More than 80 sponsors sign on with Fever

Like everything else related to the Indiana Fever, corporate sponsorship for the WNBA team was one thing in the B.C.C. Era (Before Caitlin Clark) and something much bigger since the sharp-shooting, precise-passing guard arrived in town.

“The business around the Fever fundamentally changed overnight,” said Joey Graziano, executive vice president for strategy and new business ventures at Pacers Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Fever and the NBA’s Indiana Pacers. “We went from a local business to now a truly national and global business.”

For 2024, Clark’s rookie season, WNBA teams had deals with an average of 48 corporate partners each—those can be local companies or big national names, such as Nike, Gatorade and Coca-Cola. The biggest sponsors have their names on WNBA uniforms, courts, overhead scoreboards and elsewhere.

The Fever’s roster of sponsors ballooned from 65 last year, which already beat the league average, to 85 this year, Graziano said. The Fever’s leadership looks for corporate partners that share a vision and a set of values with the team, he said. The relationship is also reciprocal.

“How can we help tell those partner stories? And how can those partners help tell our story? We aspire to be ‘America’s Team,’ and that means we need big, bold, ambitious partnerships because it’s a crucial part of the storytelling,” Graziano said.

Record-breaking TV ratings and attendance figures both home and away bolster the argument that the Fever could, indeed, become America’s team, especially given the popularity of Clark and fellow all-stars Kelsey Mitchell and Aliyah Boston.

But not every company that wants to do business with the Fever receives a “yes” response.

“You have to commit a lot of energy and time to be able to learn about their business, to feel intimately connected to their growth story and to understand their priorities,” Graziano said of potential sponsors. “There are certainly capacity limits. You can’t take on an unfettered number of partners.”

The Fever jersey, for instance, has featured Salesforce and AT&T on the front and back, respectively, since 2019. Nike, a marketing partner of the WNBA since its inception in 1997, has its Swoosh logo on one shoulder. Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. came on board in 2024 to claim the opposite shoulder position.

On the home court at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, different corporate sponsors are displayed based on whether a game is televised nationally or regionally.

“If it’s a national game, those are WNBA partners with WNBA messaging,” Graziano said. “If it’s a local game, those are our local partners.”

The league places the logos of Michelob Ultra beer and a six-pack of sponsors known as the WNBA Changemakers Collective (online bank Ally, AT&T, Carmax, accounting and consulting firm Deloitte, Google and Nike) on the court.

The Fever place the logos of Ascension St. Vincent, FanDuel and Cheez-It on the court.

Other sponsors are found off the court. Please & Thank You coffee and cookie chain, a Louisville-based business founded by Indianapolis native Brooke Vaughn, is featured during games on the arena’s scoreboard and an LED “ribbon” encircling the seating area.

Please & Thank You, which opened a downtown Indianapolis shop in 2023, also operates a cookie kiosk on the main concourse of Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

Vaughn said she wanted Please & Thank You to be affiliated with both the Pacers and the Fever.

“I’m a woman. I grew up in Indiana. I’m 5-foot-11. Of course I played basketball,” she said.

Vaughn said she believes there are more opportunities for small businesses to be sponsors in women’s sports than in men’s sports.

According to research firm SponsorUnited, there is room for growth: WNBA teams generated 4.75% of the sponsorship revenue of NBA teams in 2024.

The WNBA, which was a 12-team league last year, collected $76 million in sponsorship revenue. The 30 teams of the NBA amassed $1.62 billion.

Meanwhile, SponsorUnited reported that the 12% growth of women’s sports sponsorships in their 2024-2025 seasons is outpacing the 8% growth in sponsorships for men’s sports.

And some of those new sponsors are seeing an impact.

Vaughn, who studied English and film at IUPUI, said the Please & Thank You cookie kiosk at Gainbridge Fieldhouse generated more than $113,000 in revenue since its October 2024 debut. Meanwhile, more people are visiting the Please & Thank You storefront at 849 Massachusetts Ave.

“We’ve seen a 30% increase in traffic,” Vaughn said. “Hopefully, you can cheer on a team and be a fan of a team but also have advertising drive business to our shop. With Mass Ave being under construction for the past two years, I felt like this was helpful.”

Graziano said in-person attendees of Fever games represent all 50 states and visitors from 45 countries.

“You want to be able to help your local businesses use this moment to help launch their next stage of growth,” he said. “We want fans from outside of Indiana to come experience that and say, ‘Man, I want one of those to launch in my hometown,” Graziano said.

