Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.

Marketing Brew

A football icon depicting sports marketing

Sports Marketing

Alyssa Meyers

marketingbrew.com

It’s no secret that sports fans love content about their favorite teams. These days, that doesn’t just mean live games on legacy TV networks.

Some major US leagues, it seems, are well aware. As football season kicked off, the NFL inked a content partnership deal with sports newsletter and media company The Gist, plugging the league directly into The Gist’s 

, many of whom are millennial and Gen Z women. Earlier this week, The Gist announced a similar content deal with the NWSL.

Both partnerships are designed not only to serve the media startup’s audience with deep dives into their favorite sports, but also to drive fandom for the leagues beyond the audiences they’ve already been reaching for years, The Gist co-founders Jacie deHoop and Ellen Hyslop told Marketing Brew.

“We really saw that traditional sports media was very much focused on an avid male sports fan, and we really felt like there was an opportunity for us to engage with this next-generation female fan and create a community and create a media platform for her,” Hyslop said. “We knew that this audience…was going to be valuable to the teams and to the leagues that wanted to reach her, but didn’t necessarily have the right way.”

Both the NFL and NWSL were, according to deHoop, “dream partners” for The Gist, which was founded in late 2017 as a sports newsletter covering men’s and women’s sports equally. The NFL, which is the biggest league in the US, could have easily “laughed in our faces,” deHoop said, but she said league execs were “open and receptive” when talks started at the Super Bowl this year.

For The Gist’s readers, the NFL is their “No. 1 favorite sport,” according to Hyslop. Through the partnership, subscribers will have access to more NFL content, including a 

 that allows participants to guess which team will win each matchup of the season for the chance to win prizes.

“Women are so often left out of any fantasy league, the office pool, the survivor pool, and a big reason why we want to be that source is because we actually want to create a community where they feel welcome,” Hyslop said. For its part, the NFL, she said, gets to “continue to grow and lean into that female fandom.”

To further support the content partnership, The Gist will also up its presence and coverage around NFL tentpoles like the draft and the Super Bowl, Hyslop added; earlier this year, Gist staffers 

 the Super Bowl in person through a partnership with Verizon.

For Servi Barrientos, director of media partnerships at the NWSL, working with The Gist opens an avenue not just to acquire new fans, but to turn casual fans into avid ones through storytelling, he said.

On one level, Barrientos said he hopes to see the partnership drive game tune-in, which could also stand to benefit the league’s legacy media partners, including CBS, ESPN, Prime Video, and Scripps Sports. The Gist’s support will mean even more media coverage for the league, he added, keeping it in the news cycle more often than just during major games.

“We want to make sure that fans know where to find us and where to watch the game,” Barrientos said. “It’s important to have the right storytellers to be able to tell these stories of not only the players, but the leagues themselves, and continue to put out content…We live in a digital world now. The more content, the better.”

On a deeper level, Barrientos said he thinks that content can help create league superfans. The NWSL is giving The Gist an “inside look” at the league and access to players with the intention of driving more emotional stories that can “turn fans into passionate fans or avids,” he said.

Increased content coming out of the partnerships also opens up more branded content opportunities, which could benefit The Gist and the leagues. League sponsors already have access to tentpole moments like championship games; now, The Gist can cover those same moments more deeply and offer that content up to its brand partners, deHoop said. Meanwhile, new content, like the pick ’em challenge, is also sponsorable real estate.

“It gives our marketing partners an opportunity to extend their programming,” Barrientos said.

The content partnerships represent more than an opportunity for brands to target 

 sports fans—they open the door for marketers to tap into content that’s geared toward modern fans.

“Audiences are changing; their relationship with fandom is changing,” Hyslop said. “The folks at all of these leagues…are recognizing what they need to be doing to set up the league for success five, 10, 15 years down the line.”

NFL, NWSL are looking to reach next-gen fans with new media partnerships

Content deals with sports media startup The Gist come as both leagues look to reach millennial and Gen Z women fans.

