working to re-sign Trinity, we always knew that we wanted it to be a big moment,” Bolt told Marketing Brew. “A lot of the storyline and momentum of the original announcement extended even beyond just women’s sports, or sports in general, and really had broader cultural, lifestyle, fashion reach…But what was missing was really, ‘How is this going to be a moment back home?’”

Get outside

Rodman was on the road for USWNT training during her re-signing announcement in January, but back in DC, Bolt said the Spirit were planning for a “follow-up moment to sustain the news.” Since Rodman wears jersey No. 2 for the team, a campaign timed to February 2 made sense.

For 30 minutes that day starting at 2:22pm, 126 digital bus shelter displays throughout DC neighborhoods showed “#2” in Rodman’s handwriting, as well as a QR code that led to a landing page offering two tickets to the Spirit’s home opener on March 13 for $22. After the initial 30-minute window, ads switched to visuals showing Rodman’s full signature. Those ads, as well as additional OOH creative showing Rodman with the tagline “DC is Trin’s turf,” ran for another week, Bolt said.

The campaign, called “All In On 2,” was designed with new fans and nonfans in mind in order to “get people to know her name, know her number,” Bolt told us, but since the NWSL, and Rodman in particular, already has a substantial following, Bolt and her team also wanted to include some shoutouts to the Spirit’s existing fanbase.

Back at Rodman’s re-signing in LA, the Spirit invited a young soccer player who styled her hair after Rodman’s pink braids during the Paris Olympics. Some fans might recognize the fan, Emma, from the Spirit’s most-viral Instagram post of 2024.

Adidas assist

The campaign was further boosted by Adidas, a sponsor of Rodman’s, which ran OOH ads of its own, including at Nationals Park. Bolt said her team knew Adidas would likely be working with Rodman around the news of her re-signing, so the two organizations put together a “coordinated effort in terms of how we prepared for that moment,” Bolt said.

The campaign was largely geared toward brand awareness, and resulted in over a million earned media impressions, as well as another million from the paid media push, which combined OOH with geotargeted ads on Meta platforms, Bolt said.

OOH is “something that I think is very good for awareness, but not necessarily to drive conversions, and so the way that we had approached this was actually like a one-two punch,” she said. “We did a big out-of-home moment takeover, but we combined it with that geotargeted, paid digital buy, so we could really get the best of both worlds.”

Player powered

In the wake of the Rodman campaign, Bolt said she plans to keep spotlighting Spirit players and cementing the team’s brand in the DC area to drive hype ahead of the start of the NWSL season next month.

Given the team’s focus on highlighting players, as well as the general importance of athletes to team brands, Bolt said she hopes continued investment in women’s sports will lead to more American stars sticking with the NWSL as opposed to playing overseas.

“I hope that there’s been a turning point for women’s sports where it’s the norm that the ticket sales keep climbing and the viewership and ratings keep climbing,” she said. “For some of these star players that are American, [it can mean a lot] to be playing for the NWSL on your home turf.”