Technology
Ally Runs New Game Plan in WNBA All-Star Rookie Debut
It’s weird to consider a brand that spends nearly half of its sports marketing budget on women’s sports a rookie in the space, but Ally Financial is making an immediate impact in its first year with the WNBA.
After making its 50/50 Pledge to spend equal amounts of its sports advertising budget on men’s and women’s sports back in 2022, Ally threw its support behind the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), the U.S. Women’s Open golf championship, ACC women’s college sports, its Team Ally athletes, and the Unrivaled Basketball 3-on-3 league—where it was a founding sponsor.
The financial company also took a modest step onto the WNBA’s courts last year when it became an official sponsor of the Las Vegas Aces—putting its logo on the team’s jerseys and practice facility. In April, however, it joined the WNBA as its official banking partner and Changemaker investor.
During the 2025 WNBA All-Star Game in Indianapolis, Ally made its presence felt by setting up an arcade at WNBA Live and giving fans a game debit card featuring one of its three athlete ambassadors—Breanna Stewart, Sydney Colson, and Paige Bueckers—for a “Savings Bucket Challenge” that let them shoot at hoops of varying heights for a chance to win Ally x WNBA branded merch.
It also gave 1,500 fans complimentary League Pass subscriptions, sold designer Jocelyn Hu’s “Walking Bucket” hat, and put its logo on the Gainbridge Fieldhouse court and beneath the rims, among other activations.
ADWEEK spoke with Ally’s head of sports and entertainment marketing, Stephanie Marciano, about the company’s WNBA debut, how it showed up, and how it’s finding space in women’s basketball:
ADWEEK: How is Ally listening to voices within women’s basketball as it enters partnerships with leagues?
Marciano: Listening to the players has been a priority for us from the start.
When we announced Team Ally, our roster of ambassadors, we assembled a roster of folks that we considered advisors in their respective sports. We talk to them all the time about what they are feeling in their sport, the challenges they’re seeing, so listening to the players is critical.
A handful of years ago, coverage and visibility were the biggest gaps in women’s sports. That’s why we announced our 50/50 media pledge, and we’ve been intentional over the last handful of years with that, and we’ve seen great things happen. The NWSL got a new media deal. The WNBA got a new media deal. You’re seeing the social currency of players continue to rise. Commercial investment comes.
We also close that visibility gap and that coverage gap through our investment with the emerging media outlets: Just Women’s Sports, The Gist. These folks are also getting the athletes out there, their stories, highlights of games, and it’s critical to pull in more casual fans. So we’ve spent a lot of money in that media space, making sure that if a fan wants to be a fan, they can turn on their TV and get games. They can open their social media channels and learn about these players.
Where did the WNBA come in?
As we were building out the portfolio, we were in the NWSL. We have a player roster, but we knew we had to get into the WNBA space because it’s one of the crown jewels of the landscape. It’s growing. Fans are here. It’s pulling casual fans in, so that was huge for us.
Do you have any kind of anecdotal evidence, any stories of successes, places where you’ve really collaborated and worked out especially for the betterment of the players?
It’s a bit behind closed doors, to be honest, when other brands are looking to invest in another league.
We’ve been an NWSL partner from the beginning, so we have brands that call us up and ask us, “What are your thoughts on the league partnership? How do you think the league’s going?” We advise each other.
When we were coming into the WNBA, we made a number of calls to our friends at other brands to say, “How is this working for you? How can we come in and positively grow this league? We’re thinking about doing player deals—what’s the space that you’ve carved out? We want to make an impact here—how can we coexist and grow things together?”
Ally has become a familiar brand in women’s sports, but it is still new to the WNBA. How does it approach campaigns and activations differently than it does with more longtime partners?
[All-Star Weekend] is kind of our coming-out party: A big women’s tentpole event that isn’t a championship.
We show up at the NWSL Championship every year, and we’re super proud of that. But this is our first time activating at WNBA All-Star Weekend, and as we were planning, we wanted to stay true to our WNBA Changemaker focus—more access and more engagement opportunities for fans. We wanted to be tech-forward, and we wanted to pull through our product because women’s sports love our brand, but there’s still a little bit of work to do on: Do they know what we do? Do they know that we’re a bank, and what are the products and services we have to offer?
We wanted to pull through merchandise and fashion, which is so culturally relevant right now in all sports. We’re giving away League Pass to thousands of fans, and that’s so important because it’s about access. In the WNBA media deal, there are a lot of games that are still not on broadcast and cable TV. Coming out of All-Star Weekend, there’s a back half of the season that’s going to be electric, and we want to make sure fans can access that.
You have a number of other elements around All-Star as well.
Every single thing that we’ve rolled out this weekend for folks on the ground and at home is about increasing access and increasing fan engagement opportunities. We’ve got commercial units; we’re on the goal pads; we’re on the jerseys of all the players; we’re on the court with the other great Changemakers. We’re a presenting partner of the fan vote, and leading up to this last year, there were over 10 million votes cast for All-Star. That’s an exact testament of fan engagement.
Ally was a founding sponsor of Unrivaled, which was also present during WNBA All-Star Weekend. What did you take away from Ally’s Unrivaled experience?
Unrivaled has been tremendous, and I think that they have succeeded so much because, again, they fill the void in the marketplace. They listen to the fans, but they built such a cool brand, and they led with social media.
Signing the best players was critical: Fans want to see the best players play. Descending on a market [in Miami] that’s got a lot of great culture and excitement, keeping the game small—it’s just a couple thousand people that go to the game—so it’s intimate, right on the court, proximity to the players.
A lot of our deals in women’s sports were on the jerseys, and that’s by design. When we first launched the 50/50 Pledge, coverage and visibility was a huge issue, but what was never an issue was the social power, social strength, and currency of the players.
So if you’re in proximity with the players, and they’re pushing out their content and they’re engaging with their fans, we’re moving our brand and our story through that as well.
Since you’ve made your 50/50 Pledge, other companies have begun building women’s sports marketing portfolios approaching 40% to 50% of their overall sports spending. How does Ally feel about that, and was it part of the plan?
We love to hear it.
When we announced the 50/50 Pledge a handful of years ago, we definitely were taking a bit of a risk. There’s a lot of things that we were trying to figure out at the time: Men’s sports naturally deliver scale, and when you buy one unit in a college football game, you’re going to reach this many eyeballs. How do we build it on the women’s sports side? Because you have to piece things together, so it’s not the easiest.
Early on, everything didn’t pencil out perfectly. But there was work to be done, and we knew that we could get there if we build it. If we talked about it, we worked at it, and we were intentional with it, we could get to a point that not only we going to be talking about the story and trying to motivate other brands, but that this work was going to deliver tremendous brand and business results for us, and it has.
We are now close again, a few points off of that 50/50. It’s now in our DNA. This is how we buy media moving forward.
