How Ally broke the vicious cycle of disinvestment in women's sports

An interview with Andrea Brimmer, Ally's chief marketing officer.

When Ally chief marketing officer (CMO) Andrea Brimmer calls herself a product of Title IX, she isn’t exaggerating. In the mid 1980s, she played soccer on Michigan State’s very first varsity women’s team, and helped bring women’s soccer to the entire Big Ten conference.

So in 2021, with the 50th anniversary of Title IX on the horizon, Brimmer knew she wanted Ally to do something special to celebrate the occasion. She was particularly struck by a couple of stats her team flagged for her:

• Women’s sports received less than 10% of the media coverage.

• Ninety-four percent of C suite women in the Fortune 500 played sports at some point in their life, and 54% at the collegiate level.

As Brimmer thought about Ally’s responsibility “to create economic mobility and trajectory,” she asked her team how much Ally’s marketing department spent on women’s sports sponsorships; it turns out, they were at about ten percent, too. Well, that simply wasn’t good enough.

With that moment of self reflection, an idea was born: “What if we tried to spend equally between men's and women's sports?” Brimmer didn’t follow the usual corporate playbook and send the idea to focus groups and sub-committees to be watered down to death. Instead, she called her friend Julie Foudy, and within a week she was announcing Ally’s 50/50 pledge on a livestream at the espnW Summit. (After it went public, she got a text from her boss saying, “It's a really good idea, but you probably should have told me first.”)

Last month at NWSL championship weekend in Kansas City¹, Brimmer sat down for an interview with Power Plays and Gal Pal Sports. This was an invaluable conversation that I know will inform my reporting in the new year, as it gave me a better understanding of the dynamics of the relationships between sponsors, television executives, players, and sports leagues themselves.

Today, I’m sharing a lightly edited and condensed version of that chat for you to peruse as we turn the page on 2024. Brimmer talks with us about the unexpected difficulties of implementing the 50/50 pledge, Ally’s commitment to DEI in the face of our current political climate, and how Ally increased its support for the league — and especially the players — in the wake of the abuse scandal.

I hope you enjoy!

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(In the photo above, Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer (left) and NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman (right) present Washington Spirit rookie Croix Bethune with the 2024 Ally Rookie of the Year award.)

Lindsay Gibbs (Power Plays): Okay. So you make the 50/50 pledge. We've all set goals for ourselves and our companies. That's kind-of the fun part. But then you have to implement them. Where do you even start bringing up 10% [of your sports marketing budget dedicated to women’s sports] to 50%, and how do you make those decisions?

Andrea Brimmer (Ally CMO): It's actually been really hard, and it's been hard not in that we didn't have a desire to do it, it's been hard because of the unavailability of media in the women's sports space. When you think about it, almost three years ago when we made the pledge, the NWSL didn't have its broadcast deal. The WNBA didn't have its deal. There weren't all of these vibrant, what I'll call kind-of shoulder ecosystems in the women's sports space: The RE-CAP Show, what you [Power Plays, and Gal Pal Sports] are doing, Haley [Rosen] and Just Women's Sports, The Gist, and all these places, right? Even brands like The Athletic weren't super focused on women. There just wasn't a lot of focus on women's sports.²

So the first challenge was really, how the hell do we find the media? And we kind-of put together this three-pronged strategy. The first strategy is, let's work with legacy media systems to create systemic change. And we did this multi-million dollar deal with Disney and said 95% of our commitment has to go to women's sports, but the agreement is you have to move the women's sports into prime time slots, or we're not doing it. We're not going to run stuff at 3:00 in the morning. You literally have to move programming. And they were awesome. It took us, like, six or seven months to put that deal together. You know, Rita Ferro [the director of Disney Advertising] and the team over there were absolutely incredible. That was a biggie.

The second biggie was really working with CBS and the NWSL and getting the championship game moved to prime time two years ago. Crazy enough, I'm not talking about 1970, I'm talking about 2022, was the first women's championship game in any sport ever played in linear prime time. And that's how we've had to do it.

And then, like I said, finding other places, all the emerging ecosystems to invest in, whether it's been, you know, new platforms that have emerged, athlete-led, female-founded, all these places where people are going to get their content now.

Lesley Ryder (Gal Pal Sports): Now that it's been a few years since that 50/50 pledge. How do you see it now? What has been the success story of it?

AB: The metrics are incredible. Let's start with the business metrics, and then we can talk a little bit about what I think has been just the, I won't say societal impact, but I think the impact in the world, because I do think it's been significant.

