This story is the latest in a series about women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profile here.
Sports fans will have no trouble finding programs that focus on the men’s game. Beyond the games and matches themselves, there’s also ‘The Last Dance’ for basketball lovers, ‘Hard Knocks’ for football lovers and ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ for England football fans, just to name a few.
Allison Davis and Melissa Forman know that all too well. The two media executives spent years at Fox Sports, long before women’s sports docs like Full Court Press and In the Arena: Serena Williams were available to viewers. He also worked for years at other brands and media companies, including Red Bull and MTV.
“There’s a disconnect between what the fans want and what the platforms think and what the fans really want,” Davis told Marketing Brew.
In 2022, Davis and Forman set out to address that disconnect, founding Impakt Partners, a media company focused on producing, marketing and distributing programming about women’s sports.
โWe want to do something important at this point in our careers,โ Davis said. “Men’s sports are fine. They don’t need us anymore. We’ve done a great job for all these men. Now let’s do it for the women.”
the climb
Davis and Forman grew up on opposite coasts, Davis in the Bay Area and Forman in New York City, and their encounters with athletics were far apart.
Davis played a variety of sports from an early age, including basketball, softball, swimming and cycling, but said she felt there was “no clear pipeline” for a career in sports. Forman discovered his love for sports late in life and took them to the extreme. Fresh out of college, she landed a job at MTV and quickly moved to MTV Sports, working behind the camera covering athletes in extreme sports like paragliding. . She once climbed Cotopaxi, one of the world’s tallest active volcanoes, while filming a project.
โFor me, that really lit the flame and the fire because you really see what drives players to do what they do,โ Forman said. “While I was behind the camera, I was always part of the adventure.”
An avid cyclist, Davis also got his start on the content side of the media business, honing his skills at the University of San Francisco, where he served as a videographer for the men’s basketball and soccer teams and worked at the university’s radio station. After working in production in LA, I moved to the marketing and business side of magazines and media. She later worked as a marketing executive at companies such as E! network after Fox Sports and Universal Sports Network.
Let’s spin the wheels
Forman and Davis had previously worked together at Fox Sports, but they first met through a mutual friend while Davis was working with Red Bull athlete Rebecca Rush on the documentary Blood Road. I started working on it. They spent the next few years in each other’s orbit before officially partnering.
By the time they started working together, both had reached a turning point in their careers, with Davis realizing that he was “much happier being a big fish in a small pond than a little fish in a big pond,” and Forman felt some frustration after work. I’m working on Candice Parker’s documentary Title IX: 37 Words That Changed America. Those complaints included an inability to run an impact campaign around the time of release, she recalled.
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Suffice to say she didn’t agree with that approach. “[Womenโs sports stories] It needs to be communicated in different formats,โ she said. โWe need to reach an audience that doesnโt yet know theyโre a sports fan.โ
For Impakt Partners’ first project, Davis enlisted Forman to help produce a documentary about the original Tour de France fam of the 1980s, with Forman responsible for marketing, including encouraging people from the cycling community and the broader field. He said he tried to disseminate information through the website. Not only the sports world but also brands share it.
The doc, “Uphill Climb: The Women Who Conquered Impossible Races,” will be streamed on Peacock in the U.S. and Discovery+ in Europe, and Forman and Davis worked with both companies to promote it, Forman said. he said. Forman said it made up 50% of the audience for the race’s live stage, which was broadcast before the race.
“That’s unheard of,” she said. “Super Bowl numbers don’t even do that. People are hungry for women’s sports storytelling.”
Forman said this helped solidify the idea they had been dreaming of.
Off to the races
Today, Impakt Partners serves as a production company and strategic marketing studio for teams, leagues and athletes, with a nonprofit arm that funds some of its work.
One of Impakt Partners’ other early projects is “In the Machine,” a documentary about racing driver Ashley Freiberg for the Lucas Oil-owned cable network MavTV. Davis and Forman are currently producing a documentary about swimmer Ali Truwitt, who was attacked by a shark about a year before winning two silver medals at the Paris Paralympic Games. It is expected to be released next year, Davis said. They are also working on a feature on women’s flag football on Fox Sports that will be aired during Sunday’s NFL games, Forman said.
Davis said marketers could do a better job by “walking the walk” and working on documentaries and programming related to women’s sports. Data from companies like the Sports Innovation Lab is helping to substantiate the marketing case for women’s sports, but investment in stories about female athletes remains lacking, Forman said. .
It also means there’s a lot of room for growth.
โItโs not just space for one story,โ Davis said. โThe sooner these things get funded, the faster this whole segment can build and grow, because thatโs the fuel that feeds the ecosystem.โ
Updated September 27, 2024: This article has been updated to better reflect Forman’s role at MTV Sports. Davis’ work on the documentary “Blood Road” and removing inaccurate quotes.