There’s a content gap in women’s sports. These execs partnered up to help close it

This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles here.

Sports fans have no problem finding programming focused on the men’s game. Beyond the games and matches themselves, there’s The Last Dance for basketball enthusiasts, Hard Knocks for football fanatics, and Welcome to Wrexham for fans of English football, to name only a few.

Allyson Davis and Melissa Forman know it well. The two media execs spent years working at Fox Sports, as well as years at other brands and media companies like Red Bull and MTV, long before women’s sports docs like Full Court Press or In the Arena: Serena Williams were available to viewers.

“There’s this disconnect between what the platforms think that fans want 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.

“We want to do something that matters at this point in our careers,” Davis said. “Men’s sports, they’re fine. They don’t need us anymore. We’ve done a great job for all those men. Let’s do it for the women now.”

The climb

Davis and Forman grew up on opposite coasts—Davis in the Bay Area and Forman in New York City—and their introduction to athletics was also miles apart.

Davis played an array of sports from a young age, including basketball, softball, swimming, and cycling, but she said she felt there was “no clear pipeline” for her for a career in sports. Forman discovered a love of sports later in life, and she took her involvement to the extreme: Fresh out of college, she took a job at MTV and soon moved to MTV Sports, where she worked behind the camera covering athletes in extreme sports like paragliding. She once climbed Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world, while filming a project.

“For me, it really lit the flame and the fire, because then I could really see what drives athletes to do what they’re doing,” Forman said. “While I was still behind the camera, I was always part of the adventure.”

Davis, an avid cyclist, also started out on the content side of the media business, cutting her teeth at the University of San Francisco, where she served as videographer for the men’s basketball and soccer teams and worked at her college radio station. After working in production in LA, she moved to magazines and to the marketing and business side of media. She went on to work as a marketing executive for companies including E! Networks and Universal Sports Network after Fox Sports.

Get the wheels turning

While Forman and Davis overlapped working at Fox Sports, they only first began working together when a mutual friend introduced them while Davis was working with Red Bull athlete Rebecca Rusch around the documentary Blood Road. They spent the next few years orbiting one another before partnering up officially.

Around the time they started working together, both were reaching turning points in their careers, with Davis realizing that she was “much happier being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond,” and Forman experiencing some frustrations after working on Candace Parker’s documentary, Title IX: 37 Words That Changed America. Those frustrations included not having the ability to execute on an impact campaign around the time of its release, she recalled.

Suffice to say she disagreed with the approach. “[Women’s sports stories] need to be told through a variety of formats,” she said. “You need to tap audiences that don’t even know they’re sports fans yet.”

For Impakt Partners’ first-ever project, Davis brought Forman in to work on a documentary about the original Tour de France Femmes in the 1980s, and Forman said they worked to get the word out with marketing, including encouraging people in the cycling and broader sports world, as well as brands, to share it.

The doc, Uphill Climb: The Women Who Conquered The Impossible Race, streamed on Peacock in the US and Discovery+ in Europe, and Forman and Davis worked with both companies to promote it, Forman said. It held 50% of the audience from the live stage of the race that aired before it, according to Forman.

“That’s unheard of,” she said. “Super Bowl numbers don’t even do that. People are hungry for women’s sports storytelling.”

It was a stat that helped solidify the idea the two were dreaming about, Forman said.

Off to the races

Now, Impakt Partners serves as a production company and a strategic marketing studio for teams, leagues, and athletes, with a nonprofit arm that funds some of its work.

One of Impakt Partners’s other early projects was In the Machine, a documentary following racing driver Ashley Freiberg, for Lucas Oil-owned cable network MavTV. Davis and Forman are currently producing a doc about Ali Truwit, the swimmer who was attacked by a shark about a year before she won two silver medals at the Paris Paralympics; it’s set to come out next year, Davis said. They’re also working on a feature for Fox Sports about women’s flag football that’s set to air during a Sunday NFL game on the network, Forman said.

Davis said marketers could do a better job “walking the walk” and becoming involved in documentaries and shoulder programming around women’s sports. Data from companies like Sports Innovation Lab has helped demonstrate the marketing case for women’s sports, Forman said, but there continues to be a lack of investment in stories about women athletes.

That also means that there is plenty of room to grow.

“There’s not just room for one story,” Davis said. “The sooner that those things are funded, the faster this whole entire segment is going to build and grow, because that’s the fuel that feeds the ecosystem.”

Update 9/27/2024: This piece has been updated to better reflect Forman’s role at MTV Sports. Davis’s work involving the documentary “Blood Road,” and to remove an inaccurate quote.