Before we get into this case study, I’d like to ask if you could take a moment and recall the last time you flipped on the TV and watched sports. Remember? Alright, now what if I told you with 96% confidence that sporting event featured men? How could I be so sure? Because that’s the incredible statistic we came across when developing our campaign for the 2019 US Open – “of all sports covered in America, only 4% features female athletes." An astonishing fact, especially when you spend as much time as we do marveling at Venus, Serena, and Coco.
With the US Open’s legacy of advancing women’s equality and the 2019 US Open falling on Women’s Equality Day, we knew this was the perfect moment to air out this statistic and achieve more airtime for women. So, we took this miniscule 4% and gave it a powerful voice – trailblazer Billie Jean King’s – and invited others to join-in for themselves, rallying behind #WomenWorthWatching.
With an immense passion and a modest budget, we knew success couldn’t be captured alone. So we turned to the USTA’s partner, SheIs- a women’s equality organization setting out to use the power of women’s sport to create a future of, by and for strong women. Together we were able to join our powerful content and platform with our partner’s ambassadors to show up to Women’s Equality Day in a big way.
People took notice and ran with our Hashtag, using it to celebrate women in sport all over the world. Over the 2 weeks of the US Open, the campaign garnered:
33.636 M Broadcast impressions:
100M+ PR Impressions
240M+ Social Impressions
4.2M+ Video Views
4.1M+ Social Interactions
24K Unique Social Authors
Icing on the cake? All that chatter helped the US Open to reach its highest ratings ever, including the most-watched championship match in women’s tennis. Overall, there was a whopping 32% increase among women 18-34, and a 10% increase among men in that age range.
It is still an active hashtag on twitter today. And while we were ecstatic to the see press, from the NY Times to Ad Week, highlighting our cause, nothing made us prouder than seeing an article written by the Melbourne Boomers in Australia. It was written by the GM and highlighted 2 young girls at one of their games with a #womenworthwatching sign, with a huge smile on their faces as they cheered and celebrated the women athletes. This is the core of why we need for more coverage of women athletes, for little girls like them to find their role models.
