As Women’s Volleyball Breaks Records, Brand Interest Spikes

Shattered attendance records. Skyrocketing viewership. Exploding revenue. There might not be a hotter sport in the U.S. than NCAA women’s volleyball, and media partners and brands are falling over themselves to participate. "The hardest part is making sure we have room for everybody," Jacqueline Dobies, vp of revenue and yield management at ESPN, told Adweek. To help make that room, every NCAA volleyball tournament game was available on an ESPN platform this year, giving the Disney company far more advertising inventory than before—as well as sales success. “A great matchup is just icing on the cake, but we definitely experienced sellouts for this way earlier than we have in years prior,” Dobies said. As an example of the bump in brands, this year's NCAA women's volleyball championship tournament on ESPN brought in 76 advertisers, a 69% increase over last year's 45, with the top spending advertisers including Volvo, Nissan, Procter & Gamble, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Novo Nordisk. Additionally, those advertisers spanned 51 categories, compared to just 31 last year, with the top spending categories including autos, pharma, cellular radio systems and accessories, household cleaners and athletic wear. And partners are getting their money's worth. Why More Brands Should Add Gender Equity to Their Playbooks After This March Madness Overall, ESPN saw its most-watched women’s college volleyball regular season ever, averaging 116,000 viewers on its networks—up 58% year-over-year. Those numbers prompted the company to move the NCAA selection show to ESPN (from ESPNU) and broadcast the final on ABC for the first time last Sunday. “We see this as a sport where we have a lot invested in. It resonates with people, and we get a great response,” Dan Margulis, ESPN’s senior director of programming and acquisitions, told Adweek ahead of the championship. “Every time we do these things, it’s an experiment, and we think it’s going to be successful.” Bump in attendance Despite going up against the NFL with a 3 p.m. airtime, Sunday’s championship between Nebraska and Texas on ABC became the most-watched college volleyball match in history. The event averaged 1.7 million viewers—a 115% increase from 2022 when ESPN aired the championship on a Saturday night in primetime. Additionally, last week’s semifinals on Thursday, which went against Thursday Night Football and the NBA, averaged 1.1 million viewers—another record. Heading into the semifinals, Margulis thought the match would "hold its own" against the NFL, noting, “We saw this as one of our premium championships that we’re trying to grow.” The semifinals and finals both took place in Tampa—quite the distance from the universities' homes in Lincoln and Austin—and both set attendance records. A gathering of 19,727 fans became the largest crowd to ever attend an indoor NCAA volleyball match, breaking a record set days before. In addition to helping set the indoor volleyball attendance record, Nebraska's volleyball team also set the world record for women's outdoor event attendance earlier in the year, with 92,003 people piling into Memorial Stadium to watch the Cornhuskers beat Omaha. Just the start The trajectory of volleyball's popularity has been easy to trace, and much of it comes from increased broadcasting of the sport across media partners like ESPN and Fox. According to Margulis, Covid-19 helped accelerate the growth of women’s volleyball when the entire tournament took place in Omaha. ESPN viewed the 2020 tournament as a way to leverage then-fledgling ESPN+. In the following year, every game in the early rounds was available on the platform to increase exposure of the sport, with the company also taking care to present matches in the best way. “We get challenged a lot in the first and second rounds, ‘Why don’t you put more games on linear?’ And I counter that they’re usually a blowout,” said Margulis. To present early rounds in a fan-friendly way, ESPN developed a whip-around show, The 5th Set, which returned for a second straight year in 2023. Meanwhile, Fox's Big Ten Network has also regularly aired volleyball matchups in primetime on Saturday nights (drawing more viewers than Big Ten football in some cases). The network has also found success with Sunday afternoon games on Fox alongside the NFL in October, which recently set the regular season viewership record by averaging 1.66 million viewers, tripling the record that had been set just weeks before. In this year's tournament, all of the regionals aired on linear (ESPN2 and ESPNU), with the semifinals landing on ESPN and the aforementioned championship broadcasting on ABC. But even in the regular season, ESPN saw viewership success, upgrading 20 matches to bigger networks—two of them twice. “We pushed this year, and increasing the overall viewership of regular season volleyball really helps," Margulis said. "It’s an overall investment sport." Volleyball is the third women’s college championship ESPN has broadcast on ABC, all to resounding success. The NCAA women’s basketball final in April averaged 9.9 million viewers—the most ever. Additionally, April’s 2023 NCAA Gymnastics Championship averaged 1.02 million on ABC, 10% more than 2022’s, which had set the prior record. How Julie Haddon Is Reinventing the National Women’s Soccer League as Its First CMO “Women’s college volleyball is definitely on the same trajectory that we’re seeing for a lot of our women’s sports across the board, both from an audience perspective and looking at the revenue as well,” Dobies said. Serving up opportunities ESPN sees women’s sports—and women’s Olympic sports—as a rapidly growing area for the company. “We’re trying to find those inflection points in other sports and use that to drive interest to other areas and support other areas,” Dobies said. For instance, if a brand approached ESPN about sports marketing interest in the NCAA women’s college basketball tournament, Dobies’ team might point the advertiser toward other sports like lacrosse or swimming. “We’ve tried to be strategic about how we’re monetizing and leveraging our women’s portfolio to make sure we’re supporting all women’s sports, and not necessarily the ones that are just getting the most attention right now," Dobies said. “The sports that we’ve really embraced and have gotten behind have really all performed for us."

Programming & Performance

As Women's Volleyball Breaks Records, Brand Interest Is Spiking

ESPN saw 76 advertisers in the 2023 NCAA tournament—a 69% year-over-year increase

Mollie Cahillane

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Mollie Cahillane