Morgan Stanley Is Profitable With Serena Williams and Disney

When a model like Morgan Stanley needs to assist inform some of the compelling tales in sports activities, it doesn’t want a person within the enviornment: It wants the best of all time.

Serena Williams retired from tennis in 2022 with 23 ladies’s Grand Slam singles titles, 18 Grand Slam doubles titles, 4 Olympic gold medals and almost $95 million in winnings. This summer season, Morgan Stanley signed on because the presenting sponsor of an eight-part ESPN+ documentary during which she displays on her athletic profession.

“Final 12 months, we introduced on our upfront stage that we started manufacturing on a groundbreaking challenge with world-class athlete Serena Williams,” mentioned Mike Denby, svp of gross sales for Disney Promoting. “Disney continues to amplify ladies’s sports activities by means of our programming, offering distinctive alternatives for advertisers to deliberately decide to the expansion of girls’s voices in sports activities, and we’re proud to collaborate with manufacturers who’re simply as invested on this mission.” 

The docuseries, Within the Enviornment: Serena Williams, debuted on the Tribeca Competition in June—which was additionally co-sponsored by Morgan Stanley—and serves as an extension of director Gotham Chopra’s collection that kicked off with the Emmy-winning Man within the Enviornment: Tom Brady in 2021 and 2022. Launched on the competition with a screening and dialog between Williams and author/comic Amber Ruffin, Within the Enviornment drops its first episode on ESPN+ right now, with new installments debuting every Wednesday by means of Aug. 28.

“Serena is the epitome of somebody with grit and willpower and imaginative and prescient to see what nobody else can see,” mentioned Alice Milligan, CMO of Morgan Stanley. “Partnering together with her made whole sense: She herself has [the] Serena Ventures [venture capital fund] and does lots round serving to the following technology transfer ahead—whether or not it’s within the sport or outdoors of the game—and Morgan Stanley does plenty of that as a part of our core values.”

Funding at fault

Morgan Stanley’s involvement comes at a time when model curiosity in ladies’s sports activities hasn’t fairly matched fan depth. The corporate pointed to latest analysis from Deloitte forecasting ladies’s sports activities income to exceed $1 billion in the USA for the primary time this 12 months—regardless of receiving simply 1% to 2% of whole sports activities funding.

In the meantime, a 2023 examine by Wasserman’s women-focused apply, The Collective, discovered only a 15% share of sports activities media protection devoted to ladies’s sports activities—regardless of ladies’s occasions accounting for 50% of all sports activities competitions within the U.S. 

Take collegiate sports activities out of the equation, {and professional} ladies’s sports activities get simply 8% of sports activities media’s consideration.

Few are extra conscious of the disparity than Disney Promoting, which simply noticed NCAA ladies’s March Insanity protection on ESPN platforms greater than double its viewing viewers from 2022 and finish with almost 19 million viewers for its championship sport. Its WNBA Draft protection drew an viewers 4 instances bigger than the earlier document, whereas regular-season matchups noticed their highest viewership in additional than twenty years.

With NCAA ladies’s softball additionally seeing document viewership on ESPN platforms in 2024, Disney Promoting is in a novel place to assist manufacturers trying to put money into ladies’s sports activities.

“Over the previous few years, we’ve put plenty of effort and time into taking a look at ladies’s sports activities, and it’s been nice to see over the past 12 months the joy and a focus round it,” Milligan mentioned, additionally stating the disparity between ladies’s sports activities viewers development and model funding. “We needed to vary that narrative a bit, and the best way you do it’s by placing your cash the place your mouth is.”

Holding courtroom

Working with Disney Promoting, Morgan Stanley has its model included amongst in-show components on ESPN+ streaming and linear properties, voiceover promotions inside ESPN studio exhibits and mentions by means of varied ESPN cross-channel promotions. The corporate sees it not solely as a possibility to take a position additional in ladies’s sports activities, however to construct on its international partnership with the Girls’s Tennis Affiliation (WTA) launched originally of 2023. 

With assist from model ambassador and 2021 US Open finalist Leylah Fernandez, Morgan Stanley has hosted Come Play tennis clinics in Charleston, New York, San Diego, London and Australia to assist 3,000 youngsters in underrepresented communities entry the game. Morgan Stanley additionally teamed with the WTA on the What Strikes You program, which helps tennis gamers handle their funds throughout and after their careers.

The corporate builds on that final level with its Within the Enviornment sponsorship, consulting its fairness analysis workforce about ties between the style business and sports activities, and what athletes can be taught from Williams’ expertise together with her S by Serena clothes line and WYN Magnificence merchandise. It had the fairness workforce delve into potential investments for athletes to contemplate whereas asking its banking workforce to assist retiring athletes tackle enterprise transitions, together with buying capital.

Morgan Stanley additionally provides athletes entry to its Inclusive Ventures Lab, which brings in firm founders from varied industries to function mentors and stroll them by means of steps, together with preliminary investments and public inventory choices. Whereas Morgan Stanley’s sponsorship of Within the Enviornment permits it to assist inform Williams’ story, the partnership with Disney Promoting pressured it to ask severe questions on simply the way it was serving to everybody concerned.

“How do you carry a set of belongings collectively that present worth to your shoppers and potential shoppers that they couldn’t get on their very own?” Milligan mentioned. “Then how will we take this to the following degree and convey worth to each the particular person we’re collaborating with—like Serena, like ESPN—in addition to the shopper and prospect that we could also be bringing into the expertise?”