Talking sports with e.l.f. Cosmetics CMO Kory Marchisotto is less about athletics or even cosmetics than what the access afforded by both means to fans and consumers.
A few weeks ago, ADWEEK asked for Marchisotto’s thoughts about the cosmetics industry’s recent activity in women’s sports based on e.l.f. Cosmetics’ sponsorship of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), the Billie Jean King Cup by Gainbridge women’s tennis tournament, the iHeart Women’s Sports Audio Network, Paralympic swimmer Anastasia Pagonis, IndyCar and NASCAR driver Katherine Legge, and, most recently, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).
Marchisotto, backed by iHeart host Sarah Spain and NWSL executive Matt Soloff, noted that the brand carved out a place in women’s sports by using its resources to help create opportunities where they previously didn’t exist.
Left out of Marchisotto’s contribution, however, was much of the inspiration behind the brand’s foray into sports, the calculus that led to its appearance during the Super Bowl, and the context provided by Billie Jean King herself that pushed Marchisotto to expand e.l.f.’s presence in the game.
Here are the rest of Marchisotto’s insights into e.l.f. Cosmetics’ investment in women’s sports, as well as the women who follow sports:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ADWEEK: You’ve said that when you started at e.l.f. six and a half years ago, you received correspondence from consumers telling you that you weren’t selling cosmetics: You were democratizing access. How did that influence the brand going forward?
Marchisotto: People would say things to us like, “E.l.f., you saved my life at a time when nobody else was there for me. E.l.f., you invited me into a world that everybody else shut me out of.”
I realized that e.l.f. was a symbol for the overlooked and a champion of the underdog, and when you reframe a brand like that, it starts to completely change the aperture, the perspective, the way in which you show up in the world.
We solidified each of the ways in which we democratize access, and the first place that has to start is with your employees. It means access to equity. We democratize access to the Board of Directors: We’re one of only five companies out 4,200 to have a board of directors at 67% women and 44% diverse. We democratize access to our C-suite: I go on TikTok Live, and [e.l.f. Beauty CMO Mandy Fields] is teaching financial literacy on our Twitch channel, and 100,000 people showed up.
So, how did sports enter the equation?
They are interconnected in deeply meaningful ways: 94% of women who make it to the C-suite are former athletes, so democratization of access to the playing fields creates pathways for growth into the business arena.
Where did our sports journey begin? With a Twitch channel called e.l.f. You, and it started with one statistic: 77% of women reported being bullied on the platform. They didn’t have a safe space. They started to change their names and come in on the platform under aliases so that they wouldn’t get bullied, but could take a rightful place at the table because their skills were such that they could take on the boys. So we started a channel intended to be like, “E.l.f. you to the bullying. E.l.f. you to the aliases. Come here and fully express yourself.”
We’re going to talk about the fact that we can be women, and we can put on makeup before we start our live streams, and that we can talk about things that are important to our means of self-expression. That was the signal that we needed to keep going, because our channel became wildly popular. We realized that people wanted to talk to us about all different kinds of things, and that there was a need for us to push on beyond that.
When e.l.f. sponsored Katherine Legge at the Indianapolis 500 last year, she was just the ninth woman to run the race and the only woman in the field that year. How did that experience influence e.l.f.’s sports marketing strategy?
Before that, all of her sponsors were oil and gas. Our activation was between Waste Management on one side and oil and gas on the other, and ours had a line miles long to get inside.
Fifty percent of that audience was women, but nobody was speaking to them. Then we saw the pink car go around the track, and people lost their minds. The screaming young girls and the energy of the crowd weren’t actually about that pink car. It was about the symbol, the access to a new world that others shut her out of. That’s the critical underpinning.
How does that affect your approach?
When you get into that scenario, you start to branch out. We attached ourselves to the equality champion Billie Jean King. When we wanted to do our Change the Board Game campaign to make sure that women in diversity had seats in the highest positions of power and to create a way to jolt people into awareness, we brought Billie Jean King with us because she did it in the sports arena. Then, through Billie Jean King, we started working with the Professional Women’s Hockey League, another area where women were being overlooked and underserved.
So, you see how this works: You start to get yourself into a new network. You start to put energy out there. That energy starts to bring back kindred spirits and like-minded disruptors, who we then partner with to elevate women in sports.
As e.l.f. began amassing sponsorship partners and listening to athletes and figures within women’s sports, how did the brand itself start to adapt?
It gives us so much rocket fuel in our tank, because what we see, more than anything, is the power of feeling seen, supported, and amplified.
When we understood that women’s wrestling was the fastest growing high school sport in America, we went to sponsor the high school championship, and people were coming to us in droves just to say, “Thank you. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for showing up for me. Thank you for being here for me in a meaningful way,” because no one was showing up for them.
What that did for us was have us ask another very simple question: Where are they? Where are the underserved communities who haven’t been given a voice, that we can use our platform to give a voice? When you think about what we’re doing with the iHeart Women’s Sports Audio Network as a founding sponsor, it’s another moment to create pathways for growth.
Are you starting to see that growth?
That was the important part for us with the iHeart Women’s Sports Audio Network, because we’re always trying to look under the tip of the iceberg at what needs to be true. What needs to be true to get the 9% of all sports sponsorship dollars [in 2023, according to Sports Innovation Lab], to get to [20% in 2025]? What needs to be true to get from the 15% of coverage to equal parts over time?
What I love about Billie Jean King is she’s always anchoring me in progress with a capital P, because my first inclination is always to be pissed off. “What do you mean less than 10% of all sponsorship dollars go to women?” And she’ll look at me and say, “Kory, when I was coming up, it was less than 1%.” Or when I say, “What do you mean 15%?” She’s like, “Kory, that number used to be 3% or 4%.” What it makes you recognize is that if we can all contribute to incremental progress—more women getting sponsorship dollars, more networks covering women’s sports—then the change will happen way faster than anybody trying to do it on their own.
I hope more brands wake up and get in here. I don’t see it as competition. I see it as progress.
Where has e.l.f. found opportunity in racing, football, and other sports in which women still comprise 40% to 50% of the fanbase?
Let’s use the Super Bowl: The same math that told other people not to go was the math that told us to go.
It’s how you frame the issue. Why is e.l.f. in a Super Bowl commercial? Well, it’s the largest spectator sport, more than 100 million people watch it, and more than 80% of them say they’re there for the commercials. Who’s the audience: 50% of them are women. OK, now show me the commercials: Less than 1% of them have anything to do with something that a woman is interested in.
We followed that logic and said there is a large group of people who are underserved at this exceptional moment. We’re going to show up for them. And not only we’re going to show up for them, we’re going to show up in a bold and unapologetic way with Jennifer Coolidge, a 60-plus-year-old-woman.
If you come back for year two, not only did we show up with an 80-year-old woman the second time around, but we showed up with an ensemble cast that showcased to the world that everybody is seen by e.l.f.
That was an important message for us to get out to the world. E.l.f. is for every eye, lip. and face, and everybody has a right to play in this arena. And what we’re trying to do is be the beacon of inspiration. If we can inspire the change, if we can get you to see it through the optimistic possibilist lens that we see it through, then you too will want to play. And guess what happened? More beauty brands showed up.
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