CommBank’s multi-million dollar support of the Matildas has been one of the great sponsorship success stories in Australian history, but it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. CommBank’s partnerships lead Dianne Everett and Football Australia deputy chair Jackie Lee-Joe share tips on how the partnership delivered great results on and off the pitch.
In hindsight, backing the Matildas at a home FIFA Women’s World Cup might seem a no-brainer – record hype, attendances and TV audiences, tick – but the reality is far from straightforward.
The Commonwealth Bank has championed women’s sport for decades, including the highly successful Southern Stars cricket team. In 2021, it signed a “game changing” naming rights deal (estimated to be worth up to $2 million each year) to become naming rights partner of the national women’s team, The Matildas, junior national teams and a sponsor of the MiniRoos program for grassroots football.
At the time the bank signed the deal, Australia was in the throes of a global Covid-19 pandemic and all of the social and economic uncertainty that its brings.
CommBank’s general manager of brands, partnerships and creative, Dianne Everett, told the AANA’s RESET conference that deciding the back the Matildas at that time was “not necessarily a smooth path”.
“Adding sponsorships to your portfolio is never an easy decision to make. There’s always so many fixed costs attached to that. And you want to make sure you’ve got enough money left to leverage it and not for money left to build a profile both for your brand and for the partner entity,” she said.
“This, coupled with the fact that Football Australia was also undergoing this massive transformation. We had to consider would we even have enough fixtures to actually play in and support, and that FIFA sanctioned matches don’t allow you to have branding on uniforms. How do we integrate within broadcast rights, because there are not a lot of stoppages in football, or at least the women’s game. So there were many considerations.”
A conversion with the top brass at Football Australia soon convinced CommBank that the opportunity to support The Matildas, who had just secured a top four finish at the Tokyo Olympic Games, and women’s football more broadly, far outweighed the risks.
What really swung it for Everett and CommBank was Football Australia’s ambition to grow women’s football participation levels, a program known as ‘Legacy 23’, as well as backstory of many of the Matildas players and the legacy they wanted to leave.
“That became then a driving force for us. We saw both a leadership team that was committed to doing something differently to putting The Matildas on the map,” Everett said.
“They wanted to improve the product. There was a commitment to more games, and we were going to have a World Cup tournament on home soil. So we made a decision to become the CommBank Matildas and support junior levels.”
CommBank and The Matildas has brought to life the partnership in myriad ways, but perhaps the real success has been the support from Matildas to activate, as well as driving unseen levels of fandom across the wider community across owned and earned channels.
For example, CommBank’s Mini Mates program has given 1,400 kids the chance to walk out in World Cup matches with The Matildas and other women playing at the Women’s World Cup. About 18,000 people have been given the chance to “train like the Matildas’, and thousands more have been given tickets to matches
Matildas appearances on TV and shoots for culture-setting brands like The Iconic and in magazines like Vogue, GQ, Marie Claire fuelled the hype around The Matildas and women’s sport more generally.
“We produced something like 24 videos, 12 shoots that led to 190,000 minutes of engagement. And when you break that down, I think that worked out to be 132 days of solid fan engagement in our owned social media channels,” Everett said.
“By leveraging a fantastic asset like the Matildas, we were able to halve our CPMs, and we actually tripled the single placement view time with our highest performing social asset.”
CommBank’s 50,000-strong staff also got involved, becoming ‘super fans’ and being heavily involved in the community.
A Disney+ documentary, Matildas: The World At Our Feet, also drummed up interest and helped showcase the inspiring stories of players in the team.
Football Australia deputy chair Jackie Lee-Joe said the team was mindful of keeping the conversion going on social media, with support during the tournament from the likes of Hugh Jackman, Rebel Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Steve Smith. The Matildas grew their following by 850,000 and activity garnered 335 million social media impressions, 122 million plus social media video views.
Lee-Joe pointed out that the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand has set “a totally news standard” as the most successful edition of the tournament to date.
The economic impact of the tournament was $1.32 billion, with 2 billion viewers around the world. In Australia, the 35 games attracted nearly 1.29 million tickets. Seven’s coverage of the Matilda’s heartbreaking loss to England in the semi-finals drew a TV audience of 11 million, easily the largest for many years.
“In terms of legacy of investment, our co-hosting of the World Cup led to the unlocking of about $398 million of federal and state government funding of which a third, $129 million, positively benefits other sports,” she said.
‘A top 3% global brand’
For CommBank the results have been nothing short of remarkable.
Before the World Cup started, the brand association of CommBank with the Matildas was idling but about 30 to 50% of the levels we would like to see. We doubled that with the World Cup through all of the fandom and cultural moments that were created and we have sustained that heightened that level of awareness which is almost the same as a 25 year partnership sponsoring cricket, and we expect that to exceed cricket very soon.
“For the first time ever, CommBank has been ranked in the top 3 percent of brands globally in brand equity, classifying it as a ‘global iconic brand’.
“I’ve worked on global brands before and when I joined CommBank I certainly wouldn’t have classified it as that, but we think we have now achieved this (status) because of the quality of this partnership with the Matildas.
“We grew in meaning, in salience and differentiation. We are so lucky to be able to take the sponsorship property, the assets we put behind it and work in deep, deep partnership with a fantastically dedicated team to make those connections go a lot further.
CommBank also lifted its NPS score, but perhaps one of the results that impressed Everett the most is what supporting Matildas has done for the women’s game.
Post World Cup, registrations for women to play football are already up 20 per cent on the previous numbers.
“The growth of the game is phenomenal and it is sustained growth,” she said. “It would have been easy for things to fall off a cliff after the World Cup but they’ve sustained and that is part of our journey.”
Everett said the secret to a successful partnership is simple: “integrate, integrate, integrate”.
And at a time when budgets are tight, she had one tip for brands looking to invest in women’s sport but may feel constricted by tough economic conditions.
“We all use the term, fewer, bigger, better, and I would lessen the amount of work you do. If you have got a women’s partnership you are backing, integrate the hell out of it in everything you do. Lessen the focus on the number of programs, but deepen (the ones you have), connect and go further.”
CommBank’s partnership with Football Australia is due for renewal this year, and the value of that partnership will undoubtedly be much higher than it was in 2021. With a home Women’s Asia Cup on the horizon, it seems the bank’s journey with the Tillies, and women’s football, has only just begun.
