Women's sports are surging in popularity around the world, with record-breaking viewership, attendance and revenue growth. And yet, social media algorithms still skew towards covering men's sports. Olympic rower Kate Johnson, who now leads global marketing strategy for sports and entertainment at Google, unpacks why this is still happening — and what it will take to level the playing field for women’s sports.TED Talks Daily is nominated for the Signal Award for Best Conversation Starter Podcast. Vote here!Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Thankfully, women's sports are finally experiencing a huge surge in popularity around the world. I mean, who's not watching the WNBA playoffs right now? There's been record-breaking viewership and attendance of games across sports and significant revenue growth.
And yet, social media algorithms, for example, are still skewing largely to covering men's sports. In her talk, Olympic medalist and world champion rower Kate Johnson, who now leads global marketing strategy for sports and entertainment at Google, unpacks how and why this is still happening and why it's time to get serious about leveling the playing field for women's sports.
The Olympics has always served as a touchpoint for me to reflect on just how quickly our world changes. Think about it. Every four years, the Summer Olympics shine a massive spotlight on how much our technology evolves between the games. So I want you to take a minute and picture yourself in the year 2004. Try to remember the world back then. We didn't have iPhones.
The Facebook, as it was originally known, was just emerging on college campuses, and YouTube, it wasn't a thing. I competed at the Athens 2004 Olympics in women's rowing, which may as well have been the ancient Olympics as far as technology goes. I was still using a flip phone, and I sent my friends and family email updates from the games using my Hotmail account and dial-up internet.
So now I want you to imagine what it was like to win the first US Olympic medal in the event in 20 years. And rather than getting to instantly share that news with the world via my Instagram or TikTok account, my teammates and I had to wait to see if the Olympic broadcasters and journalists would cover it. Our story was entirely in their hands to tell or not.
Well, 20 years later, and all of this has changed. In an instant, we have sports scores, match results, and news stories at our fingertips and on our phones the moment it happens. And this is incredible. But there's still a problem. It's one thing to seek out the information you're looking for. It's another thing entirely to stumble upon it. The stumbling upon it goes like this.
You're scrolling through your social media feed, you see something that captures your attention, you click on it and poof, down the rabbit hole you go, you're locked in. Well, this stumbling upon is what we in marketing call discoverability. And for sports, it's the magic that fuels existing fans and captures new ones, pulling them in.
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