Sports innovation lab provides road map for growing women's sports

Sports Innovation Lab Co-founder, CEO and four-time Olympic medalist Angela Ruggiero joined Yahoo Finance to discuss how companies can better monentize women's professional sports.

Video transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. We talk a lot about the differences between what male athletes earn in professional sports and what female athletes earn. But now there is a way-- and you can download the report today-- to help figure out the way businesses can capitalize on women's sports. And helping us talk about the Fan Project is Angela Ruggiero, CEO and co-founder of Sports Innovation Labs. Also, by the way, the hockey player and four-time Olympian and, I believe, gold medalist, aren't you?

ANGELA RUGGIERO: I do have a gold medal. It was fun. Fun times being a hockey player.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Yeah, you don't flaunt it. You should wear it like a necklace, right? Tell me about the Fan Project. Because since we've been doing the live eight-hour at Yahoo, this has been a recurring theme about how do we capitalize on women [INAUDIBLE]. And businesses could make a lot of money here. Tell us about it.

ANGELA RUGGIERO: Yeah, so the Fan Project is an initiative of Sports Innovation Labs, my company. We're a market research company that focuses on the fan, really understanding how technology is influencing fan behavior. So with that backdrop, we set out and worked with a variety of partners, including the WWE, WNBA, UFC, LPGA, to write a research report, developed using consent-based data. So fans actually gave us their social media data.

And by looking literally at what they've done on a longitudinal way, going as far back as 2007, we believe with this report, with this research, we've been able to unlock the business potential of women's sports. So looking at fans, looking at their behaviors, we believe there's a massive market for women's sports. But you have to understand those fans are those consumers and actually build sports in a different way.

So as I say, don't lift and shift the men's model. Really focus on the future fan, the fluid fan, which we've found exists in the women's sports market in a higher propensity, and build the business around women's sports with more storytelling as an example. New ways to distribute content isn't just linear. It's OTT. It's social. Create this community-based monetization model.

So, high level, there's a massive opportunity in women's sports. The data through the Fan Project has unlocked that. And what this report's going to do is lay out the blueprint to go to market, essentially saying, how do you monetize women's sports? Here it is in this report.

JULIA LA ROCHE: Let's explore that, that blueprint. You're talking about this kind of fluid future fan-- this fluid fan base that you have, not lifting and shifting the men's model. You've obviously untapped something that's super interesting here. Let's explore that blueprint in a tangible way.

ANGELA RUGGIERO: Sure. So, again, any time you're going to build a business, you have to understand the consumer first. So that's what this report is all about. Let's actually measure these fans. The fluid fan is something we've been studying for about five years here at Sports Innovation Lab. It's this future consumer, the future growth engine to the sports industry. You have these traditional diehard fans that are going to buy tickets and merch no matter what. We're in the age of the fluid fan.

And so if you can understand, again, this digitally savvy consumer, one that is fickle, you have to do more to keep their attention, but they're more likely to invest in the athlete, as opposed to the team or the league, they like to follow their values, as an example. And women's sports have actually understood this and knows that, again, that lean-in that produce content in a different way, as I mentioned before, storytelling, right?

The Olympics do this better than anyone else. WWE does this flawlessly. You're creating a narrative 24/7, 365. It's not just about the game day stats. So what you're producing and how you're doing that is more around the athlete is the entertainer. And again, you're going to follow these athletes throughout not just their game day, but outside of game day. You're going to then distribute that content in multiple platforms, not just linear broadcasting fees, which, typically, men sports make the lion's share of their revenue on.

You're going to go find-- do deals with Twitch. You're going to go figure out how to create short form content for social media. You're going to create a portfolio to distribute this really interesting content that, again, isn't just about game day. And then you're going to look-- take a step back.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Angela.

ANGELA RUGGIERO: So you're a brand. And you're going to measure your return on investment in a different way, not just subs and viewership and numbers, but more about quality of engagement. And that's what we're seeing. We actually measured quality of engagement. And for brands with-- that sponsored women's sports, they had an immediate increase in brand engagement--

ADAM SHAPIRO: Angela.

ANGELA RUGGIERO: --and higher levels of brand affinity.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Help us understand simply-- and this is just a hypothetical. Let's say I'm Coca-Cola. And they're a fan of women's sports. The storytelling is queen, as you point out. So how do they then use the athlete or the team that they then want to monetize to reach the fans on the various platforms you just described?

ANGELA RUGGIERO: Well, if you take about it this idea of athlete-driven media that we've been talking about for years, athletes can now go direct to consumer. A brand like Coca-Cola, which, by the way, I used to be a Coca-Cola athlete, they might create more content for me. And so when I'm playing in the Olympics and I'm talking to my fans, there's more branded content that tells more about me, the person, the influence or the entertainer. And so you understand the athlete is a massive channel, in addition to your team or your league. You're going to create more long form content, short form content.

And understand that when you make these investments, when you make-- when you change how you activate, so to speak, you're going to have a massive increase. We saw, actually, our data set, there was a 2,700% increase in fans exhibiting one or more of the core behaviors that we measured correlated to Visa, following their announcement of equal sponsorship of the men's and women's national soccer teams in 2019. Over 1,000% increase in the same kind of affinity with Budweiser, following their announcement of the NWSL in, you know, last year.

So we can measure now not only just announcing it and supporting women's sports is good for the brand, because, again, we have these extreme loyalists now in the women sports market--

ADAM SHAPIRO: Hey, Angela.

ANGELA RUGGIERO: Yep.

ADAM SHAPIRO: We have only about 40 seconds left. What do you think about the Supreme Court ruling today? Is that going to open up the ability of female college athletes to then be perhaps championed by the kinds of companies you and I have been talking about and take them to the next level?

ANGELA RUGGIERO: Yeah, name, image, likeness, the athlete is the channel now. It's the direct to consumer. It's what's in the Fan Project report. And this ruling, I think, opens up, again, additional revenue streams and opportunities. And those companies that understand that are going to lean into the athlete at the NCAA level and start investing in them, supporting them. So I'm extremely excited for athletes to have more opportunities to make money and leverage their brand. But it's a shift in society. It's a shift in technology. And again, the athlete is the distributor.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Real quick, let's just let everyone know that the Fan Project report is downloadable at thefanproject.co. So we really appreciate your being here. Angela Ruggiero, Sports Innovation Labs co-founder, CEO, four-time Olympic medalist, and, we should point out, a gold medalist. All the best to you. We'll be right back.