In terms of the business metrics, we are at historic highs across every single one of the KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] that we measure. So our awareness is the highest it's been in the history of our company. Our likability and our trust grew. We are one of only four banking brands that grew in terms of trust last year, and we grew the fastest. Our positive sentiment is over 95% positive. We're in a category that people don't like. People don't love their banks! The category average is in the mid 30s. We're three times the category average, and our brand value grew 31% year over year, which was the fastest growth we've had in five years, and the financial services category dropped three points last year. So that's a 35% swing.

The other thing that I love is that 65% of everybody that's coming to our storefront, because we're only digital, no brick and mortar, 65% of everybody that's coming to our storefront is female. So the business metrics have been incredible.

I think more broadly, if you talk about the soft metrics, one, it's a huge internal pride point, like a huge internal pride point. And I love it. We have a new CEO. He started in April of last year, and he said to me, “One of the big reasons that I wanted to join was because of what you're doing in women's sports, and my wife said to me, ‘I'll kill you if you don't take this job.’ Because I love how Ally shows up for women.” And I just thought that was so cool. People rally around it at Ally, and it's, it's really, really meaningful from that perspective.

So many of the athletes …. you see the real, meaningful impact that it's made on their life. I think there’s just a bit of a different mojo that they have now that they know there's like no dead end for them, that they can actually do things that they were never able to do before. Then you just look at the movement in women's sports right now, and I don't want to sound arrogant, but I think we were a primary architect of that movement, because it takes brands to break the vicious cycle, and we were one of the first brands to do it.

LR: How does it feel to be right? (Laughter)

AB: I think it's an incredible feeling to know that our team saw around this corner and just intuitively knew. A bragging point for me is my sports marketing team, it's really all women … and you go down the list, everybody played sports, so they had a sports sensibility. We all just knew in our heart of hearts this was a big thing. Also, if you think about it from a brand perspective, do you know how hard it is to find places where you can break through? Like, if I went and sponsored the NBA — no offense to the NBA — there's 30 plus brands in the NBA, I would never be able to break through. But I can come into the NWSL, have my name on the sleeve of every single kit, and break through in a really significant way. And I think from a marketer’s perspective it was a no brainer.

LG: I want to go back to something you said about your Disney deal. I knew about moving the NWSL championship to prime time, but what were some of the other sports that got re-scheduled that were notable?

AB: They moved things into like, instead of 9:00 in the morning on a Saturday, a good afternoon time slot. We said we wanted to be across every women's sport, not just soccer. We literally said it's got to be every women's sport that you carry. So it was soccer, it was volleyball, it was lacrosse, it was basketball. And as part of the Disney deal, we did a sponsorship of the ACC. So if you watch the [ACC] women's basketball tournament, you see the brand everywhere. We've got branding and engagement in every ACC sport now. So it was really pretty ubiquitous.

Then the one thing that we did that I thought was really cool is we did two SportsCenters with them, and it was all women behind the camera, in front of the camera, and written by women. That was another really unique thing that we did as part of the Disney deal that I really liked. Then part of that also included some sponsorship of the espnW summit and really kind of embedding ourselves in that programming as well.

LG: So this is just this probably the dumbest question, but to be clear, are you just [telling Disney] we want to run our ads during the women's sports shows and during, say, women’s volleyball matches, but we are not going to do it if it's on at bad times?

AB: Yes. “Disney, we want you to give more access to women's sports to all fans, and so we will commit a very healthy spend to you if you commit to moving programming to time slots where people can actually see women's sports.” That was the deal.

If you talk to Rita Ferro and Disney, they'll tell you that for them, it got them a ton of business, because it was really well publicized, and then a lot of other brands said, “I want to do something like that with you.” That's how you create the momentum, and, like I always say, break the vicious cycle.

As you know, less than six percent of Fortune 500 brands are still investing in women's sports, and without that, I empathize with the networks. They have to monetize, they're not a charity. The only way they can monetize is through brand support. So the brands have to come off the sidelines, and somebody has to blink in this equation. It's got to be the brands. That's the only way that the leagues can truly thrive and monetize and revenue share with the players, with the teams, and that's the way you start to put real money in player’s pockets.

LG: One of the most interesting things I think you did was you also sponsored the NWSL Players Association, which you don't often see!

AB: I know. It’s juicy, right?? (Laughter)

LG: So juicy! Why did you decide to do that?

