The Courage to Build Markets: How Ally's Team Created Infrastructure Where None Existed
Every CMO knows the math doesn't add up.
You're staring at a women's sports sponsorship proposal, your CFO is asking about CPMs, and the valuation models are spitting out numbers that make no sense. Meanwhile, you're watching competitors claim the same tired sponsorships in men's sports while an entire market sits untapped.
Andrea Brimmer, Chief Marketing and PR Officer at Ally Financial, and her sports sponsorship team faced this exact dilemma—and chose to rewrite the rules entirely. Their radical approach transformed Ally from another financial services advertiser into the architect of modern women's sports marketing, generating over 90% in overarching brand sentiment while the financial services category average hovers around 30%.
The Legacy System Problem
The sports marketing industry has been trapped in its own circular logic. While women's sports media coverage has improved to 15% that still means fewer sponsorship opportunities, which means less revenue for leagues, which perpetuates minimal coverage. It's a vicious cycle that most brands accept as immutable truth.
"When I meet with other brands that aren't in women's sports, they're like, ‘we don't know what to do, we can't figure out the valuations,’" Brimmer explains. The industry applies legacy measurement systems designed for established men's sports to an entirely different ecosystem—like using a ruler to measure water.
Brands overlook lucrative opportunities when they keep trying to force women's sports into existing frameworks instead of recognizing it as unchartered territory requiring new maps. They see risk where pioneers see a green field of opportunity.
Playing by Yesterday's Rules
Most marketing teams face the same challenge when evaluating women's sports opportunities. The numbers don't fit traditional models, the inventory feels limited (because it is), and the measurement frameworks that work for established markets seem inadequate for emerging ones.
This creates a strategic puzzle that even experienced marketers struggle to solve. You have proven measurement models that the business relies on the standard formula of ”spend X dollars on traditional marketing, drive Y people to your brand, convert Z customers.” But when you're managing multi-million dollar budgets, any major reallocation can feel risky because it disrupts those reliable frameworks.
It’s timing and approach, not budget allocation, that’s the real challenge. Forward-thinking marketers understand that testing new markets often requires a dedicated budget that provides breathing room to create new measurement models and performance goals. The problem is when brands treat this as either impossible or as a request they can't justify.
This creates three fundamental barriers:
It positions women's sports as competing against proven performers rather than recognizing it as an untapped growth channel
Relies on measurement systems designed for mature markets when applied to emerging opportunities
Assumes brands must choose between existing performance or new market development
Many marketing teams get caught in this binary thinking—either optimize current spend or venture into new territory. But the most successful market makers realize it's not an either-or decision. Ally's approach combined both strategies: securing incremental investment while also recalibrating their existing sports portfolio over time.
The traditional playbook says: find available inventory, negotiate on price, measure against men's sports benchmarks, and hope for comparable returns. This only works well for mature markets, but fails to capture the arbitrage opportunity that emerging markets represent.
The Starting Line
When Title IX's 50th anniversary approached in 2022, Brimmer was adamant that Ally seize the opportunity to do something meaningful. Rather than creating tribute ads or commemorative campaigns, she and her team collaborated on something that would create lasting structural change.
In exploring truly impactful ways to invest, the Ally team was struck by the insight that media is one of the biggest revenue drivers in women’s sports but less than 5% of total sports media coverage at the time was dedicated to women’s sports. It forced self-reflection in which Ally realized their own heavily lopsided media spending was part of perpetuating what they dubbed as the “vicious cycle.”
So, they decided to do something bold about it. At the 2022 ESPN W Summit, Brimmer announced Ally’s 50/50 pledge—committing to achieving equal media investment across men's and women's sports within five years. This wasn’t a PR stunt. Their commitment was real and rooted in establishing a forcing mechanism that would reshape the women’s sports ecosystem and, in many ways, Ally’s approach to their entire sports portfolio.
The team understood that meaningful change required both incremental investment and strategic reallocation. They secured additional budget for women's sports initiatives while simultaneously recalibrating their existing men's sports spend.
Over time, they optimized out of underperforming investments to fund growth opportunities. "If we truly believe the thesis that this is a good place for the brand to be," the logic went, then the portfolio should reflect that conviction.
But even after making the pledge, there were real challenges to executing it, from seasonal differences in the sports calendar year to year to the fact that significant inventory around women’s sports was still incredibly limited compared to men’s.
“Women’s sports have historically not been in those primary time slots, and so they have not attracted advertisers because audience composition was not great,” Brimmer says. “And your ability to deliver reach and frequency was sub optimized. In that equation, honestly, the only one that could blink first were the brands.”
So Ally blinked.
Ally’s Triple B Playbook
Instead of waiting for women's sports infrastructure to magically appear, Ally created it themselves through what we call the Triple-B Playbook: Build, Bridge, Broadcast.
This three-phase strategy transforms marketers from passive buyers into active market makers, systematically solving the inventory problem while creating lasting competitive advantage. Each phase builds on the previous one, turning infrastructure gaps into opportunity zones:
BUILD starts with infrastructure investment.
In addition to buying traditional inventory, Ally poured resources into emerging platforms— RE-MEDIA, Just Women's Sports, The Gist—creating the foundation traditional media ignored.
