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Between overlapping international soccer tournaments, the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, and the US Open Tennis Championships, sports fans would be forgiven for expecting youth baseball to fly under the radar this summer.<\/p>\n
To the contrary, the Little League World Series Championship Game, which aired on ABC the day before the first round of the US Open began, was the most-watched of its kind in almost a decade, according to ESPN.<\/p>\n
The series was front and center on ESPN platforms, and in addition to mainstream network viewership, Little League boasts a media landscape and major brand sponsors like Gatorade, Adidas, and T-Mobile, painting a picture of an industry whose viewership and sponsorship interest looks increasingly similar to the big leagues.<\/p>\n
Ballpark figures<\/h2>\n
Little League games have appeared on Disney-owned channels like ABC and ESPN since the early 1960s, according to Liz DiLullo Brown, Little League\u2019s EVP and chief marketing and business relationship officer. \u201cIt\u2019s one of our longest-standing partnerships,\u201d Deidra Maddock, VP of sports brand solutions at Disney Advertising, told Marketing Brew.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just out of respect for tradition that the networks keep airing games: This year\u2019s Little League Baseball World Series Championship Game averaged 3,535,000 viewers on ABC, up 20% year over year and delivering the highest viewership since 2015, according to ESPN. Excluding the MLB postseason, MLB All-Star events, and World Baseball Classic games, it was also the most-watched baseball game at any level on any network since the 2021 Field of Dreams<\/em> game, per ESPN.<\/p>\nSoftball, too, has seen growth in participation in recent years and viewership has followed. The 2024 Little League Softball World Series championship game, which overlapped with the Olympics, was the fifth most-watched Little League softball game on record. In 2023, Little League softball games averaged 340,000 viewers across ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2; that championship game on ABC was the most-watched Little League softball game on record, with 861,000 viewers, according to ESPN.<\/p>\n
Naturally, some of those viewers are parents and families of the kids who participate, but \u201cwe wouldn\u2019t get to 3+ million for those championships\u201d without interest from other demographics, Maddock said. The audience for Little League tends to skew toward millennial and Gen X parents, though there\u2019s also an increase in co-viewing among families, as well as a growing younger audience watching highlights on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, Brown said.<\/p>\n
All the bases<\/h2>\n
In addition to network coverage, which Maddock said includes \u201ca lot of the same \u2018game around the game\u2019 treatment that we do for professional sports and for college sports,\u201d social media has helped elevate youth baseball even further, according to Han Oh, CMO of baseball scouting organization Perfect Game.<\/p>\n
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\u201cSome of these kids have their own social media followings at 16 or 17, with tens of thousands of followers,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a fragmented media space, but somehow these kids have really figured out ways to connect it all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perfect Game has a streaming service of its own, PGTV, that debuted during the pandemic with a few cameras at one facility, CEO Rob Ponger said. Now, \u201cthere\u2019s almost a camera on every single field that we\u2019re on,\u201d he said. Having a media presence that includes social media and the streaming service has helped Perfect Game attract sponsors outside of traditional sports apparel and equipment companies, he said, including Yeti and UBS.<\/p>\n
Big-league brands<\/h2>\n
There are also brands that come to Little League through Major League Baseball, which assists in \u201cthe sponsorship acquisition process\u201d for Little League baseball and softball, Brown said. For sponsors, adding Little League to the mix is often aimed at \u201creaching this young audience, and this really engaged audience,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Little League sells its baseball and softball sponsorships as a package deal, Brown said, and across the more than a dozen brands that sponsor Disney\u2019s Little League content, almost all of them, including Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods, PNC Bank, and Uncrustables, engaged with both sports this year, Maddock said\u2014mirroring the increase of brand dollars that pro women\u2019s sports have seen in recent years.<\/p>\n
\u201cGone are the days when people were saying, \u2018I only want to activate in baseball,\u2019\u201d Maddock said. \u201cBrands are being very intentional about making sure that they are in both the baseball and softball space.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Between overlapping international soccer tournaments, the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, and the US Open Tennis Championships, sports fans would be forgiven for expecting youth baseball to fly under the radar this summer. To the contrary, the Little League World Series Championship Game, which aired on ABC the day before the first round of the US […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-21718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-marketing"},"yoast_head":"\n
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