Women watched the Super Bowl before Taylor Swift. But now advertisers are paying attention

– Taylor’s version. Among the estimated 200 million viewers of last night’s Super Bowl was a new demographic: the Swifties. With Taylor Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce’s team, the Kansas City Chiefs, in the NFL final, fans of the superstar tuned in.

Advertisers and brands took advantage of the opportunity to reach the Swiftie demographic. There were ads for products popular with young women, like e.l.f. Beauty and the female-founded soda brand Poppi. The NFL ran an ad for its merch shop that featured diverse fans wearing all kinds of football gear beyond the typical men’s jerseys (and inked a licensing deal with Kristin Juszczyk, who makes custom team apparel worn by Swift and other partners of players). There was a Verizon ad featuring Beyoncé (followed by a Beyoncé album announcement!). Cetaphil was the most on-the-nose with a pre-Super Bowl ad showing a father and daughter bonding over their new shared interest, with the dad adding friendship bracelets to his usual gameday gear and offering his daughter a jersey with Swift’s lucky number 13. The marketing rush is a sign of Swift’s singular economic power—noted by the Fed and now by Super Bowl advertisers.

And yet, while there was much hype around Taylor Swift-themed Super Bowl parties, this is hardly the first time women have watched the big game. Women made up 47% of NFL fans, according to 2020 data.

What’s new isn’t that women watched the Super Bowl, but that advertisers and the NFL acknowledged them.

In 2012, 65% of Super Bowl ads that featured women were in some way sexist, according to California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s organization the Representation Project. That stat has steadily declined over the past decade; in 2022, the most recent year with data available, 6.3% of ads with women were identified as sexist.

For advertisers to go from objectifying women to catering to them in a decade is a major shift for America’s biggest annual TV broadcast.

The NFL has courted female fans, too; last year, I interviewed Las Vegas Raiders president Sandra Douglass Morgan (who hosted the Super Bowl at Vegas’s Allegiant Stadium last night) at the Coins2Day Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit. She described her efforts not to recruit more female fans but to create a more welcoming experience for the many female fans who are already there, from a “more casual” gameday experience in the stadium to merch for women that doesn’t look like cheerleader uniforms. The Swiftie Super Bowl amped up those efforts with a superstar-sized spotlight.

Swift fans who paid close attention to their first Super Bowl hopefully enjoyed the game, with the Chiefs pulling off an overtime win. Some of the hubbub around Swift’s attendance at Chiefs games has gotten a little out of control (did Japan’s U.S. Embassy really need to release a statement confirming she’d be able to make it to Vegas from her Eras tour stop in Tokyo?). But the Swiftie football season has proven that women were watching all along.

Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe

The Broadsheet is  Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

- Logging off. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker announced she is resigning from the search engine and handing it off to interim CEO Laura Chambers in a rare example of women succeeding women in the C-suite. Baker will redirect her efforts to AI and internet safety as chair of the corporation’s nonprofit while Chambers, who previously worked at companies like Airbnb and PayPal, leads the search for a permanent CEO. Coins2Day

- Discrimination at TikTok. The former head of global business marketing at TikTok filed an age- and sex-based discrimination lawsuit last week against the platform and ByteDance, its parent company. Katie Ellen Puris, who was fired in 2022, claims she was let go because she didn’t exhibit the “docility and weakness” that company executives, including ByteDance chairmen Lidong Zhang, expected of female employees. TikTok declined to comment on the suit. Coins2Day

- Pill paper pulled. A study previously used to argue that the mifepristone abortion pill caused significant health complications was retracted last week after its publisher uncovered “a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors’ conclusions.” A federal judge used the paper in a ruling against the pill last year, but it will now be inadmissible when that same case goes before the Supreme Court in the near future. James Studnicki, the paper’s lead author, has defended his research. NPR

- Pedal to the medal. Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas announced that she’s returning to the sport this month for the Winter Cup in Louisville after eight years off of the mat. Douglas holds three Olympic gold medals to her name and now hopes to use her Winter Cup performance as momentum for a possible spot on the 2024 Olympic team. Washington Post

- Where women work. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that women made up 46.9% of the American workforce in 2023 and accounted for almost all of the country's skincare specialists and Pre-K and Kindergarten teachers. Women also accounted for nearly 96% of dental hygienists and 94.3% of speech language pathologists. Wall Street Journal

ON MY RADAR

15 years ago, Jennifer's Body flopped. Now, Diablo Cody's trying again Bustle

Xi has no place in women’s bedrooms Bloomberg

When mental health treatment becomes a political identity The New York Times

PARTING WORDS

"A lot of people don’t believe that some women can be feminine and sexy and smart at the same time. You just prove yourself by doing what you do best."

—Dolly Parton describing the key to her success