Stacey Allaster is creating a global footprint

Stacey Allaster is the new chief executive of the Women’s Tennis Association. As she finds her feet in her new role, she intends to continue the tour’s rapid commercial growth through a combination of canny marketing and global expansion.

It has been a tumultuous few weeks for Stacey Allaster following her promotion to the top of women’s tennis. She has undertaken a whirlwind tour of tournaments and key stakeholders in the Women’s Tennis Association, the organisation she now leads, having been confirmed in July as the replacement for longstanding chief executive and chair Larry Scott.

Not that Allaster is any sort of newcomer to the executive table. She previously shared leadership duties with Scott after taking up a specially created role at the WTA – the player and tournament body that controls women’s tennis – as president in 2006. As chief executive, following Scott’s surprise resignation earlier in the year, she is now tasked with continuing the rapid growth of a 51 tournament tour that currently takes in 31 countries, offers US$86 million in prize money and, in 2008, attracted 4.8 million spectators.

And the growth has been prodigious. Since 2002 the tour has reported a 500 per cent increase in sponsorship revenues, a two and a half times increase in overall revenues, a 40 per cent increase in prize money and some US$710 million investment in new and upgraded venues.

Allaster certainly has a lot to live up to, although her tennis management experience is certainly not in question – before being headhunted, the 46-year-old Canadian spent 15 years at Tennis Canada, the governing organisation of the sport in the country. Now, however, her outlook is very much an international one. “It’s been great,” she says of her first few weeks in the top job. “I’ve certainly hit the ground running. On the day my appointment was announced, by midday I was on a plane to Europe for some business development meetings. I’ve been spending time on the road and meeting with players, which is important obviously. When I’m at an event I’m also speaking with sponsors and thanking them for their investment in women’s tennis.”

Inevitably, it will be sponsorship negotiations that will, in the short-term, dominate much of Allaster’s time. In her previous role, she was largely responsible for cultivating the formidable title sponsorship deal between the WTA and mobile telecommunications firm Sony Ericsson. That deal – worth a total of US$88 million – runs until the end of the 2011 season.

Beyond that, the future, so far at least, remains unclear, though Allaster is cautiously optimistic when asked about renewal chances. “We’ve had preliminary talks before and, in the coming weeks, we’ll continue those conversations. It’s been a fantastic partnership. We’re very fortunate to have a great brand that has energised our sport, delivering great ROI for Sony Ericsson. We’re hopeful that it will continue.”

She adds: “We are hopeful they will renew and all our energies are focused on that. That being said, we realise this is a challenging economy. We’re in a different place; Sony Ericsson’s business is in a different place to when we first launched our partnership. So we will have our conversations with them where we might make changes to our partnership, recalibrate and meet their objectives.”

Understandably, Allaster describes Sony Ericsson as “a perfect partner” for the tour and suggests that a global title partnership has paved the way for much of the WTA’s recent commercial growth, not simply from a financial perspective but from an image one as well. She says: “To have such a world class brand as Sony Ericsson aligned with women’s tennis – that has been a significant lift in the growth that we’ve had over the last five and a half years. They’ve brought financial success and enhanced brand value. They really have challenged us to innovate and to be a sport that’s very accessible to its fans.” She swats away any comparison with the Association of Tennis Professionals’ (ATP) current difficulties in finding a new title sponsor to replace the departed Mercedes-Benz.

In fact, the WTA works closely with the ATP – its male equivalent – so much so that, in comments made shortly after Scott’s departure, he suggested that in order to “fully unlock the potential” of the sport the two organisations must consider merging. Allaster, generally speaking, concurs. “I do share Larry’s belief that, for our sport to truly compete against the other sports, we do need to collaborate as one sport and use all of our energy as a whole, particularly during challenging times.”

However, in reality, the logistical and contractual complexities involved make a total merger some way off. Says Allaster: “In terms of how we move forward with the ATP, I think we’ll take it one step at a time. I’m focused on the WTA Tour; Adam [Helfant, the ATP’s new chairman] is very focused on his responsibilities at the ATP Tour. There are places and opportunities for us to align operationally, whether it’s IT or HR. Other areas of business are where I think he and I are open to having further discussions.”

There is no doubt at all that the WTA has coped well with the crippling worldwide economic crisis. It has, to date, lost only one tournament sponsor from 51 – a performance that compares very favourably with other sports or leagues, some of which have struggled terribly with the previously straightforward task of retaining or attracting sponsors. Allaster believes, first and foremost, that credit should go to the players. As she puts it: “We’ve got a great product. And we’ve also got great promoters who know how to service their sponsors. They know how to recalibrate when necessary, they have long-term agreements in place, which helps. We’ll see. We’re not immune to this economic situation that the world economy is in, but I’ve just been in Toronto where we had 19 of the top 20 players, ten of ten and, now more than ever, delivering to fans and sponsors is fundamental. It can only help us going forward to have the very best product that our players deliver.”

