When the 29th season of the WNBA tips off on Friday, it’ll come with a warning.
The league’s latest brand campaign, slated to run throughout the 2025 season, is a riff on the classic “viewer discretion advised” message used on content like movies and shows rated for mature audiences.
The first spot in the campaign warns that “the following footage contains dominance” before showing Las Vegas Aces center and reigning MVP A’ja Wilson scoring and blocking opponents’ shots. Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese, Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier, and New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu are also featured in the first iteration of the campaign.
The campaign, called “Viewer Discretion,” is meant to highlight the deep bench of talent playing in the league this season and help establish the W’s brand positioning in the crowded sports market while driving viewership coming off of a record-breaking 2024 season, WNBA CMO Phil Cook said.
“Each one of those athletes brings a very distinctive and very unique and very amazing set of skills to the WNBA, and we’re taking this opportunity to highlight those skills…with a bit of cheekiness to it,” he told Marketing Brew.
You’ve been warned
The league started rolling out the campaign during the draft in April, with a short teaser of upcoming player vignettes. The spots build on last season’s “Welcome to the W” campaign, which welcomed the 2024 rookie class and all of the new viewers that came with them.
Cook said the response to the 2024 campaign was positive, so the league wanted to continue building on what made it effective.
“I think the athletes loved it—we put them front and center in the storytelling—and our fans loved it because it started to identify and position the WNBA as the best of the best,” Cook said. “These athletes deserve the recognition that is coming with all this attention, and so fans are very appreciative of the fact that we are starting to build a brand around the WNBA and carve out an identity within the sports ecosystem.”
Wieden+Kennedy Portland, which was responsible for “Welcome to the W,” also worked on “Viewer Discretion.” The first wave of the campaign is set to run for the next couple of months leading up to the All-Star break in July, with another round featuring different athletes planned for later in the summer, according to Cook. The first spots are running on social and digital platforms, including during WNBA games and the NBA playoffs, he said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clIUyf29cnk
Choosing the initial five players to highlight was no easy task, Cook said, but his team tried to pick athletes who were driving the most engagement with the league’s content. During a recent meeting, one of the W’s broadcast partners presented a list of its top 10 most-engaging athletes so far this season, and four out of the top five are included in the campaign by “pure serendipity,” Cook said.
Push the pace
Cook said he’s primarily focused on making sure that “Viewer Discretion” continues to grow the WNBA brand by “creating premium content that focuses on our athletes.” Another top KPI for the campaign is viewership, a more straightforward metric. The ads are designed to drive audiences particularly to “key matchups” like Aces, Fever, Sky, Lynx, and Liberty games, Cook added.
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Last year’s viewership, which broke record after record through the finals, might be hard to beat, but Cook said he feels “fully confident we’re going to continue to grow our audience across every metric,” including viewership and in-person attendance. A recent game between the Fever and the Brazilian national team at Clark’s alma mater, the University of Iowa, averaged 1.3 million viewers, 13% higher than last year’s regular-season average on ESPN, and less than only two NBA preseason games since 2010, both of which featured LeBron James, according to basketball analyst and Hall of Famer Rebecca Lobo.
“It sends a great signal to all of us—our partners, our sponsors, the athletes, and the league itself —that the momentum is not slowing down,” Cook said.
Between last year’s added audiences and the potential for even more new WNBA followers to come from the league’s expansion into San Francisco with the Golden State Valkyries (who are running their own brand campaign), Cook said the league is on track for “significant growth” again this season. Plus, the W is riding a wave of interest from general sports fans across the board, which “Viewer Discretion” aims to capitalize on.
“They love great performances, they love rivalries, they love competitive games and games that are relevant,” he said. “The general sports fan started to see that, and I think we’re very confident that once this fan engages with the W once or twice, they’re gonna get hooked.”
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