Banking app Chime was founded to make banking and credit building easier for everyday people who tend to be “overlooked by the traditional banking system,” according to CMO Vineet Mehra. Amplifying the Chime brand relies on reaching those people, Mehra told Marketing Brew.

And what’s something many everyday people enjoy more than anything else?

“Sports,” Mehra said. “It’s where a lot of cultural trends start.”

For the past several years, Chime’s sport of choice has been basketball, one of the most zeitgeisty in the US. In 2020, the banking brand signed on as a jersey-patch sponsor of the Dallas Mavericks the same season the Mavs finished first in the Southwest division. Last year, the team made it all the way to the NBA Finals, further boosting brand awareness for Chime, according to Mehra.

Since then, Chime has doubled down on the Mavs. In May, it re-signed its sponsorship deal for 

 for an additional three years, and it also partnered with rookie Cooper Flagg. To truly generate awareness, though, Chime is going after more than even the 

 of the jersey patch and the latest No. 1 draft pick. That’s why the brand’s approach to its sponsorships hinges on community initiatives, as well as a content strategy that’s all about “serializing social media” with athletes, Mehra said.

One attribute that initially stood out to the Chime team about the Mavs was the organization’s dedication to the Dallas-Fort Worth community, Mehra said. “They really try to give back,” he said.

When Chime signed on to work with the team, it was with the intention to be a part of those efforts, he told us.

Since the collaboration began, Chime has worked with the Mavericks and other partners to build basketball courts in the area, Mehra said, and the organizations have also collaborated on financial literacy and entrepreneurship education programs for students in North Texas. Chime also wove the Mavs into its Chime Scholars Foundation, which pledges 1% of the company’s equity to higher education scholarships, by awarding five scholarships each time the team played a game in the 2024 Finals.

That Finals run was a significant driver of awareness, credibility, and trust for the Chime brand, according to Mehra. In the past three years, Chime has “almost doubled” brand awareness, and it has seen growth in membership particularly in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he said.

While community programs have given Chime an avenue to connect with potential users in places they spend time in the real world, like courts and schools, many people spend at least as much time online as they do in their communities.

Chime aims to show up there in a big way as well, including through its 

 series, which shows viewers how to replicate NBA and WNBA tunnel fits by thrifting. The series has so far featured players including Sacramento Kings (and former Mavs) center 

“This is where we started to realize and really unlock sports in fashion and culture and some of those areas,” Mehra said.

, which has so far had two seasons, represents Chime’s approach to creating serialized social content, sometimes with athletes.

“You want to turn your social channels into almost like a streaming platform,” Mehra said. “

 is a series, so you know that every Wednesday that show is on, kind of like you know 

 is on every Sunday. I think the best brands think of themselves as publishers and editors. You’re constantly putting out stories in the world, and you’re almost serializing the way you think about social.”

One of Chime’s first projects with Flagg, who Mehra says is the first athlete to serve as an ambassador for the brand on a mulit-year basis, was part of a social series called 

, where celebrities like athletes and singers talk finance with their moms. Mehra said the series is a particularly good fit for Flagg, who has 

 about his mom, Kelly Bowman Flagg, a former 

“It’s a really powerful storytelling partnership for us,” Mehra said. “Cooper is the real deal, both from a basketball standpoint, but also from a humanity standpoint and a story of progress.”

Chime’s partnership with Flagg kicked off less than two months ago, but already, Mehra said he plans to do much more storytelling with the rookie, including potentially involving him with Chime’s philanthropic efforts. Whatever shape the partnership takes next, Mehra said Flagg and his team will have plenty of input.

“Gone are the days of athletes just doing what a brand says,” Mehra told us. “I don’t think that's authentic…It’s that co-creation which I think drives the authenticity, that creates stories that people actually believe and want to listen to. It’s a really big part of how we think about all of our partnerships.”

