Forward of Wednesday night time’s official March Insanity tip-off starting with the First 4, ESPN unveiled the subsequent part of its “That’s Our Transfer” season-long marketing campaign for girls’s basketball.

Following a record-breaking 2022 match—the primary yr the NCAA allowed the ladies’s version to make use of March Insanity branding—ESPN and types are capitalizing on the unprecedented progress of ladies’s faculty hoops.

Constructing off the momentum from 2022, ESPN, which has the unique broadcast rights to the match, is working a multiplatform marketing campaign that includes WNBA stars Arike Ogunbowale, Kelsey Plum and Destanni Henderson, all of whom had legendary NCAA careers. The NBA’s Steph Curry additionally makes a cameo look.

The spot options voiceovers from the three WNBA gamers, highlighting their record-breaking faculty moments. It additionally consists of moments from present NCAA stars, together with Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, South Carolina’s Aliyah Boston and Stanford’s Cameron Brink.

“We wished to create a marketing campaign that made a unified assertion for girls’s faculty basketball on all our networks,” Michelle Berry, ESPN’s senior director of sports activities advertising, advised Adweek. “For the model and the enterprise, and our imaginative and prescient of shifting girls’s faculty basketball ahead, it was essential for us to verify we have been leaning into our worth of gender fairness and asserting our management.”

The preliminary 30-second spot premiered on March 12 throughout the Girls’s NCAA Choice Present, the second yr in a row that this system aired on a Sunday versus a Monday. Regardless of going up in opposition to the Academy Awards, Sunday’s particular pulled in 1.27 million viewers, up 18% year-over-year and the most-watched telecast since 2005.

“[The campaign] speaks to the broader motion of ladies’s faculty basketball, and from a model standpoint, ESPN is who’s offering the platform right here, and we take that very significantly,” Berry mentioned.

A ‘advertising arsenal’

ESPN labored with its in-house company, Grande & Leonard, to create the marketing campaign, with inventive director Cheryl DiCarlo selecting to spotlight Plum, Ogunbowale and Henderson.

“It was an elevation of the expertise. We glance round, and we see all these gamers that have been fiercely profitable within the match, and now that’s translating to success on the planet,” DiCarlo advised Adweek.

ESPN created a 30-second, 15-second and 5-second model of the spot, which will probably be constantly up to date all through the match, culminating on the Ultimate 4 in Dallas on the finish of the month.