For example, Deloitte (the place Engelbert previously served as CEO) overhauled the WNBA’s digital presence, serving to the league see a 390% enhance in WNBA App downloads over the common season.
“Deloitte actually helped us do our digital transformation, and Nike continues to assist us from a advertising perspective and publicity with their massive advertising model,” Engelbert mentioned. “We’re listening to greater than ever from manufacturers expressing curiosity within the W, which I believe is vital.”
Google, one other Changemaker, prolonged its partnership with the league via 2025, most just lately including Pixel. In simply three years as a Changemaker, Google has labored with Disney and ESPN so as to add 173 hours of ladies’s sports activities programming to broadcast TV, together with 48 hours of recent reside video games and 17 hours of recent pre-game present content material on WNBA Countdown.
When the WNBA appears to be like for a model partnership, Engelbert focuses on innovation and a model’s willingness to work with and construct gamers’ manufacturers, pointing to campaigns like Deloitte’s and Google’s.
“How do you innovate contained in the partnership? How do you activate it?” Engelbert mentioned. “[Google] has finished a tremendous job.”
Media rights are shifting
When Adweek final caught up with Engelbert, the league’s upcoming media rights negotiations had been top-of-mind.
The WNBA’s take care of Disney, its largest broadcast accomplice, runs via 2025 and was value $27 million in 2021. Final 12 months, the league additionally signed a three-year take care of Scripps’ ION, making Friday nights appointment viewing for followers and bringing a further 5.9 million viewers to the WNBA this 12 months, in line with Engelbert.
“We do have an awesome bridge right here to get us to a extremely good, greatest worth attainable [deal], one which’s lengthy overdue,” mentioned Engelbert. “We’d all like everyone to do the precise factor right here and lift ladies’s sports activities, however I believe we’re coming from a extremely robust place from a digital, linear, social, partnership help.”
To Engelbert’s level, Main League Soccer, which has a 10-year, $250 million per 12 months unique streaming take care of Apple, averaged 343,000 viewers within the 2022 season. In the meantime, common viewership for the WNBA 2023 season got here in at 505,000 viewers throughout CBS, ESPN and ABC.
And in comparable leagues, the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League simply struck the largest-ever broadcast deal for girls’s sports activities—a $240 million settlement over 4 years.
“We’ve been constructing out our publicity via all of our companions. We’re working very exhausting up till ’25 as a result of there’s by no means been a more true adage of ‘when you construct it, they are going to come’ than the WNBA goes via proper now,” Engelbert mentioned. “We’ll proceed to double down on what we’ve been doing already with advertising, branding, storytelling, constructing these family names.”