Ally’s 50-50 pledge to shift its paid media investment equally between women’s and men’s sports was bold when the brand made it in 2022. Now, it has done it — and a year earlier than its self-imposed deadline, to boot.
Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer (a 2024 SBJ Game Changer) announced the milestone at Deep Blue’s Business of Women’s Sports Summit on Tuesday.
“We were talking [last week], our CEO and I, and he said, ‘It’s not very often in your business career where a personal passion point can intersect a business opportunity in a way that is actually accretive to the growth of your company,’” Brimmer told me.
Ally’s brand value has increased 40% since making the pledge, according to Brand Finance. With significant investments in the WNBA, NWSL, Unrivaled and more spread widely in women’s sports, the financial services firm has built credibility with women’s sports fans, who are 27% more likely to trust it compared to general consumers. (Taking an aside to bold, underscore and emphasize this for anyone still skeptical of the ROI in women’s sports.)
The company faced obstacles in inventory, especially early on, and had to make more to buy ad time. In 2022, it worked with CBS to move the NWSL Championship to prime time, launched a deal with Disney/ESPN in 2023 to help expand its coverage and most recently partnered with Scripps Sports to air the first nationally televised PWHL game in the U.S.
Becoming a founding sponsor in Unrivaled in 2024 and a WNBA sponsor last year helped Ally get closer to its goal.
“We’ve optimized out of other things that we either sponsored or on the media side or did historically that we just didn’t think had the same value and the same opportunity as women’s sports,” Brimmer said.
Ally will at least maintain this level of investment, Brimmer told me. And with only 13% of Fortune 500 companies sponsoring in women’s sports (👀 yes, that’s correct), she wants to see more follow their lead.
“Much as I hate to compete with people that have bigger checkbooks than me,” she said, “the idea was always to create this virtuous cycle and to open the playbook and invite others in.”