National identity

Gainbridge Fieldhouse will host the WNBA All-Star Game on July 19, which gives the Fever another opportunity to embrace a national spotlight.

“There’s certainly a recognition we’re in a transformative moment for women’s sports,” Graziano said. “We’re also obviously in a transformative moment for the Indiana Fever. We want to be one of the brands and teams that helps lead this moment forward.”

Tom Denari, CEO of Indianapolis-based advertising agency Young & Laramore, credits Clark for “lighting the fuse” for the WNBA’s surge in popularity.

“But those crowds are emerging everywhere,” Denari said. “I think it refocused people to think, ‘Oh, let me watch that.’ And when they watched it, they thought, ‘This is really fun.’”

Denari has developed campaigns for Goodwill, Steak n Shake and Angi, then known as Angie’s List, across a 35-year career. He said the WNBA is attracting companies that strive to be aligned with rising tides.

“Everybody wants to be part of a winning thing,” Denari said. “That’s why people are scrambling to get on board now, when it’s on the upswing.”

Solo spotlight

Sports sponsorship includes league-level partnerships, team-specific partnerships and player-specific endorsements.

Clark, who was named WNBA Rookie of the Year and an All-WNBA First Team player in 2024, has endorsement deals with Nike, Wilson Sporting Goods, Gatorade, State Farm, Hy-Vee, Xfinity, Gainbridge, Eli Lilly and Co. and trading-card company Panini.

Leading up to her second season, Clark made a commercial for Zionsville-based annuity products company Gainbridge at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the arena where the digital platform became naming-rights partner in 2021.

Young & Laramore devised the ad, titled “Assist-Obsessed,” which shows Clark tossing popcorn into a fan’s mouth, completing a high five with a fan who had been left hanging and mopping up a drink spilled by a fan.

Raghu Hariharan, vice president of marketing and strategy for Group 1001 Insurance Holdings, parent company of Gainbridge, describes Clark as “arguably one of the most recognizable and high-performing athletes in the world.”

The ad, he said, refers to Gainbridge’s mission to assist consumers with their money and Clark’s single-season record for assists last year.

“You want to make sure that you are working with people who can help you tell that story effectively, and that’s a combination of people who are high-trust, high-caliber, high-performance but also recognizable,” Hariharan said. “You can work with someone who meets all of those characteristics but isn’t necessarily known. If you’re thinking about it from a messaging perspective, that doesn’t help your vision.

“Caitlin checks that extra box of doing all of those things while just being extremely noteworthy and recognizable right now—and we think for the foreseeable future,” Hariharan said.

Of course, Clark’s shooting is even more famous than her passing, and Gainbridge sponsored a 15-minute YouTube video she made with members of trick-shot crew Dude Perfect at Hinkle Fieldhouse.

The video, titled “50 Ways to Make a 3,” has racked up 3.3 million views since being posted on May 31.

Brand awareness

During Fever home games, Indianapolis-based Lucas Oil is one of the sponsors displayed on digital courtside signage at the scorer’s table.

“We’re trying to find avid fans,” said Katie Lucas, president of Lucas Oil. “We don’t want passive customers, and we don’t want passive fans. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to partner with some great organizations that have passionate fan bases.”

Lucas mentioned the Indianapolis Colts, Dallas Cowboys and NASCAR’s Richard Childress Racing as key sponsorships for Lucas Oil. For the 2025 WNBA season, Lucas Oil expanded its digital courtside signage program to include the home courts of the Dallas Wings and New York Liberty.

Lucas Oil Products became naming-rights partner for the city’s NFL stadium, Lucas Oil Stadium, when it opened in 2008. Lucas said the stadium deal helped grow brand awareness for the company.

“People in the auto industry and the racing community certainly heard the name ‘Lucas Oil,’ and they’re familiar with the products,” she said. “But our products are not just for the racing community. It’s for the everyday driver, and that’s something we are really trying to get out there. … It’s been a wonderful marketing and branding piece for us.”

Gainbridge executive Hariharan said his company is experiencing similar benefits because of its arena partnership.

“The concept of people playing ‘at Gainbridge’ is now becoming a thing,” Hariharan said. “Obviously, it takes the right mix of TV exposure or content exposure and the teams doing well or the players doing well for people to get that, but they’re starting to get it.”•