Ally Financial’s Andrea Brimmer on closing the women’s sports spending gap

Women’s sports are seeing record viewership, and media investment is finally starting to reflect the growing popularity.

Ally Financial announced this month that it reached equal spend on advertising between women’s sports and men’s sports, fulfilling an earlier 50/50 pledge.

Andrea Brimmer, chief marketing and PR officer at Ally Financial, spoke to The Current on the ground at the Possible conference in Miami this week about the earlier-than-expected results.

“We wanted to do something substantive that would actually be meaningful in the women’s sports ecosystem,” she said. “It seems counterintuitive now given how popular women’s sports are, but at the time they did not have the same ubiquity that they do today.”

Brimmer talked about how Ally made it happen, including partnerships with the likes of Disney and CBS to get championship games on prime-time TV, and the business results Ally is seeing.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

In 2022, Ally publicly pledged to reach equal media spend between men’s and women’s sports.

This month, you announced you achieved that 50/50 split a whole year earlier than planned. How did you do it?

When we made the pledge, we wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Title IX, and we wanted to do something substantive that would actually be meaningful in the women’s sports ecosystem. It seems counterintuitive now given how popular women’s sports are, but at the time they did not have the same ubiquity that they do today.

How we did it was actually really hard because it took a lot of work. We had to partner with platforms to create the media. We had to make investments in sponsorships that would bring us media. And we had to do big and bold things like get championship games moved to prime time where they had never been played before.

You built the inventory when it was scarce. Talk me through how you did that and the moves your team made to make this media happen.

The first thing that we did was go to the 800-pound gorilla, so to speak — which was Disney, ESPN and all the properties that they owned — and made a multimillion-dollar deal with Disney. And the multimillion-dollar commitment was based on them taking women’s sports content and moving it into prime time. That created a lot of media opportunity for us.

The other thing that we did was we worked with CBS and the National Women’s Soccer League, and moved the championship game to prime time. For the first time ever, a women’s championship game — in any sport — was played in prime time.

And most recently, we worked with Ion, which has been incredible in the women’s sports space, and moved the Professional Women’s Hockey League game — which was being played in our hometown of Detroit — to network for the first time ever in that sport’s history.

What were the signals that made Ally treat investment in women’s sports as a long-term growth strategy versus a one-time campaign?

There were a couple of things. One, we compete in a very ferocious category of financial services. The category spends about $55 billion a year in advertising money; we’re less than 2% of that. So, we have to see around corners and find places where we can play, where there is evergreen opportunity in front of us. At the time, we thought that women’s sports was one such place.

Second, we saw a couple pieces of data that were really interesting to us. The first was that 94% of C-suite women in the Fortune 500 played sports at some point in their life, and 54% played it at the collegiate level, myself included. As a company that’s dedicated to creating economic trajectory and mobility, we thought, “That’s a really interesting place for us to lean in.”

Lastly, we saw that women’s sports were getting less than 5% of media commitment. We thought if we could change that equation, we could actually create something from the ground up. Those were the signals that pointed us to a strategy.

From a business standpoint, what have the results looked like?

We find that, for fans of women’s sports, their favorability towards Ally is 20 to 30 percentage points higher, depending on the sport, than general market. The second thing we find is that fans of women’s sports convert at a rate of six times higher than any other target for us, and they are more efficient for us in terms of cost of acquisition. Sixty-five percent of everybody that’s coming to our storefront is female, so everything has really come together.

And the other big piece is that our brand valuation in the last five years since we made the pledge has grown 40%, the fastest-growing brand valuation in all of financial services.