Cooper Flag in Chime's "Mama, I Made It" series

Chime is ‘serializing social’ through its Dallas Mavericks sponsorship

The banking brand is focused on community programs along with series aimed at making its social accounts feel “like a streaming platform,” its CMO said.

The National Women’s Soccer League is just 13 years old, but it’s already hit $75 million in team sponsorship revenue as of 2024, almost as much as the WNBA’s team revenue of $76 million 27 seasons in, according to a new 

 from sports and entertainment sponsorship intelligence platform SponsorUnited.

While both leagues lag behind long-established men’s pro teams in the US like the 

, which are topping $1 billion in revenue from team brand deals, the number of sponsorship deals for women’s sports is squarely on the rise.

SponsorUnited’s report, its first focused specifically on the NWSL’s growth, found that more than 200 new brands got involved with NWSL teams last season, bringing the total up to 401 in 2024 and representing a 16% increase in the number of sponsorship deals from 2023.

That being said, just three teams account for almost half of that revenue, which SponsorUnited said could spell “both opportunity and risk” for the NWSL in the second half of its 13th season.

 For the more than 400 brands that sponsored NWSL teams last season, the average spend per deal was about $170,000, with the biggest 10 deals coming in at over $1 million a piece, according to SponsorUnited data. Those included:

Railway operate CPKC’s stadium naming rights deal with the Kansas City Current

Healthcare company Providence and Portland Thorns FC (Ring replaced Providence on the Thorns’ jerseys this season)

AmericaFirst Credit Union and the Utah Royals

And the Black Future Co-op Fund and Seattle Reign FC

Brands in the healthcare and finance categories spent the most on NWSL team sponsorships last season, topping $25 million combined, SponsorUnited found; transportation, consumer services, and alcohol brands followed.

 With two sponsorships a piece on SponsorUnited’s top 10 biggest NWSL deals list, Angel City and the Current were among the teams with the highest sponsorship revenue, followed by San Diego Wave FC. Those three teams made up 46% of league-wide sponsorship revenue, meaning there are opportunities for other NWSL teams to follow in their footsteps.

For now, though, that imbalance represents something of a “structural risk for the league’s financial stability,” according to the report.

The Current and Angel City were both among the teams with the largest number of sponsors (47 and 43, respectively), though the North Carolina Courage and Racing Louisville FC each had more (61 and 94, respectively). Angel City, the Wave, and the Current are also in the top five NWSL teams by social media follower count so far this year, but the Orlando Pride holds the top spot, followed by the Thorns.

Angel City in particular represents “the power of engagement and monetization,” SponsorUnited wrote, finding that the team generates $29 per social follower and outperformed 15 MLS and 25 MLB teams in terms of sponsorship revenue per game. Angel City’s revenue per follower is also better than some MLB teams, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, which generate $13 per follower, and the New York Yankees, which generate $8 per follower, SponsorUnited found.

The NWSL club’s “ability to convert fandom into value is unmatched,” the report says.

 Angel City is home to two of the NWSL players with the most endorsement deals. Defender and captain 

 had 11 sponsorships in the last 12 months—the most in the league—with brands including DoorDash, Klarna, and Ascent Protein, while forward Alyssa Thompson was endorsed by nine brands, including 

, Subway, and investment bank Stifel, putting her at No. 3.

Chicago Stars forward Mallory Swanson split the Angel City duo at No. 2, having worked with 10 brands including AT&T, Frito-Lay, and Visa. Thorns forward Sophia Wilson and forward María Sánchez, who recently returned to Liga MX Femenil club Tigres Femenil from the Wave, rounded out the top five.

Orlando Pride v Washington Spirit players at the NWSL 2024 Championship Game

NWSL teams hit $75 million in sponsorship revenue in a dozen seasons: report

That’s almost as much as the WNBA, which is in its 28th season, according to SponsorUnited.

