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Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment, a firm dedicated to helping brands build women’s sports marketing strategies, is partnering with iHeartMedia to create an audio platform exclusively for women’s sports content.
The platform, called the Women’s Sports Audio Network, will include ad-supported content like podcasts and daily sports coverage that will be available on podcast platforms and on iHeart’s broadcast and digital channels, according to a joint press release from iHeart and Deep Blue.
It’s set to go live in a couple of months, Deep Blue founder and CEO Laura Correnti said when she announced the partnership at Deep Blue and Axios’s Business of Women’s Sports Summit on Tuesday in New York.
“When you’re driving your kids to school, when you’re going to the mall on the weekends, you’re going to just start hearing, ‘Today in women’s sports,” iHeart CMO Gayle Troberman said at the summit. “Every day, across every sport, we’re going to scale access.”
The new platform comes at a time when brand and audience interest in women’s sports is climbing, and while a majority of sports fans in general are listening to audio content like sports podcasts. There remains, however, a lack of women hosts and women’s sports-focused content among the top sports podcasts.
The Women’s Sports Audio Network aims to help close that gap. It will include content from WNBA legend Sheryl Swoopes and ESPN sports reporter Sarah Spain, the latter of whom will host a daily show spanning news, stats, and interviews. Spain’s show will be among the first to roll out with the network, Troberman said.
Across shows, the programming will focus on a wide range of sports year-round and highlight stories of athletes both on and off the field. Deep Blue and iHeart are looking to “amplify well-known and new influential female sports athletes” while also creating new inventory for advertisers looking to engage with women’s sports content, the companies said.
Brand, agency, and media execs have often commented that a lack of available inventory around women’s sports has been a barrier to increasing investment; “the need for more discovery, visibility and scale [is] a common pain point for the advertising and media marketplace in this space,” Correnti said in the press release.
The network is in the process of “looking for founding partners who really want to get in, support, commit, activate, bring your resources, your access, your athletes, your platforms…and build something groundbreaking together,” Troberman said onstage. “Bring it on, brands.”