RAJ Sports Rewrites the Women's Sports Marketing Playbook

By Amara Osei

For 85% of Karina LeBlanc's career, the marketing strategy around women's sports was essentially, "Here's what the men did. Let's do it for women." LeBlanc, EVP of strategic growth and development at RAJ Sports, said this during a panel at Treasure AI's Agentic World conference in Miami — and her company is now testing whether that copy-paste era can actually end.

RAJ Sports, a sports operator and investor, owns the WNBA's Portland Thorns and the NWSL's Portland Fire. It partnered with Treasure AI, an agentic CDP (customer data platform, a tool that unifies audience data for targeting), to understand who its customers are and what they want from women's sports.

The starting point is access — or the lack of it. LeBlanc, a former professional soccer player, said women's sports fans had to "go chasing" to find a platform or channel that streamed games. That inaccessibility frustrated fans and players alike. Women's sports are now easier to access and reach a wider audience, she said, but the work isn't done.

What does the data show?

RAJ Sports pools its own first-party data — ticket and merchandise sales, social media and email engagement — with leaguewide data from the WNBA and NWSL, all funneled into a data warehouse. Owning data is not the same as using it. The biggest challenge, said chief commercial officer John Torris, has been "making sense of the whole pool of fans" across both teams. Treasure AI helped develop audience segments and determine who to target with what content, he told AdExchanger.

The findings broke a core assumption. In men's sports, a new fan's first interaction with a team tends to be buying a ticket, Torris said. In women's sports, the data showed the entry point for many fans is buying merchandise. By the time they attend a game, "they feel like they have a connection with the club or the players," he said.

The takeaway in plain words: for women's teams, the T-shirt comes before the turnstile.

How is RAJ Sports monetizing that insight?

Last year, RAJ Sports took the Fire's ecommerce and merchandising strategy in-house to influence the fan experience directly. The move produced what Torris called "expressive" merchandise that cultivates an "intimate relationship" with the team. The Thorns are taking their ecommerce in-house for next season.

One item sold at the Fire's "Sneakerheads Night" was a T-shirt featuring pictures of Nike sneakers designed by the team's players. The shirts sold out within minutes of the arena opening.

T-shirts alone don't sustain a business. RAJ Sports deploys ads across social media, email and linear TV, and runs commercials through its own local sports network, Rose City SportsNet, which streams all Portland Fire matches and a number of Thorns games. A paid streaming app, Portland Fire+, carries live programming and behind-the-scenes content on mobile.

What do brand partnerships look like?

More brands are pursuing WNBA and NWSL partnerships as women's sports expand. Partnering with a team can serve as a "validator" for brands, particularly emerging ones, Torris said, because sports fans are "loyal to a fault." The catch: the partnership works only if the brand resonates with the fans' values.

Both the Thorns and Fire partner with baby product brand Nuna, running activations aimed at mothers and children, including on-field toddler and baby races at halftime.

The fandom itself differs structurally, according to Torris. Men's sports fandom focuses on wins, losses and athletic performance. Women's sports fans respond more to community and the broader experience of being at the game — though they still want their team to win. If the Fire lose, "we would have a standing ovation with 15,000 plus people cheering them on through the end," Torris said. "Nobody leaves, and I haven't seen that in men's sports."

RAJ Sports therefore advertises the experience, not the scoreboard. "The message is like, 'Come and try it, and we hope you come back,'" Torris said. And often, they do come back.

LeBlanc put it this way: "People are like, 'What is this energy?' Because it's inspired and it's positive. And people are like, 'I want more.'"

The bet, still unproven at scale, is that data-driven segmentation — not recycled men's-sports tactics — turns that energy into durable revenue.