With two World Cup wins, an Olympic bronze medal, and experience in multiple pro leagues around the world, Christen Press is one of the most prolific soccer players of the time. But fans would be hard-pressed to find digital evidence of her early career highlights from when she competed in Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS), the precursor to the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) that folded in 2012.

“If you go back and try to find highlights from my first years as a pro, you can’t,” Press told Marketing Brew. “You can find US Women’s National Team (USWNT) highlights always, but that’s what you’ll find. It was like that was my only job.”

Now, highlights of Press—or, really, any other pro women’s soccer player—are abundantly available, just one indication of just how much the landscape of women’s sports has shifted in the last few decades. More than 50 years after the passage of Title IX made it possible for more girls to succeed in sports in grade school, the talent pool of women athletes is deeper than ever, media outlets are showing women’s sporting events in prime time to record-breaking audiences, and major brands are funneling sponsorship dollars into the ecosystem.

Sport to sport, it’s not exactly clear what should be credited with kicking off the boom. But does it matter? Thirteen years after the founding of the NWSL, women’s professional soccer seems here to stay in more ways than one, with two of the biggest revenue drivers in sports—media rights and sponsorships—abundant enough to prop up two pro properties.

One of the biggest changes in the women’s soccer ecosystem in recent years has been media coverage of the sport. In the days of the WPS, and even more recently, fans often struggled to find games on TV aside from international tournaments like the World Cup and the Olympics every couple of years.

“When I started playing in the WPS and my first days of the NWSL, I was playing in front of a couple hundred people on bleachers in high schools and colleges,” Press remembered.

It wasn’t until 2022 when CBS Sports aired the NWSL Championship in prime time for the 

, but when it did, the game became the most-watched NWSL match in history, with 915,000 viewers, a 71% increase from 2021, per CBS. (The 2024 Championship beat that record, averaging 967,900 viewers, according to the NWSL.)

The deal for prime-time coverage in part came about thanks to Ally Financial, a years-long sponsor of the NWSL and many other women’s sports properties, which played a key role in conversations with the league and the network.

“You’ve got this vicious cycle that’s never going to be broken unless the brands jump in and kind of force systemic change,” Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer told Marketing Brew at the time. “It takes the brands sitting at the table to demonstrate that they’re willing to come in, that they’ve got the money to invest, but that they need the networks to think differently about the way that they’re selling media and the way that they are giving women’s sports timeslots and the platforms that they deserve.”

The NWSL’s current four-year media rights deal, signed in 2023, indicates a much different approach from networks and streamers, spanning coverage across CBS Sports, ESPN, Prime Video, and Scripps Sports; it’s 

 worth $240 million. As of the mid-point of the current NWSL season, livestreams of matches were up 34% year over year, with 1.2 billion minutes viewed, according to the league. Women’s soccer fans can also watch pros play on Peacock, which holds the media rights to the Gainbridge Super League, a new pro women’s soccer league that kicks off its second season on August 23.

While major media outlets play a big role in whether women’s soccer is widely available to audiences, the ecosystem has also been thriving thanks to athletes taking matters into their own hands, leveraging channels like social media and podcasts to increase visibility of the sport.

“Social media completely changed the landscape for women’s sports in a really powerful way, because before, you had all these legacy media channels that really acted as middlemen,” said Tobin Heath, an NWSL and USWNT icon who announced her retirement in July. “Once a year you’d get this terrible window, never prime time, and always it was through a lens of what the patriarchy wanted to see in women’s sports, which was obviously extremely narrow and really didn’t represent our sport’s culture at all.”

That frustration led Heath and Press, who are married, to found 

, a sports media company that publishes newsletters and 

 meant to represent “gal culture,” which Heath described as an answer to “bro culture.” Their podcast, 

, joined the Audacy network for distribution and global ad sales in July, part of a larger wave of growing interest in 

Heath and Press aren’t the only soccer icons who have carved out their own media channels. Former USWNT co-captain Alex Morgan has 

, the media and commerce company she started with Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim, Olympic swimmer Simone Manuel, and basketball legend Sue Bird. Bird also founded production company A Touch More alongside her partner, Megan Rapinoe, another retired USWNT co-captain.

