Lilly and Amazon Ads partnered on a campaign starring basketball legend Candace Parker that debuted during a WNBA on Prime doubleheader on July 30. Built in close collaboration between Lilly and Amazon Ads' creative strategists and sports-brand partnership team, it is a useful snapshot of where women's sports marketing is heading.
The 30-second spot features Parker in a basketball practice facility, depicting her across roles — wife, mother, president, owner, hustler, winner, analyst and trailblazer — as she discusses the importance of her health on and off the court. Parker is also an analyst for Prime Video's WNBA coverage and is set to be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this month.
The campaign follows Lilly's "Start How You Can" work from May featuring WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark, created with Wieden+Kennedy Portland. The Indiana-based pharmaceutical company is also the jersey patch sponsor of Clark's Indiana Fever.
"Women's sports are at the center of culture, and conversations about health belong there too," said Lina Polimeni, senior vice president and consumer CMO at Lilly. "For 150 years, Lilly has broken through barriers, always pushing toward what comes next. That's the same grit that's made women's sports one of the most exciting stories in culture today, and it's exactly where we want to be — not just as a sponsor on the sidelines, but a partner invested in where the game is going."
Amy McDevitt, head of sports partnerships at Amazon Ads, explained the mechanic: "We see that brands stand out more when they're leveraging our own talent to tell their stories during the live events. It tells the viewer, 'This brand gets me because they know I'm watching this content and they're delivering me a message using some of the same experts in their creative.'"
Mercedes-Benz USA ran a similar play with Amazon Ads previously. Lilly's version spans marketing services and talent, showing how storytelling-led advertising works on the platform.
The WNBA has aired on Prime Video since 2021. In 2024 the streamer and the league signed an 11-year rights agreement, effective this season, giving Prime Video exclusive rights to stream 30 regular-season games annually. Amazon applies Nielsen measurement to the WNBA as it does to its other live sports.
This year Prime Video has, for the first time, a full slate of shoulder programming — pregame, halftime and postgame — for both the WNBA and NWSL, with WNBA on Prime using the same studio as NBA on Prime. That parity of presentation matters as brand interest in women's sports grows.
Amazon Ads is nearly sold out of inventory for both leagues, McDevitt said. "In certain cases, we're having to build incremental opportunities… so that we can answer the demand. Brands don't want to just run their commercials — they want to surround and be more organic in the sport, so we're trying to give them multiple ways to do that."
Live sports on Prime Video in Q2 2026 helped lift Amazon's advertising segment to $19.8 billion in revenue. Brands activating across multiple sports saw 2.3x higher unduplicated reach than single-sport advertisers, and multisport viewers drove 12% higher spend and 17% more orders on Amazon.
The transferable idea is not sponsorship — it is getting inside the programming. Casting the broadcast's own analyst in the ad ties the spot to the context around it and removes the jarring switch that sends viewers away. It only works where the platform controls the talent, so the equivalent elsewhere is co-production with the rights holder.
The 2.3x multisport reach figure is a usable budget argument. For why streamers are pivoting to live events at all, see Streaming Services Turn to Live Sports and Concerts.
It casts Candace Parker, a Prime Video WNBA analyst, in the ad itself, so the creative connects directly to the broadcast context viewers are already watching.
Brands running across multiple sports saw 2.3x higher unduplicated reach than single-sport advertisers, and multisport viewers spent 12% more and placed 17% more orders on Amazon.
An 11-year rights deal signed in 2024 gives Prime Video exclusive streaming rights to 30 regular-season games per season, plus full pregame, halftime and postgame programming this year.
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