One of the other areas that Allaster will be focusing on is developing the tour’s marketing strategy. Predictably the players remain central to those plans. Last year, the tour unveiled its multi-million dollar ‘Looking for a Hero’ campaign, which showcased more than 50 players. The campaign, which covered print media as well as television advertising, reputedly cost US$15 million to develop and roll out.
A year on from the launch, Allaster explains that the next phase of implementation will have a digital focus. “It’s definitely a priority of ours,” she says. “In 2009, it has evolved with the addition of our digital exploitation of the campaign, so it might be viral videos, a game on our website, the launch of the new website – we launched that and integrated the whole campaign in that website. We really believe that the digital space is where we’ve got a significant opportunity to promote our athletes and to allow them to engage with younger fans through the digital world.”

She adds: “We need to assist the athletes with their brand building project, so the more we can do cooperatively – they have their business, they have their own marketing effort that we can complement – we want to be doing more of that for them.”

Currently, as well as the four Grand Slam tournaments each year, the ATP and WTA are, as Allaster puts it, “inextricably linked” through several combined tournaments, or back-to-back events. The two bodies also work together on tennistv.com, an online streaming service for fans in certain territories around the world. But, despite the collaboration, Allaster insists that the two remain commercial competitors, sometimes vying for the same sponsors. “There’s no doubt that they’re in the marketplace selling the ATP Tour and we’re in the marketplace selling the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour.”

Given the fanfare of the combined ATP/WTA tournaments – they are by some margin the most popular events of the year – Allaster makes it clear that they remain an integral part of the WTA’s future growth strategy. “When we were building our own new circuit structures, we had combined events as part of our strategy,” she explains. “We know that our sport shines very brightly when the men and women are on the same stage. You just have to look at the most successful events in tennis, the Grand Slams, and look at our top four events: the BNP Paribas in Indian Wells; Sony Ericsson Open in Miami; Mutua Madrilena in Madrid; and the China Open – the largest stages, equal prize money and our top events being aligned.”

A more recent point of contention for Allaster has been Dinara Safina’s ascent to the top of the world rankings. Whilst undoubtedly a talented player, critics seized on the fact that, at the time of writing, the Russian had achieved the position despite having so far failed to secure a Grand Slam title. Allaster, however, has a message for those critics: “This has been a long debate,” she says with just a touch of weariness. “It’s not the first time that the ranking system has had a number one that hasn’t won a Grand Slam. But what we know is that it is the combination of the Grand Slams and the tour events, and it is a 52-week rolling average. Through that, we know that on a consistent basis Dinara Safina is playing the best. I respect that fans will decide in their own minds and their own hearts who’s number one but, on a statistical level based on our ranking system, it is Dinara Safina.”

She adds: “I think the rankings system is one of those mechanisms that we don’t make a lot of changes to because it is fundamental to the business. I am in my own mind thinking about how we might look at things a little differently. For example, should we be promoting more of a money leader like some of the other leagues do? If you look at the top money leaders, Serena Williams is currently top. I think we have a ranking system and we should explore at all times what is important to fans.”

Indeed, despite the continuing debate over the rankings and the perception that the WTA Tour currently lacks a Roger Federer/Rafael Nadal-style rivalry to galvanise public interest, Allaster believes that the tour still has a “fantastic product”, and the lack of a dominant figure makes it all the more compelling. “I always find the sport goes in cycles. You got through the cycle of having one or two superstars like Roger and Rafa – we had Steffi [Graf] and Monica [Seles], Chrissy [Evert] and Martina [Navratilova]. Then fans begin to get a little tired of that – the same two always winning.

"We have the inverse of that right now, where we have all of this depth with a wide array of the very best athletes – we have Venus and Serena [Williams], two of the finest players we will ever see in the history of women’s tennis; we have the dominance of the Russians with Dinara Safina, Elena Dementieva, Svetlana Kuznetsova; then we’ve got some fantastic rising stars with [Caroline] Wozniacki, [Victoria] Azarenka, [Agnieszka] Radwanska; and then we have our comeback players with Maria [Sharapova] working incredibly hard off the court to strengthen her shoulder, and Kim Clijsters. It’s a great thrill to have Kim back on the tour and it proves what a great champion she is.” The fact she doesn’t feel the need to mention the likes of Jelena Jankovic or Ana Ivanovic merely serves to underline her point.

Allaster also has big ideas about expanding the WTA – already a 51-stop tour – geographically. Asia is one of her major targets. “We now have our Beijing office there and we see it as a top priority to be in that market, build our fanbase, build our brand, work with our partners at the China Open – one of our mandatory equal prize money – and make that event even bigger,” she says. “That, I think, will provide a great foundation and, as the Chinese players continue to rise through the ranks as they are, we will have a very, very good equation for growing women’s tennis in China.”

India and Brazil are two other specific countries into which Allaster would like to make inroads. “We want a global footprint, a real global footprint,” she says. “That means having a business strategy in India and Brazil, two massive economies where at the moment we don’t have a presence.”

As for Allaster’s long-term goals as the tour’s leader, she simply says: I think [the targets are] driving financial success for our members, players and tournaments; seeing prize money well exceed US$100 million between Grand Slams and tour money; looking at China as a robust market for women’s tennis with lots of growth and excitement; and seeing that we have financially-successful tournaments that have stable and growing operating budgets.
“In the long term those are critical for the WTA Tour.”

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