Rebel Girls announces new family-friendly sports program with Swerve Sports

The GIST: Today, girls empowerment platform Rebel Girls (RG) announced a new partnership with Swerve Sports, a FAST channel dedicated to women’s sports that’s available in 80% of U.S. and Canadian households. Together, the partnership will create Rebel Girl Sports Hour, a first-of-its-kind kids and family program for women’s sports that will air under its Rebel Girls Sport vertical.

• We’ve explored how this youth-focused brand has its finger on the pulse of what content Gen Alpha girls are looking for, leading to several prominent sports partnerships. But this new collab highlights a key component of winning over the young generation — winning over their parents, too.

The details: Swerve Sports is airing six episodes of Rebel Girl Sports Hour starting October 11th, all of which will be hosted by teen sports journalist Pepper Persley. Initial episodes focus on snow sports, motorsports, and Olympic sports, featuring Chloe Kim, Mikaela Shiffrin, and Michelle Kwan. Episodes will be available to stream on demand after each release.

The background: This is the latest in RG’s’ sports strategy: Since starting its Rebel Girls Sport vertical in January, the brand has teamed up with LOVB, AUSL, and Gotham FC as sports teams and leagues also consider Gen Alpha audiences.

• RG simply listened to the data: Before launching RG Sport, 45% of its 20 most-watched YouTube videos focused on sports, and eight months into the vertical’s YouTube presence, the channel had 8.4M views and 236K hours watched.

The context: While parental sports traditions often inspire youth fandom, sports fandom can also flow from children to parents. In women’s sports, this especially comes into play when considering Gen Alpha has more avid fandom for the WNBA and women’s soccer than older generations.

• Having children in the home increases the likelihood of sports viewership, while the involvement of daughters, sisters, and mothers sport boosts the likelihood of women’s sports fandom. And among Gen Alpha parents in a recent study, 60% have watched a pro sports event with their youngest child, and 39% have attended a pro game with their youngest.

Zooming out: It’s important to create accessible, kid-centered sports content for Gen Alpha girls, especially as RG and its partners realized that kids can be key to unlocking brand awareness and affinity for the whole family. Research shows that over 70% of Gen Alpha kids influence their parents’ purchasing decisions and wield as much as $100B in direct spending power annually.

• It’s worked for NFL media partners that have leveraged kid-friendly brands like Nickelodeon and Disney to put sports in children’s terms and encourage viewership. Gen Alpha and their parents should be a prime target market — and reaching them through activating around family-centered programming checks so many boxes. Put them in slimetime.