Super Bowl’s sexy ads take a back seat to Me Too
A mainstay for years, tactic can often backfire
Sex sells, or so it is often said. But is it true?
None of the Super Bowl ads available for preview before the game employed the sort of overtly sexualized commercials that were a mainstay for years for some Super Bowl advertisers.
Rebecca Ortiz, assistant professor of advertising at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, says that’s not only because of the Me Too movement. She says the trend away from such ads began a few years ago, largely because of academic research suggesting that sex, in fact, does not sell.
“So people may pay attention to a sexualized ad — they’re like, ‘Oh, wow, what is this?’ — and then they may walk away not remembering” the ad’s message, Ortiz says. And other consumers, she says, particularly women, can be left with a negative impression.
The domain-registration site GoDaddy used overtly sexualized commercials on Super Bowls to go from unknown to a recognized name, Ortiz says, but she says in the aggregate most companies do not benefit from such ads — or, worse, are hurt by them.
The Me Too movement made it even
more perilous for companies to consider overtly sexualized ads for this year’s Super Bowl.
“No brand wants to, at best, be accused of being tone deaf or at worst become added fuel to the fire,” says Shawn McBride, executive vice president, sports, at Ketchum Sports and Entertainment.
“I imagine advertisers this time thought, ‘Let’s not even go there,’ ” Ortiz says.
Ads released in advance of the game indicated many more men appearing in Super Bowl ads than women, by as much as 2-to-1 by some counts.
“I do not see this as a byproduct of brands not wanting to be inclusive,” McBride says, “but rather the result of sensitivities in how women have been historically portrayed in Super Bowl advertising and in the current environment, no brand wanting to misstep or be perceived as out of touch with the times. And while this sentiment — including eliminating the objectification of women — is noble, perhaps the attempted execution is lacking as it relates to this year’s batch of ads.”
NBC’s Winter Olympics ad on skier Mikaela Shiffrin plays like a minimovie and is a feel-good testament to female empowerment.
It highlights her motto growing up — always be faster than the boys — in a fast-paced ad set to Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode.
Its theme carried echoes of last year’s Audi ad, in which a father watches his daughter racing past boys in a cart race as he worries about her equal place in the workforce once she grows up. That ad looked good, but critics quickly pointed to Audi’s mixed record on promoting women to leadership roles in the company.
“I think as companies continue to navigate these issues, day-in and dayout, they are definitely hesitant to make any kind of statement or take any kind of position in their advertising that could backfire and result in reputational risk to their brand,” McBride says.