Through these platforms, the players can bypass legacy media companies and engage directly with fans on their own terms, which wasn’t always an option for athletes. 

, whose penalty kick delivered the USWNT the World Cup in 1999 and who went on to work with brands including 

, said she sometimes thinks about what her sponsorship roster could have looked like had she been playing in 2025.

“In terms of brands and branding, gosh, I think there’s a part of me that wishes that there were all these resources that existed,” she said.

As the audience for women’s soccer has grown, so too has its list of sponsors. This year, the NWSL 

 its 13th season with 13 sponsors, including first-time brands E.l.f. Beauty and Alex Cooper’s Unwell Hydration. E.l.f.’s involvement represents a broader trend of beauty brands, which haven’t historically invested much in sports, leaning into sports sponsorship opportunities across leagues, including the 

. In August, E.l.f. further upped its investment in women’s soccer by signing NWSL players Melanie Barcenas, Abby Dahlkemper, Lo’eau LaBonta, and Jaedyn Shaw to its talent roster.

For brands, women’s sports are particularly compelling because the audience tends to encompass different consumers than men’s sports audiences, Super League President Amanda Vandervort told Marketing Brew. In pro basketball, for example, only 5% of Golden State Valkyries season-ticket holders also have Warriors season tickets, despite the teams sharing both an arena and a sport, a 

“There’s so many communities who haven’t had access to women’s pro soccer, and when you add that to the growing interest, the demographics and behaviors of our fans, and the opportunity for brands and sponsors to get in front of a whole new audience, it just makes business sense,” Vandervort said. “Now, we’re having real conversations about the return on the investment in women’s professional soccer.”

 had purchased the league’s naming rights, and it’s only seen an uptick in inbound interest since then, according to Vandervort. The league also has several endemic sponsors, including kit provider Capelli Sport and ball manufacturer Select.

In the NWSL, jersey sponsorships are breaking records at breakneck speed. Last year, 

 reportedly had the biggest back-of-jersey deal in the league with Trader Joe’s, and in February, Gotham FC and Dove 

 broke the record again. Days later, the Portland Thorns and Ring were said to have agreed to the 

 in league history, exceeding $2.6 million.

“It’s not just about the dollars,” Matt Soloff, SVP, partnerships and business development at the NWSL, told us. “It’s about leaning into brands that want to lean into us at the highest level.”

Amazon, for instance, has a wide-ranging relationship with the NWSL that includes streaming rights to Friday night games and a playoff match on Prime Video, as well as an exclusive retail sponsorship for Amazon and the presenting sponsorship of the league’s Best XI Awards for Amazon Prime. The company also worked with the league and other media partners, including Togethxr, for a docuseries about the 2024 season.

It was the “rabid fanbase and the growth” of the league that made it stand out to a sponsor as big as Amazon, according to Deb Curtis, global director of marketing for Amazon Prime.

“The growth and the excitement around women’s sports, and obviously the NWSL, is incredibly energizing,” Curtis said. “Fandom fuels growth, and so we see our role as being able to go deeper. People know our brand, so how can our brand help to enhance that experience?”

Brand sponsorship dollars can also be invested back into the leagues, creating a virtuous cycle for women’s soccer.

For some players who have seen the industry shift in real time, it feels like vindication.

“What’s been proven is people love women’s sports,” Heath said. “That’s just the truth, and also, they love women’s athletes as people. Brands love women’s athletes. They’re more approachable. They’re better at marketing.”

Angel City FC players celebrate a goal in front of a screen with social media icons displayed on May 21, 2022.