The media coverage gap isn't just about major outlets underserving women's sports. It uncovers a much broader ecosystem of outlets attempting to serve fans the content they're craving, but many are too early in their media company journey for traditional ad sales models to work. These platforms struggle to offer the scale and standardized metrics that most marketers require, leading to a vicious cycle where passionate audiences go underserved despite strong demand.
Ally has found that when you fund the platforms telling women's sports stories, you feed fans' appetites and create inventory that didn't exist.BRIDGE connects ecosystems.
Brimmer’s team orchestrated a partnership that linked traditional and emerging media: "We sponsored a bunch of [ION’s] NWSL content, but we used sponsorship to cross-promote exclusive content on RE-MEDIA." They drove broadcast viewers to digital platforms for exclusive analysis from Tobin Heath and Christen Press.BROADCAST moves content to prime positions.
One of Brimmer’s biggest moves in delivering on the 50/50 pledge came later that same year, when Ally worked with the NWSL and CBS to move the NWSL championship game into a primetime network TV slot for the first time ever. It was notable for women’s sports as a whole, not just the NWSL, Brimmer noted. "No professional women's championship game in any sport had ever been played in network prime. Ever. And we're not in the 1970s. I'm talking 2022."
That 2022 championship saw record-breaking viewership, with its peak hitting 1.1 million viewers, despite competing against college football, and the league’s championship has remained in primetime on CBS ever since. Ally followed similar logic in developing a first-of-its kind media sponsorship with Disney and ESPN early the following year. The multi-million dollar commitment saw Ally allocate 90% of their investment specifically to women's sports media, including a guarantee for more women’s sports highlights. True to form, it also included another notable first, as Ally worked with ESPN to build two SportsCenter takeovers featuring an all-women cast and crew that thrust the issue of media equity front and center.
Ally didn’t deploy these tactics as isolated approaches, but rather as building blocks of a systematic strategy to market creation. One where the Triple-B method transforms CMOs from buyers into builders, creating value rather than extracting it.
Creating a Movement, Not a Campaign
The business results tell the story. According to Brimmer, "Last year, our brand valuation increased 31% and the category of financial services dropped 3%." Fans of women's sports are six times more likely to open an Ally account. When they announced their WNBA partnership, social media engagement spiked with supporters expressing brand loyalty—a clear signal that their investment strategy was resonating with audiences.
The brand has now become synonymous with supporting women's sports.
But the transformation extends beyond numbers. Ally became the convenor, deliberately giving up categories they weren't actively promoting to create opportunities for other brands. When renewing their NWSL deal, Brimmer strategically relinquished the mortgage category—despite having a mortgage product—to allow the league to monetize additional partnerships.
"We said, we don't really advertise mortgage, so we're going to give up that category, and allow you to monetize it," she explains. "And even made calls and called other mortgage lenders and said, you should meet with the NWSL."
This approach of sharing rather than hoarding sponsorship territories helped grow the entire ecosystem. Brimmer even has a text chain with CMOs from State Farm and AT&T to share WNBA insights.
They understand that growing the pie matters more than fighting over slices.
It stems from Ally’s core belief system. "We've got this thesis around this notion of allies don't sit on the sidelines," Brimmer notes. It's an operational philosophy. When you genuinely invest in improving conditions for players, leagues, and fans, that authentic engagement generates measurable brand returns that surface-level sponsorships simply can't match.
What gave Brimmer this vision? She'd lived it.
A former Michigan State soccer player who scored 31 goals as a sophomore, Brimmer understood the sports industry from the inside. Her passion for women's sports meant she was paying attention while others ignored it—and in financial services, that white space represented massive opportunity.
Where others saw charity, she saw untapped value waiting for someone brave enough to claim it.
The Market Maker Shift
After three years of pioneering women's sports investment (and going), Brimmer has distilled Ally’s approach into four principles that any CMO can apply—regardless of budget size or category. These battle-tested strategies transformed Ally from sponsor to architect.
Each principle challenges conventional marketing wisdom while providing a practical path forward:
Think Portfolio, Not Add-On
Stop treating women's sports as incremental spend. Brimmer’s team optimized their existing portfolio—pulling from underperforming cable buys and reinvesting in women’s sports. It’s about smart testing, not finding new money. Frame the conversation as a test internally. We don't know if something works until we try.Value Differently
"You can't use the same method of valuation on the women's side as you can the men's because it's apples and oranges," the Ally CMO insists. Develop new metrics that account for growth trajectory, audience quality, and long-term brand building.Commit with Conviction
Public commitments create accountability and attract opportunities that quiet investment never would. "There was no harm in making the pledge,” she notes, referring to the 50/50 pledge. “What was the worst thing that was gonna happen?"Leap When Numbers Don't
Sometimes the biggest opportunities hide behind spreadsheets that don't make sense. "While some valuation may not pencil out in the early years, the long tail of it absolutely is accretive to growth." When traditional models fail emerging markets, smart marketers build new ones. Don’t place concern on whether current metrics justify the investment, but whether you're willing to measure growth differently.
The beauty of Ally’s approach is that it doesn't require a marketer’s budget to grow from day one in order to invest in women’s sports. It requires a growth mindset.
Start with one emerging platform investment, create one meaningful media partnership, or move one piece of content to a better time slot. The compound effect of these actions creates momentum that traditional sponsorship can never match.
That’s because the path forward isn't just about finding budget. It's about finding courage to build markets rather than rent them.
