As the Las Vegas Aces face-off with the New York Liberty in the best-of-five WNBA finals series starting Sunday, Oct. 8, Deloitte's postseason ad campaign has celebrated women in basketball and in business as new findings show exactly how key playing sport is to women's professional success.
Current WNBA players Diana Taurasi (Phoenix Mercury) and Sydney Colson (Las Vegas Aces) and former players Theresa Plaisance and Sylvia Fowles all feature in the four 30-second slots, the first of which premiered Sept. 19.
The videos imagine a world where businesswomen are as celebrated and admired as professional athletes, as the four basketball players cheer wildly for various businesswomen, draft fantasy rosters of CTOs and CMOs ("Never go deep on marketing," Sylvia Fowles tells Sydney Colson) and wear t-shirts printed with a CEO's LinkedIn photos. The tagline is "Deloitte: Proud Sponsor of Professional Women Everywhere."
The ads were developed by Ryan Reynold's agency Maximum Effort.
The actor shared that, "As a girl dad, co-chair of a Welsh woman's football team and producer of a WNBA TV show [The Syd + TP Show], I want to help create a great professional environment for women. Sports is transformative and fun for both women and men, whether a career in sports is the goal or not. I am grateful to Deloitte and the hilarious WNBA stars for collaborating with Maximum Effort to create this campaign."
The accompanying published survey adds to existing evidence of the importance of playing sport to women's eventual career success. 80% of professional women surveyed said their participation was important to their success, and that number increased to 91% for women in leadership roles and to 93% for those making over $100,000 (€94,335) a year.
