“Listening to the players has been a priority for us from the start,” Stephanie Marciano, head of sports and entertainment marketing at Ally, said in a conversation at WNBA All-Star Weekend. “A lot of us at Ally, from an executive standpoint, are also former athletes ourselves. I played in college, and I played basketball abroad in Germany—so we went through it, and we understand the disparity in resources as we come up, so we really know what levers we had to push and pull as well.”
Jason Notte/ADWEEKMeanwhile, in addition to teaming with media and culture firm Togethxr to host an All-Star panel with Unrivaled-affiliated NBA players, including Rickea Jackson and Kate Martin, Aflac touted its partnership with the WNBA and handed out supplemental checks to WNBA Skills Competition and 3-Point Contest winners Natasha Cloud and Sabrina Ionescu.
This year, Aflac kicked in $115,000 to boost the prize pool for both the 3-point contest and the All-Star skills challenge. Based on the league’s 2020 collective bargaining agreement, which players just opted out of in October, the WNBA itself provides the winners of both competitions with just $2,575 each.
More financial security has been one of Collier’s goals in Unrivaled, which had only 36 players in its first season, but attracted investors including John Skipper, former Turner president David Levy, Moira Forbes, Alex Morgan, Michelle Wie West, Dawn Staley, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Megan Rapinoe. In the first year on TNT Sports, Unrivaled drew 221,000 fans per broadcast and paid its players an average of $220,000 per game—or just under the WNBA’s $250,000 maximum salary.
During Collier’s All-Star MVP trophy presentation, WNBA broadcaster and ESPN’s Holly Rowe reminded everyone that Collier and her fellow players and brand partners had been making their case for value independently of the WNBA throughout All-Star events. Rowe not only asked Collier during the trophy presentation what was important for her and the players at this moment, but brought up the WNBPA vice president’s fellow executive committee members, Nneka Ogwumike (president) and Breanna Stewart (vice president), to make their demands known.
The latter, Stewart, not only hinted that the time between Saturday night’s All-Star game and Tuesday’s return to regular-season play should likely be longer, but earlier that day, saw Unrivaled extend seven collegiate players’ name, image, and likeness rights deals with help from its partner Samsung. The announcement came at an Unrivaled activation that followed the league’s successful first season and was a roughly 12-minute walk from the WNBA All-Star host site at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.