On the subject of NCAA rankings for 2024, it’s an entire new sport.
Sunday’s 2024 NCAA ladies’s championship between Iowa and South Carolina, a 3 p.m. ET tipoff airing on ABC and ESPN, scored a median of 18.9 million viewers, blowing by the boys’s championship sport on Monday, which had 14.8 million (reside+same-day) throughout TBS, TNT and TruTV, based on Nielsen.
That is the primary time the ladies’s championship beat the boys’s in rankings, and advertisers who obtained in early are scoring massive.
“This week has been completely loopy for me, not due to the boys’s event however due to the ladies’s event,” David Solomon, director of sports activities partnerships, Ampersand, informed ADWEEK forward of the sport.
Ampersand is a nationwide gross sales arm for Comcast, Constitution and Cox, and Solomon mentioned advertisers had been clamoring to get into the Last 4 and the championship after Caitlin Clark and Iowa’s win over LSU drew viewership of 12.3 million in an Elite 8 matchup.
“Everybody’s been scrambling,” Solomon mentioned. “Cultural moments actually drive this.”
Nevertheless, when advertisers are scrambling, they’re usually paying a premium. In the meantime, a number of entrepreneurs have had ladies’s event plans way back to final yr’s TV upfront, and the funding is paying off.
For example, by a deal on the final upfront, Omnicom Media Group’s Optimum Sports activities had buys that amounted to 35% of all broadcast stock throughout the Girls’s Regional Finals from Albany and Portland, which included the Iowa and LSU sport.
The deal supported customized inventive for purchasers reminiscent of AT&T, State Farm, Gatorade and The House Depot.
Although business spending on the Girls’s NCAA was up 50% this yr, based on OMG, Optimum Sports activities spending was up 88%.
One other early mover, Aflac has proven up all through the ladies’s event, shifting its spending from the boys’s Last 4 to the ladies’s Last 4 in 2023 and teaming with South Carolina coach Daybreak Staley lengthy earlier than the event to handle Daybreak’s Record of inequities in ladies’s sports activities.
The corporate additionally partnered with ladies’s sports activities bar The Sports activities Bra and media and commerce firm Togethxr to throw a sequence of March Insanity watch events.
