‘A rising tide lifts all boats’: Inside the ECB’s push to elevate women’s cricket

It’s this thinking that inspired the ECB’s major campaign for the Women’s T20 World Cup. The grand ambition is not just selling tickets but building a brand.

“In order to deliver on those big attendances and ticket sales, we also need to do a brand job because that’s what’s going to hook people in,” Vile says. “Doing brand work is all about creating connections with audiences and that is the job to be done for women’s cricket.”

Selling the sport, not the progress of women’s sport

Last year, the ECB refreshed its audience segmentation to understand who its existing fans were and where to recruit new ones from the broader cricket fandom. “It was really encouraging that we found that there is a passionate core of fans who are already engaged in women’s cricket and a sizable group who are open to it but who we haven’t quite pulled in yet,” Vile says.

It sounds simple, but the key insight the ECB got from its audience research is that fans of cricket, be it male or female, just want to watch great sport. To sell women’s cricket, Vile says: “We really need to communicate the skill, the drama and the competition. We just need to make people see it, feel it, connect with it.”

The ECB tasked agency House337 with creating its T20 World Cup 2026 campaign. Vile found the pitch “compelling” as it encouraged the ECB to “stop selling the progress of women’s sport” and start selling the sport. The ‘Catch the Spirit’ ad tries to capture the “infectious” energy that a country feels when a World Cup is on home soil.

The ad shows a dad applying sunscreen to his daughter’s face and then revealing two cricket stumps drawn with the white lotion. It also features a guy knitting at a bus stop, with the camera panning to show him knitting cricket pads into his legs. Then, the ad cuts to a couple shopping in a market. The boyfriend tosses his girlfriend an apple, which she then bats away using a baguette. “The way that House337 has gone about it is really smart and fun and joyous,” Vile says.

The campaign rolls out in two phases, the first running from now until Christmas and the second in the run-up to the tournament. Since the ECB is aiming for brand awareness, the majority of the media plan involves mass-reach channels, with broadcast and streaming TV and more premium digital spaces. Vile has also incorporated the audience segmentation research into the media plan for “sharper” targeting.

Marketing for the collective effort

The tournament in 2026 is likely to be boosted by the England ladies team, the Lionesses, winning the Euros earlier in July. “Each time women's sport does these amazing things, whether it's the Lionenesses, whether it's the Red Roses or whether it's the England women's cricket team, it moves the whole category,” Vile explains.

Women’s cricket has been going from strength to strength since selling out Lords stadium for the 2017 T20 World Cup final to record-setting attendance in the 2020 final between Australia and India drawing 86,174 spectators. These figures aren’t just about a full stadium, Vile says, but a “powerful signal” that there is a true appetite for women's sport.

The marketers behind women’s sport are always working together both directly and indirectly, Vile says. “There's a real collegiate nature to women's sport and we definitely all feel that a rising tide lifts all boats when it comes to women's sport,” she adds.

Each sport is advertised in different ways because each of the sports are unique and have their own selling points, however, marketers believe in the “collective effort” of raising the profile of women’s sports and “driving structural progress”, Vile tells The Drum.