About this Study
One Shared Goal
This case study is drawn from The Women’s Sports Playbook, a March 2026 report published by WPP Media in partnership with three leading measurement firms. Understanding each partner’s role is key to understanding what was measured and why it matters.
WPP Media
WPP’s global media collective. Study author and client lead — responsible for commissioning the research, working with brand advertisers, and translating findings into media planning strategy.
Adverteyes
AI-powered creative intelligence platform. Audience attention & reactions measurement using facial coding to score 200+ creative executions with an overall performance score.
EDO
TV outcomes measurement firm. Search engagement measurement — tracked ad-driven consumer search behavior in the minutes after each TV spot aired to quantify downstream intent.
VideoAmp
Advanced TV measurement platform. Audience intelligence — profiled the demographic and psychographic composition of linear women’s sports viewership to characterize its value for brand advertisers.
The Challenge
A Growing Market Without a Measurement Story
For years, the case for advertising in women’s sports was argued primarily on equity grounds. While that rationale remains important, it left a critical gap: the empirical data to justify media investment at scale had never been systematically assembled.
Women’s sports viewership had been surging, impressions grew 79% year-over-year, yet most linear TV advertising budgets remained concentrated in non-sports broadcast and cable environments. The ecosystem was scaling, but brand investment lagged behind audience growth.
"Much of this investment has been guided by assumption and enthusiasm rather than empirical data. The wider measurement story has yet to be told."
The core challenge wasn’t awareness. It was measurement. WPP Media needed to answer three questions with hard data:
- Do ads actually perform better in women’s sports environments, or does it only feel that way?
- What specific creative attributes drive that performance?
- How can brands new to women’s sports replicate those results?
To answer them, WPP Media assembled a multi-partner measurement framework, pairing EDO’s search engagement data with Adverteyes’ attention diagnostics, to create a holistic, scene-level view of creative performance across five brand verticals and over 88,500 qualifying ad airings.
Key Takeaways
What the Data Showed
426%
Peak Engagement Lift
WPP’s global media collective. Study author and client lead — responsible for commissioning the research, working with brand advertisers, and translating findings into media planning strategy.
1.3 to 2.3x
Stronger Than Avg Linear TV
AI-powered creative intelligence platform. Attention & resonance measurement using facial coding (Human Measurement) to score 200+ creative executions on attention and emotional reactions.
86/100
Peak AP Score
TV outcomes measurement firm. Search engagement measurement — tracked ad-driven consumer search behavior in the minutes after each TV spot aired to quantify downstream intent.
79%
YoY Impression Growth
Advanced TV measurement platform. Audience intelligence — profiled the demographic and psychographic composition of linear women’s sports viewership to characterize its value for brand advertisers.
The Solution
A Two-Signal Measurement Framework
WPP Media commissioned a comprehensive study combining two complementary measurement disciplines: behavioral engagement signals from EDO and human attention diagnostics from Adverteyes. Together, they created a before-and-after view of creative performance, from the moment a viewer watches an ad to the seconds after it ends.
Audience Response
Adverteyes applied AI-powered facial coding to analyze creative frame-by-frame. Their 1-100 index scores attention, emotional engagement and likelihood of driving sales uplift.
Each brand’s creative was benchmarked against its own established AP norm per platform (linear, CTV, social), drawn from Adverteyes’ database of more than 200,000 ads.
Media Planning
EDO captured ad-driven search behavior in the minutes after each spot aired, producing an Engagement Rate (ER) per person, per second, benchmarked against non-sports broadcast/cable.
The Ad Multiplier translates this into a practical planning metric: how many standard non-sports ads would be required to generate the same total consumer engagement as one ad in women’s sports.
WPP Media commissioned a comprehensive study combining two complementary measurement disciplines: behavioral engagement signals from EDO and human attention diagnostics from Adverteyes. Together, they created a before-and-after view of creative performance, from the moment a viewer watches an ad to the seconds after it ends.
"Women's sports offer something distinct in a fragmented media landscape, a setting where fans are emotionally invested and genuinely receptive to brands that show up with authenticity."
The study found that each digital environment also has its own characteristic behaviors. Feed attains the highest levels of engagement, and stream excels the most in visibility and attentiveness, while short form sees an intermediate level of attentiveness , visibility and engagement.
Results
Intelligence Across Five Verticals
Banking
+89%
+238%
70
67
Technology
+192%
+284%
86
71
Automotive
+75%
1.8×
15s > 30s
-
CPG
+175%
+352%
67–71
3×
Sportswear
+426%
+358%
4.6×
18–34yrs
"Even short-form, lightweight, contextually embedded integrations can deliver outsized attention when the context is right and the audience is leaning in."
The Winning Formula
Five Adverteyes-Validated Creative Principles
Across all five brands and more than 200 creative executions, Adverteyes’ attention diagnostics helped WPP Media identify five repeatable principles that consistently drove superior performance in women’s sports environments.
01
Authentic, Athlete-Driven Storytelling
Athlete-led creative delivered the strongest engagement lifts observed across the study. Close-up, expressive athlete footage was the primary driver of sustained gaze in attention heatmaps. Sportswear brand: 426% lift. Ally in Pro Women’s Basketball: 127% more effective than the banking category average.
02
Context Amplifies Performance
Because brands ran consistent creative across environments, the measured lift reflects the media context — not creative customization. Women’s sports placement alone delivered 75%–192% stronger engagement across brands versus their non-sports linear benchmarks.
03
Purpose-Led, Emotionally Anchored Creative
Narratives rooted in empowerment and shared achievement sustained higher attention. Multiple executions scored 67–71 AP, well above platform norms. Overly complex, call-and-response creative reduced attention by forcing viewers to process competing narratives simultaneously.
04
Platform-Native Creative Matters
15s CTV executions outperformed 30s in high-energy environments. Social-first vertical formats achieved 82–86 AP scores. Simplified storytelling delivered up to 3× higher attention than dense, fast-cut formats on YouTube.
05
Scene-Level Optimization Improves Impact
Adverteyes’ scene-level diagnostics revealed that the automotive brand’s attention only rose after the brand logo appeared mid-ad, providing a clear directive to surface brand cues earlier. Micro-level creative decisions measurably influence performance within high-attention environments.
Outlook
How WPP Media Plans to Scale This Framework
The Women’s Sports Playbook frames attention and engagement measurement not as a one-time study, but as the foundation of an always-on optimization framework. For WPP Media clients, Adverteyes is positioned as a continuous creative intelligence layer, moving the conversation from “did the campaign deliver?” to “which specific executions, in which specific environments, drove the strongest outcomes, and why?”
"The conversation has fundamentally shifted from whether to invest, to how women's sports should be strategically deployed, as a reallocation opportunity or as a quality and cultural multiplier within an existing sports portfolio."
Always-On Creative Optimization
WPP Media plans to use attention diagnostics to inform creative rotation in real time, identifying which executions to scale, which to retire, and what scene-level adjustments drive measurable improvement before budgets are committed.
Incremental Validation
By pairing Adverteyes’ AP scores with EDO engagement data and VideoAmp reach metrics, WPP Media can validate that women’s sports placements are delivering net-new audience value, not simply redistributing existing reach.
A Replicable Playbook
WPP Media plans to use attention diagnostics to inform creative rotation in real time, identifying which executions to scale, which to retire, and what scene-level adjustments drive measurable improvement before budgets are committed.