Neither Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment nor the Professional Women’s Hockey League existed before 2023, but each can help the other advance women’s sports for the foreseeable future.
Deep Blue just announced that it is adding the PWHL to its Deep Blue Exchange (DBX), which is dedicated to representing teams, leagues, and businesses in the commercial marketplace. Through DBX, Deep Blue wants to show sponsors and media partners the value of women’s sports brands and the players, stories, content, and ad space associated with them—with help from affiliated agency Giant Spoon.
“For us, it really is about awareness and positioning,” Giant Spoon partner and Deep Blue founder Laura Correnti said. “The PWHL has a very unique model in that it’s built with the players and is working hand-in-hand with the players, so that level of access for advertisers, we know, is paramount.”
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For much of the past year, both Deep Blue and the PWHL have been making fans independently.
Correnti announced Deep Blue’s launch in December as the agency of record for women’s sports, and Deep Blue got to work quickly, bringing aboard Women’s National Basketball Association legend Sue Bird as a partner, teaming with Ally on a Super Bowl party, hosting a Women’s Sports House at Cannes Lions, and announcing the Women’s Sports Audio Network on iHeartMedia with sponsorship from Capital One and e.l.f. Beauty.
DBX is just the latest iteration of its work.
“What we have seen historically is that women’s sports are a brand play, not a sponsorship play, and that very much is a result of the fact that reach and efficiency models and going out and selling on rate cards are not consistent with where women’s sports are in their life cycle,” said Correnti. “We believe that by leading with strategy, leading with storytelling, focusing on experience, you start to really pull through the value of what these leagues and teams bring to the table for advertisers.”
The PWHL, meanwhile, opened its first season under an ownership group including Guggenheim Partners CEO and Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and tennis legend Billie Jean King. Its six teams in Boston, Minnesota, Montréal, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto set six attendance records for women’s hockey games, including a crowd of 21,105 for a Toronto-Montréal matchup at Montréal’s Bell Centre.
Despite bringing in more than 40 sponsors last year and broadcasting every game free on YouTube, the PWHL remains something of a mystery to potential brand partners. Going into the start of its second season Nov. 30, the league’s teams just received names and logos.
But Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s senior vice president of business operations, wants brands to know that roughly one out of every three of the league’s players is an Olympian and, according to Nielsen, 75% of the league’s fans know its sponsors—with 65% showing loyalty to those brands as a result.
That’s where Deep Blue and DBX take the ice.
“When you go out and you look to get partners for women’s sports, it’s not about selling. It’s about building partnerships; it’s about aligning with values, so I know that Laura could go out and authentically tell our story,” Scheer said.
The PWHL has a specific request of its sponsors: Help build the sport of hockey, get girls into hockey, and keep them there.
That’s garnered the league a host of “nontraditional” partners from disparate portions of the market.
The league started its first four-month season in January, but by Feb. 18, it had become enough of a draw to bring 19,285 fans to a Toronto-Montréal game at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena. While in a suite having a conversation during a timeout, Scheer heard fans build to loud screams and cheers, looked up, and saw that the league had just announced a partnership with Mattel’s Barbie that led to in-game activations and a line of inspirational Barbie clothing for kids and adults.
The clothing line sold out in two days.
In March, the league announced a partnership with Molson that put its logo atop the numbers on the back of players’ jerseys—forcing their names to the bottom and preventing players with longer hair from covering their names. The campaign gained traction on social media and increased Molson’s sales by 6% during the time it ran.
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“Those were two really big success stories in year one for us, and we love that they’re a little bit out of the box and there’s something different,” Scheer said. “They’re not the traditional brands and not the traditional activations that teams would do.”
But the league wants more. To this end, Deep Blue’s DBX set up an event in New York with the PWHL and New York Sirens and Team USA star Alex Carpenter to meet with chief marketing officers and showcase the league’s brand. With the league’s players’ association negotiating an eight-year collective bargaining agreement, stars including Carpenter and Team USA’s Hilary Knight are essential to the league telling its story and sharing its experiences.
Telling the story is especially important when you’re building not only the league’s brand, but that of the sport itself.
Professional hockey still has a sizable following in the U.S., but it exists in something of a niche compared with other sports. The National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup Finals averaged 4.2 million viewers on ESPN this year, up 58% from last year, with game seven averaging 7.7 million. As a whole, the NHL postseason averaged 1.8 million viewers, up 60% from a year before.
That not only wouldn’t have cracked the top 100 broadcasts of 2023, but take the National Football League out of the equation and the Stanley Cup Final wouldn’t have breached the top 50 sports broadcasts of the year.
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Instead of an obstacle, both the PWHL and Deep Blue see an opportunity. Correnti’s spent the last couple of months learning the Minnesota youth-to-pro hockey pipeline and learning why stick taps against the boards resonate so deeply with players and fans alike. She sees communities that brands that never considered hockey an option before could enter for the price of an LED board.
“With respect to niches, niches scale these days,” Correnti said, referencing the attention that Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher brought to her sport in Paris this summer. “When you think about the players’ ability to leverage social, to build fanbases online, those are the touch points that, regardless of whether they’re in the net or they’re on the bench, we know are going to attract new fans.”
Scheer, meanwhile, has seen players remove the layers of boards, glass, and helmets between them and fans to take selfies with supporters before and after games. She’s seen them come to the glass when kids put up signs reading “Future PWHL Player” or when 30-somethings scrawl out, “If I knew this was here when I was a kid, I would have tried harder.” She sees the opportunity to influence girls to play the sport in the league’s two home countries and in the 14 other countries it draws players from.
“There’s a place for us now to create dreamers, but it would be great if partners come on board and help us,” Scheer said. “While it may be a niche today, I don’t think [it’ll be a] niche tomorrow.”
Jason is an Adweek staff writer covering the business of marketing.
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