Deloitte Global and US CMO Suzanne Kounkel was among the millions of fans celebrating the night the New York Liberty won the WNBA Championship, but not for the same reason Liberty fans were.
On the night of Game 5, Spike Lee was seated directly behind a Deloitte logo on the court at Barclays Center and was at one point photographed on his hands and knees right above it as he watched the nail-biting finals matchup.
The front-and-center placement of Deloitte’s logo in the midst of the deciding game meant that Kounkel’s phone was blowing up throughout the night, she said.
Deloitte isn’t a consumer-facing company, but the average fan of popular women’s leagues like the WNBA and the NWSL may be familiar with the brand thanks to the many years it has been splashed on basketball courts and around soccer stadiums as part of a more than decade-long effort to make inroads into the sports space.
As Deloitte tracks brand amplification like the kind it saw during the WNBA Finals, it is expanding into women’s sports even further as the sponsorship landscape in the space continues to crowd.
Team pride
Deloitte’s history with sports sponsorships dates back about 15 years, according to Kounkel. Golf and tennis were among the first sports the consultancy tied up with, she said, followed by soccer and basketball.
Deloitte has been a sponsor of US Soccer since 2019, including as a foundational sponsor of the organization’s SheBelieves platform. In 2020, the company inked its first exclusively women’s sports deal as part of the WNBA’s Changemakers program, Kounkel said, and then signed on with the NWSL in 2021. Deloitte is also a Worldwide Olympic Partner through 2032.
While those relationships offer significant international reach, Kounkel said her team likes to keep its number of sports partnerships to a manageable size.
“It’s not like we’re only supporting two organizations,” she said. “It’s also not like we’re supporting 45, because we do believe that that requires a level of investment and commitment that we can’t spread too wide.”
To evaluate returns on those sports investments, Kounkel said she looks at traditional brand metrics like reach and awareness. Deloitte’s 2023 WNBA campaign, for example, generated an estimated 17 million views on ESPN during last year’s playoffs and finals, according to the company.
Get marketing news you'll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
Kounkel also places high value on client and employee sentiment around sponsorships, a KPI she said “is sometimes missed” by marketers. In other words, employees and clients sharing partnership news via their own channels is an indication that “we’re onto something,” she said—as is rising client interest in access to Deloitte’s hospitality suites at games.
“We think about [our sponsorships] through the lens of: ‘Does it make our people proud and our clients loyal?’” Kounkel said.
Warrior mindset
As a consultancy, Deloitte advises clients on sports sponsorships of their own, Kounkel said, and though she’s not personally consulting for clients, she often fields questions from other CMOs about how to get into sports.
What does she tell them? “Think about what would be distinctive about what you would do with that partnership that others couldn’t do,” Kounkel said.
That mindset helped inform the Athena Pledge, one of Deloitte’s latest initiatives in women’s sports. The pledge was co-created by Deloitte, AT&T, Capital One, and Cisco in an effort to encourage other brands to increase their spending on women’s sports, the latest corporate pledge focused on furthering investment in the space.
There’s no specific financial commitment associated with the Athena Pledge, Kounkel said. Instead, the companies involved—all of which are already invested in women’s sports—pledged to help increase the number of other marketers doing the same, all in unique ways, she said. So far, Deloitte has published research exploring some of the opportunities and barriers around brands sponsoring women’s sports.
Ideally, the founding brands are aiming to get a total of 20 companies to take the pledge by 2028, Kounkel said, though she said she expects the number will be higher than that.
“We want to solidify and capitalize on the moment,” she said. “The first core piece of it is all around helping people understand what the opportunity is, and then helping them make decisions that would encourage them to get in the boat [and] stay in the boat. It’s about expanding the pie.”