Women’s soccer, after years of being sidelined, is finally in the big leagues

Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t viable to have one women’s professional soccer league in the US, but thanks to increased media and brand investment, two are thriving.

 for WNBA viewership, and brand spend followed a similar trajectory, according to a 

During the 2024 season, 450 brands spent a total of $76 million on team sponsorships, for a total of 531 deals and an average of 44 deals for each of the 13 teams in the league, according to the report. The average number of deals per team was up 52% compared to the 2022 season.

The growth has been driven by brands in sectors including finance and healthcare, as well as a range of star players from rookies to veterans who are driving strong social engagement, SponsorUnited found.

 The average sponsorship revenue for a WNBA team last season was $6.3 million, with the Phoenix Mercury bringing in the most revenue from sponsorships thanks to a deal with Bally Bet, the largest team deal in the league.

The Las Vegas Aces followed the Mercury, according to the report, which was SponsorUnited’s first that focused exclusively on WNBA sponsorships.

Ally Financial’s sponsorship of the Aces is the third-largest team deal in the league.

The Indiana Fever ranked third in terms of sponsorship revenue, with partners including jersey-partch sponsor Eli Lilly.

The Fever have the most sponsorship deals of any WNBA team so far this season, with 92, per SponsorUnited. They’re followed by the Washington Mystics (65 deals), the Chicago Sky (57 deals), the New York Liberty (56 deals), and the Mercury (52 deals). The Fever also have the most social media followers, followed by the Aces, the Sky, the Los Angeles Sparks, and the Dallas Wings.

 Brands in the financial services category accounted for the most team sponsorship revenue last season, according to data in the report generated by SponsorUnited’s AI pricing tool, SPND. Finance, healthcare, insurance, and gaming companies contributed more than $50 million in WNBA team sponsorship revenue in 2024, per the report.

, and Robinhood made up 40% of spend in the financial category.

Ally represented 23% of total brand spend in the W last year, and became a 

Coach, Booking.com, Emirates, and Evernorth Health Services became first-time league partners this year.

, who’s in her second season, and Liberty forward 

, a ninth-season vet, have had the most endorsement deals of any WNBA athlete in the past 12 months, according to SponsorUnited. Sparks forward 

 and Sky center Kamilla Cardoso, both in their sophomore seasons, followed with 20 deals each. Wings rookie guard Paige Bueckers took spot No. 5 with 18 endorsements.

Bueckers leads the league when it comes to brand engagement metrics, per the report, delivering 4.9 million engagements on branded posts in the last 12 months. She’s followed by Reese, Brink, and Fever guard 

. SponsorUnited also ranked Cardoso and Sky guard Hailey Van Lith in the top 10 in terms of providing social ROI for brands, with first- and second-year players making up more than half of that list. The vets included Stewart, Sparks guard Kelsey Plum, Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu, and 

Caitlin Clark, Courtney Williams, and Natisha Hiedeman at WNBA All-Star Weekend 2025

WNBA team deals jumped 52% in two years, led by finance brands: report

As of the 2024 season, teams were averaging 44 deals each to account for $76 million in brand spend, according to SponsorUnited.

Much like the cost of electric bills in the summer, the amount of money that B2C marketing execs in the US spend on sports sponsorships is expected to rise in 2025, according to a report from Forrester.

But while CMOs seem bullish on sports this year, a majority who were involved with sponsorships last year said they had trouble figuring out the return on those investments, per the report, which is based on data from Forrester research including its quarterly B2C Marketing CMO Pulse Surveys.

The report also indicates which sports and sponsorship assets might prove fruitful for CMOs who are spending in the space. Here are a few of the top takeaways.

 When asked to reflect on their organization’s “large-scale sports” sponsorships, 39% of marketing execs said they both spent in the space in 2024 and planned to increase that spending in 2025, according to Forrester’s Q4 CMO survey.

More than one-quarter (28%) said their brands had never done sports sponsorships, but planned to this year, reflecting a growing trend of 

 getting involved with sports like basketball.

A smaller share of respondents said they’d never done sports sponsorships and didn’t plan to in 2025 (21%).

