Snap Inc.’s Global Head of Content and Partnerships on the Risk Brands Keep Miscalculating
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How Snap Inc's decade of sports partnership-building maps onto the decision brands are sitting on right now.
When Anmol Malhotra left the NFL's Park Avenue offices in 2015, he'd just pitched Snap as a sports media partner and had no guarantee the league would bite. Snap wasn't ESPN or Turner. It was Snapchat — the app teenagers used to send disappearing photos — making the case that it belonged in the same conversation as broadcasters who'd covered the league for decades. At the time, Snap had five sports publisher relationships.
A decade later, Snap's sports portfolio exceeds 340 partners, including ESPN's made-for-mobile SportsCenter, live World Cup activations with FIFA, and creator programs at the Paris Olympics with NBC. The platform reaches over 75% of 13-34 year-olds across 25+ countries and nearly 1 billion global monthly active users.
Malhotra, named to SBJ's Forty Under 40 in 2023, helped build that portfolio by recognizing a pattern that most incumbents missed:
A credible product
An existing audience
A closing window for the partners willing to act before the market repriced
He sees the same thing happening in women's sports right now.
Key Takeaways
Brands optimizing for short-term ROI measurability are misidentifying where the real commercial risk lies
Female athletes who grew up on Snap are genuinely platform-native — accessible, responsive, and at an earlier point in their commercial development
The 2027 Women's World Cup has lead times of 12-18 months for athlete partnerships and creator relationships; brands need to treat it as a current activation decision
Relevance > Reach + Revenue
“Where is the ROI data?”
That’s the question every media planning conversation about women's sports eventually lands on. Reach and revenue need to be defensible to a CFO. But optimizing entirely for short-term measurability misreads where the real risk sits.
Malhotra structures Snap's value to partners around three variables: reach, revenue, and relevance. The first two are always the easier sell. Relevance is harder to quantify, but it's the variable that determines whether a sport or a brand stays commercially viable a decade out.
A league runs on reach and revenue, but if you aren't relevant to fans over time, none of it holds, he explained. If you miss how people watch sports now, those fans age out–taking viewership and attendance with them.
The pitch clock is his proof that the decline is reversible, if a sport is willing to change.
MLB resisted it for years; the traditionalists said the game couldn't be touched. Once implemented, it cut 20-30 minutes off the average game, attendance climbed, and TV viewership rose. The cost of waiting wasn't slower games. It was years of lost ground with the younger, casual fans the sport most needed to keep.
Relevance Is Built Before An Audience Is Established
The partners who built durable relationships with Snap did so before the platform was proven at scale. The ones who waited for proof took longer to move — and the longer they waited, the more it cost them.
Malhotra identifies three structural conditions that make the current women's sports moment genuinely time-limited, not another cycle of premature hype.
Narrative continuity compounds relevance.
One-and-done rosters in men's college basketball reset every year because fans can't follow a player's development, rivalries don't build, stakes don't accumulate. Women's college basketball ran the opposite direction. Caitlin Clark played four years at Iowa. The rivalry with Angel Reese built season over season.
"They became this dynamic duo and rivalry, almost like Bird-Magic back in the day, where they were playing each other every year and everyone knew who they were," Malhotra says. Brands present during that arc were buying into a multi-year relationship between athletes and a fan base that was actively growing around them.
Platform-native athletes are the access point.
Female athletes who grew up on Snapchat create authentic content as a default. They're more responsive to partnership structures and less reliant on large agencies to broker every conversation. Malhotra emphasizes that brands have an opportunity to build authentic relationships with athletes before the market becomes more crowded.
"Get them early," he says. "These folks are going to become very big very soon, and they're all getting big contracts. Otherwise it gets increasingly more expensive or you just have less ability to work with them in a big way." Snap's Snap the Gap program — nine athletes across the NWSL, PWHL, WNBA, LOVB, and NCAA given creator development tools and direct brand connections — is what early-stage partnership looks like before the market finishes pricing it in.
Audience growth happens through casual fans.
The casual fan responds to the culture around the sport, whether it’s behind-the-scenes access, athlete routines, or fan reactions. Women's sports, still building its traditions rather than preserving them, has more surface area for that kind of content than any established league does. "How do we pique the curiosity of somebody who doesn't know the WNBA All-Star is happening this weekend?" Malhotra asks. "How do we get that person to click in? And then we believe really strongly that what we can do is keep them engaged and make them into a hardcore fan over time."
That conversion from casual to committed is where relevance actually gets built.
2027’s Women’s World Cup Serves As A Deadline
Malhotra describes the Women's World Cup as one of only two global events (alongside the Olympics) where Snap can activate every major market simultaneously. "Every day of those games is the Super Bowl for the sport," he says. Snap's 2027 plan is already in build:
Athletes secured before the preparation window closes
Regional creator programs across key markets
Official content with Netflix (which holds US/Canada rights)
AR activations tied to national team identity.
For brands, the math on this is simple. Athlete partnerships and creator relationships that need to be in place for the 2027 tournament carry 12-18 month lead times.
Brands treating the Women's World Cup as a future opportunity to plan for closer to the date will arrive at a market that looks substantially different from the one they're evaluating today. NIL pipelines for women's athletes are expanding as college and professional careers increasingly connect. Venue infrastructure is growing, with W Cleveland, the Portland Thorns, and others creating new integration opportunities as each comes online.
The brands and platforms that moved early on women's sports are building fan-facing associations while the space is still taking shape — the ones late entrants will pay a premium for, if they can buy them at all. Malhotra saw this window in 2015. It's open again now, and closing faster than most brands think.
