Ally’s partnership with the Unrivaled Basketball League is greater than only a emblem on a jersey. It’s a blueprint for what it appears like when manufacturers deal with ladies’s sports activities as an equal and equitable counterpart.
Betting on the imaginative and prescient
In the summer season of 2024, Ally Financial turned the primary Founding Partner and Official Bank of Unrivaled, a player-owned, full-court 3-on-3 ladies’s skilled league co-founded by WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier. The firm signed on earlier than there was a completed venue, a broadcast deal, or perhaps a full roster introduced.
“We felt that we may do extra,” stated Stephanie Marciano, Head of Brand and Sports Marketing at Ally. During a personal press convention with Blavity in attendance, Marciano defined how the sponsorship aligned with its long-standing mission to validate the imaginative and prescient of ladies’s sports activities, a dedication the corporate has upheld since 2018.
She continued, “It’s not simply shopping for rights and doing sponsorships, however to step again and say, ‘What is holding again this business? What are the most important limitations to the expansion of ladies’s sports activities?’ A variety of us are former athletes at Ally, so we had a bit little bit of a head begin in understanding these limitations. And all of the insights had been telling us that the disparity in media was what was holding ladies’s sports activities again. The incontrovertible fact that 90% of media was spent on males’s sports activities and solely 10% was spent overlaying ladies’s sports activities. How may an business thrive if it solely has 10% of media protection?”
Ally’s early backing and dedicated media spend helped Unrivaled safe a broadcast accomplice in TNT Sports. The transfer was a part of the financial institution’s bigger, years-long funding in media fairness inside ladies’s sports activities. In 2022, Ally launched its 50/50 media pledge, committing to equal spending on males’s and girls’s sports activities media. The pledge was designed as an accountability mannequin, not a marketing campaign slogan.
“It was about getting higher time slots for girls’s sports activities, rising the storytelling and the narratives. And it principally gave us large goal. The work was offering societal affect. And it’s so significant to our model, to our workers, to our group, all the way in which as much as the board of administrators, as a result of once more, it’s doing extra than simply advertising our model. It’s about having actual affect, constructing model love, and it’s large for our enterprise as nicely,” stated Marciano.
Unrivaled’s debut season in 2025 delivered numbers that challenged the persistent fantasy that girls’s sports activities lack an viewers. The league averaged 221,000 viewers on TNT and truTV throughout the season, reaching 11.9 million complete viewers.
Building fandom by digital storytelling
Much of that development will be attributed to Unrivaled’s digital-first strategy and storytelling technique, which leverages social media as its major engine for fan engagement. The league has generated greater than 589 million earned and owned social impressions, whereas gamers collectively gained multiple million new followers after Jan. 1, 2025.
Across its platforms, Unrivaled affords followers locker-room entry, courtside intimacy, and personality-driven content material that transforms function gamers into breakout stars. Fans have responded by connecting with gamers throughout all eight groups, together with established names like Brittney Griner and Paige Bueckers, in addition to rising expertise simply starting their skilled journeys.
Unrivaled was constructed to deal with a structural hole within the ladies’s basketball ecosystem. While media publicity, model partnerships, and NIL offers have elevated throughout ladies’s sports activities, a major disparity stays in offseason consideration—notably for WNBA athletes.
A player-first mannequin
Kirby Porter, Chief Brand Officer at Unrivaled, emphasised that one of many league’s core targets was to maintain the momentum ladies athletes construct throughout the conventional season.
“Unrivaled actually crammed a spot — one, by way of extending the ladies’s basketball season. Obviously, WNBA goes from May to October, and historically, gamers would go abroad typically the day after the WNBA season ended to May of the next 12 months. And that type of led to a drop-off in listening to from the gamers or simply protection of the gamers. So, simply the essential good thing about protecting them right here,” she stated.
The league was deliberately designed with athletes’ greatest pursuits on the heart. Its mannequin contains fairness alternatives, the very best common salaries within the sport, and Ally’s funding helps hold gamers within the U.S. throughout the offseason quite than pursuing riskier contracts abroad. Unrivaled’s Miami-based amenities additionally supply on-site, skilled, and complimentary childcare, together with complete damage insurance coverage that ensures wage protection.
A turning level in ladies’s basketball
Within Unrivaled’s orbit, Ally’s presence is strategic and deeply intentional. The firm’s early dedication supplied essential signaling energy, serving to entice roughly 20 extra sponsors and positioning Unrivaled as a culturally related drive in ladies’s basketball—not a distinct segment experiment.
“I feel having a accomplice like Ally because the founding accomplice instills a lot confidence in Unrivaled,” Porter stated.
She later highlighted how the league’s player-first tradition and incentives, mixed with Ally’s backing, have allowed Unrivaled to “reduce by into so many different sectors, markets, and areas of curiosity.”
Unrivaled’s development continues to be simple. Its 1,000-seat dwelling enviornment repeatedly sells out on sport nights, the league has expanded from six groups to eight, and its first highway sport will happen in entrance of a sold-out crowd at a 20,000-seat enviornment in Philadelphia.
“This is the turning level,” Porter stated when requested what Unrivaled may imply for the way forward for ladies’s sports activities. “I really feel like there’s been so many ups and downs, like ‘we’re breaking by’… however that is the precise turning level for girls’s sports activities as a enterprise.”
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