Only 6% said they intended to decrease their sports spend this year, the same share who said they planned to fully cut it.

Sports and leagues where execs planned to increase their spend most on this year include the PGA Tour, the Association of Tennis Professionals, esports, and the X Games, according to Forrester’s Q3 CMO survey data. Marketers indicated they may decrease their spend on leagues including Major League Pickleball, the WNBA, and the Olympics this year.

Despite the investment in sports, 76% of marketers who spent on sports sponsorships said they found it difficult to determine ROI, per the report. Still, the majority of marketers surveyed said they agreed or strongly agreed that they see business growth associated with their sports deals, like boosts in brand equity, consideration, or earned media value.

The sports and leagues marketers choose to invest in may be influenced by their target audiences, as different demographic groups have different sports preferences. Younger generations over-index on watching emerging sports like 

, according to Forrester’s February Consumer Pulse Survey, while boomers slightly over-index on 

Gen Z is more likely than older generations to say they’re inclined to purchase from brands that support their favorite teams or athletes, per the December consumer survey.

 Assets that companies are able to work their branding into, like naming rights or on-court logos, are not all created equal, Forrester found.

More specifically, size and length of screentime for on-court logos can have an impact on brand recall, per the report.

To test recall, Forrester researchers had 567 adults from the US, UK, and Canada watch a 45-second clip of an NBA game that included 10 logos of different sizes on the court for various amounts of time; participants were then asked to select the brands they remembered seeing from a list of 24, including 14 decoys.

In another test, 612 adults from those three countries were divided into three groups and each shown a different 40-second clip of a pickleball match with brand logos in different sizes and places on the courts.

The larger the logo and the longer the screentime, the higher the percentage of people who recalled the brand in the first study, and in the second study, large logo size and prominent placement “most correlated to accurate recall,” Forrester found.

With that said, the most common response in the second study was not being able to remember any of the brands, according to the report.

To maximize returns on sponsorships, the authors of the report suggested tips like partnering with teams and leagues that align with the brand’s values (as opposed to only deciding based on CEO preferences), activating sponsorships outside of media buys alone, and considering key target audiences instead of just “a property’s clout,” one brand exec said in the report.

CMOs plan to up sports spend in 2025, but struggle tracking ROI: report

About 40% of B2C marketing execs in the US said they planned to spend more on sports sponsorships this year, according to a July report from Forrester.

This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles 

Annette Parker had been a runner her whole life. Then, during her sophomore year of college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she suffered an injury to her left knee that spelled the end of her competitive running career.

When she was feeling particularly down on her luck, her mom suggested she take some golf lessons—a suggestion that foreshadowed her near two-decade career in golf. “I asked her, ‘Why?’” Parker told Marketing Brew. “‘It’s boring,’ is what I said.”

Parker didn’t immediately take her mom’s advice, but the following year, when Parker was serving as the athletic director at a camp in Missouri and had to staff its driving range, she figured she might as well learn the ropes.

“Golf came as an interruption,” she said, “and I was open enough to pivot.”

Parker has now spent more than 15 years in the golf business, and at the start of this year, she took on the role of head of marketing at Eastside Golf, a golf apparel and accessories brand that’s part of a broader push to 

 a sport that hasn’t always been the most accessible.

“I was very intentional about going after golf once I made an assessment of the industry, because I didn’t see anyone who looked like me, and I was like, ‘I can’t be the only one who loves it like this, and if I am, then I should try to get more people to love it,’” she said. “The space was so white, so male-dominated. They were overdue for some change.”

Parker had long planned for a career in sports marketing. She studied the subject during her undergraduate days, then went on to earn a Master’s degree in sports administration from Northwestern University. After grad school, she landed an internship at the PGA Tour, but she took a break from golf to work in ad sales, a common starting point for execs she looked up to at the time, she said.

