‘Mission and capital can coexist’: Golden State Valkyries’ Jess Smith on pitch to sponsors

The work is paying off so far: the Valkyries are the first women’s sports team to notch $100 million in annual revenue, aided by over 40 partners including long-term sponsors Carmax, Rakuten, Kaiser Permanente, among others. Sponsorship income alone increased 30% year on year, according to Smith. In this conversation, she explains how Golden State positions the Valkyries to potential sponsors, and how they’re meeting marketer demands for more data.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you pitching the Valkyries to sponsors?

Brand loyalty is very hard to find. 

During the pandemic, there was a consumer unlock. Women’s sports was small, there weren’t as many games, the media value was lower: that was how it was pitched. But from 2020 that shifted because consumers were watching, ratings were going up, [people] were buying merchandise, and [brands] understood they could be part of the solution, part of women’s sports gaining more traction. 

When we’re in the room talking to brands, we say this is a place where mission and capital can coexist. You’ve got signage, you’ve got radio, you’ve got digital ads, you’ve got activation opportunities on site for fans — everything you can, candidly, buy anywhere and put your own twist on. That’s valuable. But [here], you can do that and have the community piece, the mission of growing women’s sports, and you’ll gain incredible results because you’re showing up for things fans care deeply about. They not only appreciate it, but they are going to reward you for that as well.

The Valkyries are in their second season; is sponsorship revenue growing?

We can’t share a dollar perspective, but we lead the WNBA and lead women’s sports at large. Year-on-year we grew partnership revenue 30% between regular seasons. We just announced a partnership with Athleta, which is part of Gap, this month.

Exclusivity can be a sticking point for sponsors. How are you managing that need?

Exclusivity is super important; it’s important for teams too. You’re serving the partnership best if it’s really clear what real estate you own. The fun part is, honestly, categories are endless. Finance can be six categories. Non-traditional categories are flooding into women’s sports. Sephora is a partner of ours, for example. We’re seeing interest from “non-traditional” categories starting to rise. There’s always a balance; if you’re going to own a category, that does come with a cost.

[For example], Iren is a new partner of ours — they are an AI storage company out of Australia. We’re doing a lot of work with them around international as well as local community giving through STEM programming.

What measurement asks are clients making?

[They’re asking for] event attendance, they’re looking at our social fellowships and views… They’re looking at that as an asset from a storytelling capability and reach capability. And traditional media value, as well; we are on radio, we are on on local TV, but we also have national TV coverage.

A lot of the bigger brands are doing their own measurement studies. They want consistency. There’s different technologies that are going to give you different outputs for dollar amounts of media value than others, and so there are a lot of independent studies done from the partners themselves and how they just want to compare their portfolio in sports and out of sports.

If the measurables and KPIs you’ve agreed on aren’t quite hitting the mark, then you should be going back in real time and checking, how can we make sure this feels good for everybody moving forward? That’s what a partnership is.

How do the Valkyries meet those asks?

One of the benefits of being at Golden State is we have a shared resource [with NBA franchise Warriors] of that partnership insights team. We have a team of eight people that are serving the overall business. It’s important to invest in. You can’t simply sell something and then not be able to look at it yourself. Your partner trusts you to deliver something. 

Community elements become or have become more increasingly sought after, and part of that’s our strategy. We want to be able to renovate courts, give access to youth. But how do we measure that? We’ve actually partnered with an agency, The Team (formerly Wasserman) specifically to help us through that. We have to be proactive there.

Are those requests harder to meet given the Valkyries have only been playing for two years?

The fun part about the WNBA is that this league has tremendous growth year-over-year. Part of these conversations are about [the fact that] candidly, you’re getting into a product that is going to go up the second, third, fourth, fifth year. Our long-term partners signed up with us. Next year we have six additional games, so like they’ve already benefited just simply by a 15% increase to the season because more games means more opportunities, [and] more signage is going to be seen in more places. The ratings continue to increase with the new broadcast agreement, so those are naturally going to go up.

We are going into these conversations with data, but when you’re on the other side of the table and thinking about where to invest, in three years’ time, it’s going to be better than it is today. That’s unique.