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How One Media Buyer Quietly Snatched Up 35% of Commercials in Iowa-LSU Women’s Basketball Game
Optimum Sports quietly snatched up 35% of the ad inventory in Monday's Iowa-LSU women's NCAA basketball match last year.
The outsized audience for this week’s highly-watched women’s NCAA basketball match between Iowa and LSU may also have noticed that many of the commercials seen during the game belonged to AT&T, State Farm, Home Depot and Gatorade. WPP’s GroupM media-investment arm announced last week that it intended to double the amount of money its clients spend on women’s sports in 2024, and had tapped adidas, Ally, Coinbase, Discover, Google, Mars, Nationwide, Unilever and NBCUniversal’s Universal Pictures to develop a new marketplace for women’s sports in the TV industry’s annual “upfront” market, when TV networks try to sell the bulk of their commercial time in advance of their next cycle of programming. Optimum, part of Omnicom Media Group, a direct competitor of GroupM, opened a separate women’s sports practice in 2021, but didn’t unveil it to the overall market, says Carey.
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