Women’s March Madness boomed in 2024. Can 2025 maintain the momentum?

Four years ago, the women’s NCAA tournament wasn’t even technically called March Madness. Fast-forward to last year, and the women’s championship game had more viewers than the men’s for the first time, as players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso, and Cameron Brink became household names over the course of the tournament.

Then, as college seniors tend to do, they graduated.

Even though this year’s rosters look a little different than last year’s, brand interest—and ad prices—seem as high as ever. Players like Paige Bueckers, Flau’jae Johnson, and JuJu Watkins remain in high demand in ad campaigns, and marketers are also betting on other athletes representing the next generation of talent.

“It’s about freaking time,” Jeff Kearney, global head of sports marketing at Gatorade, told Marketing Brew. “What is coming through, especially with women’s basketball, is the personalities, the human elements…People don’t talk about Celtics/Lakers, they talk about Bird/Magic, so adding those names and those personalities is just really incredible and invaluable to making people care and pay attention.”

You know my name

After last year’s record ratings, Disney sold out of ad inventory for this year’s women’s championship game on ESPN by the end of 2024, and as of mid-March, prices for remaining inventory were about double what they were last year, according to Elliot Rifkin, group lead, services at TV ad platform Tatari.

Spreading media buys across both properties has become common practice, and Ryan Briganti, EVP and head of sports sales for Paramount Advertising, said interest in the women’s tournament has helped bolster sales for the men’s game.

“It’s definitely something that is helping the overall marketplace, and there’s no doubt about brands leaning in on both,” Briganti told reporters during a press conference earlier this month.

While companies like Gatorade, Mondelez, and Intuit are incorporating both men and women athletes in March Madness campaigns this year, other brands are leaning fully on women players, some of whom have multi-year NIL deals, for their campaigns.

Johnson, who plays for the LSU Tigers, has been a mainstay during the tournament’s ad breaks, appearing in commercials for brands like Powerade, Experian, and Oreo. Bueckers, who plays for the UConn Huskies, is in ads for Gatorade, Intuit, and Nike. Watkins, who’s out of the tournament for USC with an ACL tear, stars alongside Bueckers in the Gatorade spot and is in campaigns for Mondelez and State Farm.

Watkins is “obviously someone that the consumers connect with,” Tanya Berman, SVP of biscuits at Mondelez, said, while Johnson has “stardom written all over her for the future,” according to Kevin Everhart, chief growth officer for consumer services at Experian. Bueckers, meanwhile, is “one of the most influential college athletes in basketball” who has “been at the forefront of the NIL movement since Day 1,” Danielle Roark, marketing director for Intuit, said.

Berman acknowledged that even a few years ago, it could be hard for brands to find women athletes with such reach, but that doesn’t seem to be a barrier these days.

“They have such a presence, and they all have unique personalities, and they’re really visible,” she said.

Busted

It’s not only the biggest stars in women’s hoops who are attracting brand deals. Gatorade’s Kearney rattled others off with ease: “LSU is stacked, South Carolina, Lauren Betts and Kiki Rice at UCLA, Madison Booker at Texas, Hannah Hidalgo at Notre Dame,” he said. “You can go down the list, and we’d love to sign everybody.”

Gatorade can’t, of course, but other brands are inking deals. Intuit TurboTax, for instance, has partnered with Rice for two years, and in that time, she’s increased her follower base on Instagram by 25,000, Roark said. “With UCLA earning a No. 1 seed this year, we expect her brand to reach even bigger heights,” she said. Rice and Betts are also front and center in an AT&T March Madness ad.

March Madness has long been known for its Cinderella stories—or bracket breakers, depending on who you ask—and because any team might have a stand-out moment, brands have lots of options. C4 recently signed 128 college basketball players, including Booker and Betts, as part of a program called the C4 Bracket Breakers, the energy-drink brand’s first major push into the tournament, according to Craig Lyon, SVP of brand marketing at C4 parent company Nutrabolt. The move is meant to differentiate C4 and create an association with top athletes while also building relationships with potential future stars, he said.

“You see these kids come out of nowhere and suddenly become household names, whether it be for a few months or a few years, or it jump-starts your career,” Lyon said. “We’re looking at this as an opportunity to get some introduction and some real interaction with athletes who could very much be the next generation of mainstays.”

For its first March Madness campaign, mental health platform BetterHelp sought out women athletes who have been “vocal and vulnerable about their mental health,” Head of Marketing Sara Brooks said. The brand tapped Rice, Zoe Brooks of NC State, and Chance Grey of Ohio State for a campaign called “Stop the Madness” meant to raise awareness of mental health struggles among athletes.

That qualifier narrowed down the pool of potential athlete partners, and “I don’t think that we could have made the determination purely based on schools” anyway, Brooks said, since it’s near impossible to predict who will go the distance.

Gym Weed, an “athletic focus drink,” inked its first official NIL partnership with Harvard’s Harmoni Turner right before the university received its No. 10 seed and Turner was named The Associated Press women’s college basketball player of the week, President Shane McCassy said.

Harvard fell to Michigan State in the first round, but McCassy said he’s still excited to be partnered with Turner, who has 98,000 followers on TikTok and 63,000 on Instagram. Turner’s deal with Gym Weed includes three TikToks, three Instagram Stories, a collab post, and a giveaway over the course of three months as Turner turns her sights to the WNBA draft, according to Michaela Simon, VP of content and operations at The Network Advisory, which reps Turner for brand deals.

“She already has an audience that just loves her for her, so that’s the dream for a brand, to have a genuine audience following you already,” Simon said. “It’s only up from here.”

Correction 03/28/2025: This article has been updated to show the name of C4’s campaign as Bracket Breakers.