About six years later, she moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where she got a job as a sports marketing exec at CAA under Billy McGriff, the agency’s longtime co-head of golf. Parker recalled landing the gig only after making the move when she connected with McGriff on LinkedIn and asked for an informational interview—and brought her résumé along just in case.

“While I’m a planner, I tend to take very risky moves professionally,” she said. “I moved to Florida, packed my stuff up. I had an apartment, and that’s all I had. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have a job.”

That wasn’t the first time Parker forced a change she wanted to see. In her teenage years, when her high school didn’t have a track team, Parker said she and her twin sister convinced the school to make one, which soon became a winning program to boot.

“It’s not to say that everything I put my mind to, it happens, but I get what I want because I am very strategic about work,” Parker said.

Unexpected change as a result of hard work became something of a theme in Parker’s career, and the opportunity at Eastside Golf was no exception. She first came across the brand while engaging in the activity most of the world spent the majority of 2020 doing: doomscrolling.

Parker was still working at CAA, and while she said she “loved every minute of it,” 2020 was a hard time in her life. Shortly after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police in May of that year, Parker, like many others, “was pretty much at a breaking point,” she said.

“I got into golf to make a change,” Parker said. “I wanted to affect the environment and bring more people in, more women, more color. I looked around, and I just didn’t think I had achieved that goal, and it wasn’t for my lack of trying.”

It was around that time that Parker came across Olajuwon Ajanaku and Earl A. Cooper, the co-founders of Eastside Golf, on Instagram. Seeing Ajanaku, who played collegiate golf at Morehouse College, and Cooper, a PGA-certified instructor, representing young, Black people in the golf space inspired Parker, she said, and that September, Parker got connected with Ajanaku and Cooper through mutual friends. They officially signed with CAA the following March, Parker said.

Eastside Golf had already gained some fame in 2020, when NBA star Chris Paul 

 on the night of the NBA boycott in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, but Parker became “like an agent for the business,” Cooper told Marketing Brew, introducing the Eastside Golf founders to execs at CAA and across industries to help grow the brand even further. Cooper and Ajanaku spent years talking to Parker about joining them full-time, she said, but it wasn’t until last year that she seriously considered it.

“What I knew I was doing was a lot more reaching across the table to help Eastside, because my seat was good, but I could get better leverage if I just [went] to the other side of the table,” she said. “There was a natural evolution.”

In 2024, Parker was in a rough patch in her personal life, which resulted in her reevaluating her career again, she said. She was approaching 10 years at CAA, and the job felt like part of her identity, she said, much like track had when she was younger. But, like in her college days, she ultimately decided to lean into the turning point and pivot, finally agreeing to go in-house for Eastside Golf.

Parker admits that she can be a risk-taker professionally and personally; she’s not one to arrive at the airport hours early, she said, often showing up at her gate just as the plane doors are closing. But once she’s on board, she’s built for turbulence. At Eastside Golf, “the brand is very strong,” Parker said, but “the business is catching up” to that brand still.

“One of the things that we do really well is ideas, but I think the biggest thing is having someone to execute them,” Cooper said. “Good CMOs, to me, aren’t really the ideas people. Great CMOs are ones that can understand our brand, can understand the audience, and figure out ways to connect them.”

To help strengthen the business in the short-term, Parker said she’s focused on tapping into her media experience to help solidify the brand identity, establish detailed audience demographics and psychographics, and figure out how to best target them, including diversifying Eastside Golf’s media mix. In the long term, she said the brand is looking toward a Series A funding round and establishing a brick-and-mortar presence.

“There’s not many opportunities I will get to go and help build something from the ground up for something that I’ve been so passionate about,” Parker said, later adding that “we’ve got a really solid leadership team to think strategically about how we’re going to grow this company.”

The head of Eastside Golf's Marketing, Annette Parker smiles.

Risky moves paid off for Eastside Golf’s head of marketing

Annette Parker never saw herself working in golf, a sport that’s particularly dominated by white men. But early in her career, she set her sights on the industry and hasn’t looked back.