AB: So if you remember back to when the NWSL was going through all of the harassment turmoil, I'll never forget it. I was going on a girls trip that I desperately needed because I hadn't had a day off in forever … and my phone just starts blowing up, and I'm like, “Oh my God, what's going on?” So I pulled over, because there were so many text messages. And they're like, “Have you seen this tweet from Alex Morgan?”

We were already a league sponsor. So first it was kind-of like, we’ve got to get into this and try and contain it. But then the second thought I had is, as a former player, these players are probably scared that they might have just blown up their league, right? So I called Foudy and I called Aly Wagner, and I said, “Help me get a hold of somebody at the PA.” They set me up with [executive director of the NWSLPA] Meghann Burke. I sent an email to Meghann because I figured she'd be slammed. I said, “Look, you don't know me. I'm the CMO at Ally, we're a league sponsor. I just want you to tell the players that what they did was really brave, and they're probably afraid of how sponsors are going to react, and I want you guys to know that we're not blinking.” And I gave her my cell phone number, and I said, “When you get time, if you want to call me, call me.”

She called me two days later, and she's like, "I cried when I got that email, and I shared it with the players." I said, “Look, it's the end of the year, we've got some money to burn, we want to give it to you.” And she was like, “What? Nobody's ever called and said this to me, ever!” She said, “I'm a one-man band basically. You know, I don't have a staff. Would you guys pay to help us staff up?” And that's when we put our deal together and helped them staff.

The rationale was we wanted the players to know that what they did was brave, what they did was right, and that we were doubling down. We also extended our league deal because we wanted the league to know that there was going to be stability.

LG: Have you reached 50/50?

AB: We're damn close. We're within spitting distance.

LG: Are you surprised it’s been so hard to get there?

AB: You know what's hard? We got a lot closer during the World Cup year, because you had all that media to buy, but then [this year] with the Olympics, it's not like you can just say, “I only want to buy women's soccer, women's basketball.” The WNBA was also hard for us, because U.S. Bank had a lot of the media exclusivity locked up, so they were biased towards the league sponsors, and it was hard to unlock a lot of that inventory. We've bought a lot of NWSL, but you also have to be careful, because I can't put my entire media budget in one vertical, right? I still have to get, you know, 400,000 new customers a year and these things. So, yeah, it's been hard. It's been really hard.

It would probably be easy if I didn’t have any business objectives I have to meet, right? I always laugh with Aly Wagner. She's like, “Oh yeah, I forget that you actually run marketing for a bank, and you're not just a women's sports CMO.” So I have to balance all of these objectives. I can't take 100% of my media budget and put it in women's sports. If I could, we'd hit our 50/50, pledge like that. But I have all these other things that I have to balance. We also have a men's sports portfolio. We're in NASCAR. We're in Charlotte MLS. We've got relationships with the [Detroit] Pistons and the [Charlotte] Hornets. Those relationships require care and feeding as well. It's like a Rubik's Cube. Every time we get one side all yellow, we flip it over, and all the other colors are messed up.

LG: You just hosted a DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] panel [at NWSL championship weekend in Kansas City.] In this time we're in, there are a lot of people politicizing the phrase “DEI.” So I'm wondering if, after this election, it makes you nervous to use those terms publicly when there are powerful people looking for reasons to bad-faith attack people at any turn?

AB: Yeah, look, I'd be lying if I didn't say that it enters my mind. Our commitment to DEI — which has been long standing at Ally, it was well before the George Floyd murder, it's always been part of our ethos and our DNA — could it be weaponized against us? Absolutely. Do I think that we're going to come off of it? I don't. And I know just from talking with our CEO, if you're really authentic in terms of the way that you think about diversity and equity and inclusivity, you understand that you do it because one, it's the right thing to do, but two, it actually produces better business results. It doesn't mean that you exclude others, it just means you include everyone.

Of course, I'm always worried about brand reputation, right? Protecting the brand is critically important. But I don't think anybody could point to anything that we're doing and say, “Wow, it's really bad to make a pledge to spend equally between men's and women's sports.” And so for us, I think we'll just continue to be authentic, continue to be genuine, and continue to stay true to what we've done for so very long.

1. As I noted in my last newsletter, Ally paid for my trip to Kansas City for the NWSL championship game and facilitated this interview with Brimmer. However, there were zero parameters put on questions for this interview — it was entirely on-the-record — and Ally has no editorial control over this newsletter or any other work produced here at Power Plays.

2. While Brimmer’s main point that the women’s media ecosystem wasn’t as robust three years ago as it is today, I do want to note that Power Plays (and Gal Pal Sports) were both around in 2021.