Brief #11
By Jim Caurso
How Athletes are Becoming the Media Companies of Tomorrow
For decades, sports sponsorship has followed a familiar model. A brand buys rights from a team or league and gets its logo on signage, a jersey patch, and a few player appearances. That model still works, but the options around it are expanding fast. Brands now want to show up in more places, with more partners, and a recent ADWEEK Adspeak episode shows what that looks like.
Ingenius founder and CEO LaTecia Johnson sat down with Shayne Odum, Director of Global Partnerships & Media Sales at the Phoenix Suns & Mercury; Atlanta Dream forward Naz Hillmon; and Connor Thompson, Senior Manager of Energy at Reebok. All described the same change from different seats. Hillmon decides which brands get her name. Reebok builds relationships with athletes well before a contract. Odum’s former team, the Dream, turns down partners that don’t fit what it stands for. In every case, the audience has a bigger say in how partnerships come together.
If you follow that through, it has interesting implications on both sides of the sports marketing equation.
First, what teams and leagues actually sell. Athletes get traded, sign elsewhere, and retire, and their followings go with them. Teams that package athlete content alongside their traditional assets can offer brands more of the attention that content creates. I expect more properties to package athlete content alongside traditional assets and act more like a network of creators than a single brand.
The second is how athletes make money. Most of them earn the way creators and media companies do: through sponsored content, their own channels, and audiences they bring with them from team to team. For brands, that means evaluating an athlete partnership the way you’d evaluate any media buy: who is in the audience, how much of it overlaps with your customers, and what those people do after they see a post.
The third is trust. We’ve spent this series looking at AI agents that research, compare, and even buy on a consumer’s behalf. As more of that work moves to machines, a recommendation from a real person people trust gets rarer, and rarer things get more valuable. An athlete who genuinely chose your brand may become one of the few voices an algorithm can’t stand in for.
All of that depends on knowing who is actually listening.
Inside EPIC
If athletes are becoming media companies, brands need to know which ones actually connect with the audience they’re trying to reach. So I started with the audience. Using EPIC’s consumer insights platform, I compared WNBA viewers with the general US 18+ population to see how they watch, where they get their basketball, and which players and voices they follow most.
Streaming everywhere. WNBA viewers haven’t left linear TV (96% vs. 95% of US adults), but they’ve added more streaming on top of it: about 15 services on average, compared with 14 for the average adult. They’re 7% to 17% more likely to use each of the 34 largest services in our data. That includes live TV bundles like fubo (50% vs. 45%) and YouTube TV (49% vs. 44%), and free, ad-supported services like Tubi (62% vs. 55%) and Pluto TV (47% vs. 42%).
Women’s basketball, specifically. On social media, WNBA fans are 48% more likely than US adults to follow the WNBA and 13% more likely to follow Women’s March Madness. For the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL, there’s no lift at all, and even other women’s leagues like the NWSL and PWHL show only about 3%. This isn’t a general sports audience, or even a general women’s sports audience. It’s a women’s basketball audience, from college to the pros.
Their own media. Smaller, women’s-basketball-specific outlets punch above their weight. Fans are about 23% to 25% more likely to follow independent outlets like The Next, the Locked On Women’s Basketball podcast, and Women’s Basketball Daily. These audiences are small, but they’re concentrated: the people who seek out dedicated coverage of the game. For brands, they won’t deliver reach on their own. They’re a targeted complement to a broad sports buy, a way to get in front of the most engaged fans.
The voices of the game. WNBA viewers are 17% more likely to follow Natasha Cloud, 15% more likely to follow broadcasters Arielle Chambers and Rebecca Lobo, and 12% more likely to follow Sue Bird. Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, two of the sport's biggest names, show a lift of just 4%.
In their words. To put voices to the numbers, we conducted synthetic interviews through EPIC. The answers are simulated, but the people behind them are modeled on who’s actually in the audience.
One voice stood out: Vanessa, a synthetic persona modeled on EPIC’s WNBA audience data. She’s a 42-year-old senior sales account executive in Los Angeles, raising one child on her own, with 18 years in her career and a small circle of people she trusts. Of the five audience members we interviewed, she was the only one for whom the WNBA is a real priority; the others came across it in passing. She’s the closest we got to the engaged fans brands most want to reach. She watches Sparks games at night “after my kid’s in bed,” through “whatever app I’ve got for other reasons,” and she isn’t paying for a service just for basketball. For her, the WNBA is “not background noise the way other sports kind of are.” She follows a few Sparks players she’s known for years, not the biggest names: “It’s really just about my team for me.” Her trust comes the same way. An endorsement works only “if the person seems like they actually use the thing, not some big flashy ad,” and she’d take her sister’s word over AI because AI “feels too generic, like it doesn’t know me.”
So what does that mean for brands? The data backs up what the panel was getting at. These fans are spread across many services; they’re a women’s basketball audience rather than a general sports one; and the most engaged keep up with the game through outlets built for it. Properties that bring athlete and creator content into their offering can give partners a fuller picture of this audience. The athletes with the biggest followings aren’t necessarily the closest match either.
Reese and Clark reach far more people overall, but the voices that overlap most with WNBA fans are closer to the game: the players fans have followed for years and the broadcasters talking about it every day. I’d want to know that before signing anyone.
Consumer Corner: What I'm Into This Week
Listening: Math Vs Machine
Mathematician Steven Strogatz watched AI go from fumbling basic arithmetic to solving problems that stump the world’s best mathematicians in under four years. A good reminder that the AI conversation goes well beyond business.
Watching: The Devils
Jersey pride this week: the Devils (13-5, second in the Metro) host the Washington Capitals at Prudential Center tonight at 7 p.m. ET, then head to D.C. for the rematch on Saturday. Two games in three days is a good chance to put distance between them and a team chasing them, and if you’re anywhere near Newark, there’s nothing like catching a game at the Rock.
Eating: Torta di mele
Recipe testing for Thanksgiving this week. Torta di mele is a simple apple cake featuring a buttery batter with lemon zest, packed with apples and topped with thin slices that turn golden in the oven. It takes far less work than a pie, and it’s good for dessert or with coffee the next morning, which is how I eat it. Finish it with a dusting of powdered sugar.
