USTA Women Worth Watching Champions Equal Sports Coverage
The USTA "Women Worth Watching" campaign is a 2019 public-interest film created by mcgarrybowen Chicago that uses the opening day of the US Open to call for equal media coverage of women's sports across the United States, anchored by Billie Jean King as narrator and a rallying hashtag, #WomenWorthWatching.
The United States Tennis Association launched the campaign on August 26, 2019. That date was chosen deliberately: it coincided with both the opening day of the 2019 US Open and Women's Equality Day, a pairing that frames the issue as simultaneously urgent and historically resonant. The campaign ran through September 8, 2019, the final day of the tournament, ensuring the message remained visible across one of the most-watched tennis events in the world.
The strategic brief extended well beyond tennis. While the USTA's natural platform is the sport it governs, the campaign's stated goal, as documented by campaignsoftheworld.com, was to encourage equal media coverage of men's and women's sports across all disciplines in the United States. The creative centrepiece is a single film asset built around one arresting statistic: of all sports covered in America, only 4% of content features female athletes, as reported by campaignlive.com. That number drives the campaign's moral urgency and gives the #WomenWorthWatching hashtag its argumentative force.
The USTA also expanded its existing relationship with SheIS, a nonprofit organisation whose mission, per adsoftheworld.com, is to leverage the power of women in sports to create a future built by and for strong women. Having partnered with SheIS since 2018, the USTA used the 2019 campaign to amplify the nonprofit's reach, distributing the film across broadcast, social, ESPN airtime, and live US Open event media. The Clapboard Score for Women Worth Watching is 73 out of 100, reflecting strong cultural alignment and a clear strategic purpose executed through a focused, single-asset creative approach.
Sports media in the United States systematically under-represents female athletes. The finding that only 4% of sports content in America features women, as reported by campaignlive.com, provided mcgarrybowen with a single, devastating insight powerful enough to anchor an entire campaign without creative embellishment.
The USTA occupied a structurally advantaged position from which to make this argument. As reported by usta.com, the organisation generated approximately $485 million in revenue in 2019, with roughly $400 million of that coming from the US Open alone. The tournament attracted approximately 850,000 site attendees that year, according to usta.com, giving the USTA both the financial scale and the audience reach to sustain a public-interest message beyond the ad-break. In the United States, the US Open is one of the rare sporting events that has historically offered equal prize money to men and women, a fact that positions the USTA as a credible, non-hypocritical advocate for gender equity rather than an opportunistic one.
The competitive landscape in sports advocacy advertising is crowded. Nike's long-running investment in female athlete narratives and Adidas's campaigns around women in football establish a high creative bar for brands entering this space. What differentiates the USTA's approach is institutional specificity: rather than celebrating individual achievement in isolation, Women Worth Watching indicts a systemic failure in media infrastructure and recruits its audience as agents of change through the #WomenWorthWatching hashtag. The SheIS partnership, active since 2018 according to prnewswire.com, extended the campaign's credibility beyond the tennis world and into the broader women's sports ecosystem. By launching on Women's Equality Day, as documented by adsoftheworld.com, the USTA ensured the campaign entered a pre-existing cultural conversation rather than attempting to create one from scratch.
Billie Jean King delivers the voiceover for Women Worth Watching. The choice of King as narrator is not incidental: she is both a former professional tennis player and one of the most recognised social-justice advocates in American sports history, a person whose biography is itself an argument for the campaign's thesis.
According to adsoftheworld.com, King's narration includes the line: "The fight for women's equality in many respects has only just begun." That sentence does the work of compressing decades of activism into a single present-tense claim, reframing equality not as an achievement of the past but as an ongoing obligation. mcgarrybowen Chicago built the film around this rhetorical posture, using King's voice to transform a dispiriting statistic into a forward-looking invitation. The hashtag #WomenWorthWatching functions as a call to arms rather than a passive label, grammatically positioning the audience as the subject capable of changing what gets watched and therefore what gets covered.
Kurt Fries served as Chief Creative Officer at mcgarrybowen on the campaign, as documented by campaignsoftheworld.com. The film medium was selected as the primary asset because it allowed the campaign to function simultaneously as a broadcast spot during ESPN's US Open coverage, a social-media share unit, and an event installation within the US Open grounds itself. This multi-surface deployment meant a single creative idea could achieve reach across paid, earned, and owned channels without requiring a separate creative execution for each. Production credits beyond Fries and King are not fully documented in public sources, though the campaign's clean, advocacy-forward visual language aligns with mcgarrybowen's documented approach to purpose-driven work, as noted by campaignlive.com. The structural decision to centre on one statistic and one voice kept the creative focused and resistant to the kind of tonal drift that often dilutes purpose-led advertising.
No granular verified performance data — such as view counts, earned media impressions, or brand-lift figures — for the Women Worth Watching campaign is publicly available from the USTA or mcgarrybowen. What is documentable is the institutional context in which the campaign operated, which speaks to its structural reach.
The 2019 US Open generated approximately 850,000 on-site attendees, according to usta.com, representing a substantial captive audience for the campaign's event-integrated distribution. The USTA's 2019 sponsorship and commercial rights revenue reached approximately $134.537 million gross, per usta.com, indicating the scale of commercial relationships that amplified the campaign's media footprint across broadcast and digital partners. The ESPN broadcast partnership ensured that Women Worth Watching reached a national television audience in the United States at a moment of peak sports attention.
The campaign's partnership with SheIS extended its reach into an established network of women's sports advocates, as reported by prnewswire.com, multiplying organic distribution beyond what a single organisation could achieve. By launching on Women's Equality Day, as noted by adsoftheworld.com, the campaign earned natural placement in news coverage focused on gender equity, functioning as earned media in addition to paid broadcast placement. The Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its public-interest brief with clarity and institutional authority, deploying a credible spokesperson and a verifiable statistic rather than sentiment alone. The primary structural limitation is the single media asset, which concentrates creative risk and constrains the campaign's ability to sustain narrative across the two-week tournament window.
Women Worth Watching is a 2019 USTA public-interest film created by mcgarrybowen Chicago. It launched on August 26, 2019, the opening day of the US Open and Women's Equality Day, to demand equal media coverage for women's sports in the United States, anchored by the hashtag #WomenWorthWatching and narrated by Billie Jean King.
Billie Jean King is a former professional tennis player and long-standing advocate for women's equality in sports. Her biography made her a credible, non-performative voice for the campaign's argument. According to adsoftheworld.com, King's narration included the line that the fight for women's equality has only just begun.
The campaign centred on the finding that only 4% of sports media coverage in the United States features female athletes, as reported by campaignlive.com. That single statistic provided the moral foundation for the USTA's call to action and gave the #WomenWorthWatching hashtag its argumentative force across broadcast and social platforms.
mcgarrybowen Chicago created the Women Worth Watching campaign for the USTA. Kurt Fries served as Chief Creative Officer on the work, as documented by campaignsoftheworld.com. The agency built the campaign around a single film asset designed to run across ESPN broadcast, social media, and live US Open event environments simultaneously.
SheIS is a nonprofit that leverages women's sports to advance visibility and opportunity for women. The USTA had partnered with SheIS since 2018, according to prnewswire.com, and expanded that relationship for the 2019 campaign to amplify distribution beyond tennis audiences and into the broader women's sports advocacy community across the United States.
Women Worth Watching receives a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100. The score reflects strong cultural alignment, a credible spokesperson in Billie Jean King, and a clear public-interest brief executed with focus. The primary constraint noted is the campaign's reliance on a single media asset across a two-week tournament window.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
