This year Novartis has tapped comedian Wanda Sykes for its first-ever Super Bowl ad to push women to get screened for breast cancer. Coffee mate has tapped Shania Twain for its game day debut. Uber Eats has paired Charli XCX with Martha Stewart for some brat messaging. Hellmann’s is reviving When Harry Met Sally.
The relationship between Super Bowl advertisers and women viewers has run the course of many a rom-com: from catching feelings, to the misunderstandings on the road to true love. Whether the happy ending is ahead is still a work in progress we will see play out in this year’s game.
The creative messages have begun to shift in recent years to attract the female audience in what is arguably the last live mass-media event. “Sure, there are still cowboys staring off into the middle distance here and there and the occasional action celebrity busting through a wall and screaming for no apparent reason,” said Tara Lawall, chief creative officer at agency Rethink. “But overall the content of Super Bowl spots is catered to a wider audience.”
The 2024 game put the female audience front-and-center. Observers have called it “The Taylor Swift Effect,” but female viewership of the game has been on the rise for more than a decade before the singer showed up in the skyboxes to watch her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, help Kansas City win.
“I’ve been watching football with my dad since I was eight years old,” said Val DiFebo, CEO of DNY (formerly Deutsch NY). She noted P&G’s Always feminine hygiene products advertised in the 2015 Super Bowl. “Generally men run away when they see that brand, so I think that marketers like Procter & Gamble always looked at the numbers and said: ‘There’s a female audience here, let’s talk to them.'”
It’s all part of the overall focus on women’s participation in sports and fandom, said Donna Murphy, Global CEO of Havas Creative Network. She noted that many Super Bowl ads, even if not implicitly targeting women, are presenting messages that are more inclusive of them. Havas created last year’s Super Bowl ad for Silk that featured actor Jeremy Renner interacting with his daughter. Among this year’s ads, she noted how the Reese’s spot Hershey has planned for the game features a woman in a hero role.
Not that Swift hasn’t moved the needle, though. Ipsos research found that while the female viewership of last year’s Super Bowl was slightly higher than the previous year, the number of women watching the telecast through the end spiked significantly. Additionally, they reported a higher intent to watch this year’s game, said IPSOS’s Senior VP Lisa Zielinski.
“The Taylor Swift effect is really about keeping those eyeballs on the game throughout the entire thing,” she said. “You could say we saw just more emphatic viewing last year versus in 2023.”
The NFL has been aware of this trend for some time, too. Last year, the league inked a deal with Betches Media to create content targeting Millennial and Gen Z women fans.
“We will be on site during Super Bowl week, creating quite a bit of content, both organically as well as with brand partners,” said Arisara Srisethnil, VP of Marketing at Betches Media. The platform launched its Betches Sports vertical in late 2024, in time for the football playoffs, and has been building to this occasion, she said.
Betches plans to “bring to market that second-screen experience” with content around the game that includes both action on the field and behind-the scenes content before and after the game, including coverage on the Betches Sports page and long-form content in the Betches YouTube channel. Women follow the Super Bowl as much as men—Srisethnil estimated 90% of the Betches audience follows football—but she said “knowing that typical sports media is typically run by men, we just are the women creating the content for women.”
As Betches demonstrates, it’s not only the spots in the game that are aiming at women; the increased level of amplification—on social media and in experiential activations around the game—are also showing a feminine side. This second-screen experience offers brands a further opportunity to connect with women, said observers.
Barefoot Wine, which has been an NFL sponsor since 2022, teamed up with influencers including Donna Kelce and Allison Kuch to release content around the Super Bowl. The wine category is expanding, adding nearly 2 million wine drinkers in the 2023-24 season alone, and women are a big part of it, noted Beth Orozco, vice president of marketing at Barefoot Wine parent Gallo.
“Football has always been about bringing people together, and more than ever, we’re seeing new fans—especially women—join the conversation,” said Orozco.
“All eyeballs are on you”
Unilever’s Dove brand, which had been absent from the Super Bowl since 2006, returned last year with a spot about girls’ sports. Known for its body-positive female empowerment messages, Dove had been in the Super Bowl with its groundbreaking “Real Beauty” campaign, which was featured in the 2006 game.
Other advertisers have also teased spots with a feminine quality. Uber Eats teased a spot featuring lifestyle guru Martha Stewart and singer Charli XCX comparing notes with the tagline “We listen and we don’t judge.” Nestle’s Coffee mate creamer also teased a spot starring Shania Twain, showing off a cheetah print-clad bottle.
The fact that Nestle has created cheetah-print packaging for Coffee Mate’s first Super Bowl appearance is a sign of its focus on women consumers, because launching an SKU for a product takes some effort, said Murphy. Putting a package on store shelves is a sign of committing to a consumer segment and “I don’t see my brother purchasing the cheetah cowboy coffee milk,” she said.
Focusing on women during the biggest TV audience of the year should be a no-brainer, say insiders. Women are responsible for 85% of consumer decisions, noted Murphy of Havas. “There has been a loud acknowledgment that women are a brand growth driver,” said Christine Guilfoyle, president of SeeHer, an initiative to eliminate gender bias in marketing.
“We are starting to see some progress, but to be honest, many missed the mark in 2024,” said Guilfoyle. She noted that while 92% of last year’s ads included female characters, women viewers were not impressed. Only one third of ads tested scored over the benchmark established by SeeHer’s Gender Equality Measure for showing women role models.
“If you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, you have to know all eyeballs are on you,” said Ipsos’ Zielinski. Brands tend to take a wide swing to reach the widest possible audience, but they will be looking at the content of their ads to avoid turning off women, she said.
Humor is a reliable go-to in Super Bowl ads, and Zielinski noted Ipsos research found women also respond to humor, but humorous ads tend to score lower on gender equality measures. It depends on how women are portrayed, she said.
“Is the humor directed at them? Are they the butt of the joke or are they delivering the joke?” she said. “Those are important things for them to be thinking about in terms of the character portrayal in the ad, if they want to resonate more with women. Because we know that positive portrayal of women in advertising is a way of driving effectiveness of advertising overall.”
Targeting women doesn’t necessarily require retooling all the messages to attract them, say insiders. Women respond to most of the same messages as men, as long as they don’t consider them sexist and offensive, said observers, and the messages also have to be in the context of the brand’s overall focus on women the rest of the year.
“You can’t be a two-headed monster, right?” said DNY’s DiFebo “You can’t profess that you recognize women are watching the Super Bowl and then be a company that doesn’t respect women.”
