Advertisers Ignore Millions of Viewers

Article: Women Comprise Large Part of the Sports Audience
 
Tom Van Riper, Forbes.com

Trucks, Wrangler Jeans, and Danica Patrick teasing to take her clothes off… If you watch football on Sunday’s you will see commercials for these products played ad nauseam, and the logic behind this practice is one of the basic laws of advertising – niche marketing.

Advertisers target programming for their commercials that they feel resonate with a specific audience. A show on Lifetime may be accompanied by commercials for dippers and JC Penny while the same show on FX may show commercials for ties and video games. In this vein, advertisers assume that men make up the vast majority of the sports watching population; therefore, both the products showcased and the way certain commodities are depicted reflect that assumption.

This logic, however, is not quite as hegemonic as advertisers make it seem.

According to a study by Tom Van Ripe of Forbes.com, “Females account for more than a third of 14 million-plus people that tune into major events like the NBA Finals, World Series, Daytona 500, and Stanley Cup Finals according to data from Nielsen Media Research.”

Even more impressive than this stat line, a whopping 45.9% of the 111 million viewers who tuned in to the Super Bowl in February were female. These more than 50 million women tuned in to watch the game for sure, but they were also treated to a healthy does of commercials depicting men eating pizza, men going to bars, men driving cars, men playing fantasy football, men eating Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, and grilling an assortment of brats and burgers on stainless steel grills.

Women make up a larger than expected proportion of the population watching sports, particularly the Big Three of football, baseball, and basketball, but advertising continues to reflect the age old ideology of sports as being a male-oriented cult.

So what does this mean for niche marketing? Are advertisers failing to capitalize on a a fairly substantial female, sports-watching population by not throwing in a tampon commercial between ones about big, beefy trucks?

Not necessarily. As Stephen Master, head of Neilson Sports, points out, “The mass audience for big sports events tends to cater to mass consumer goods, many of which can appeal to both sexes. Those Budweiser ads are aimed at men. But with women in charge of the grocery shopping in most households.”

Master’s point is certainly true, but brushes past what I find to be the core of the problem with advertising during major sporting events – even for mass consumer products, they fall far short of the line I would consider to be gender neutral.

Take this Miller Light commercial for example.

Miller Light Unmanly Choice Commercial 

In the spot, a team of busty bathing-suit clad women “rescue” someone from the “unmanly” decision of drinking a light beer that isn’t Miller Light. Beer would be considered a commercial product, as it is something both women and men enjoy. This commercial, however, targets a specifically male audience by using sexy women to paint the picture of drinking Miller Light as manly.

While this commercial is only one example, the fact remains that if women make up millions of viewers and, as Master’s depicts, are the ones “buying the groceries,” why do advertisements for commercial products like Pizza Hut, Coors Light, and Buffalo Wild Wings continue to either objectify or omit women entirely?

The reason is simple. Advertisers still believe the in hegemonic notion of sports consumption as a strictly “male thing to do,” and despite the fact that women – particularly since the 1990‘s – have rapidly closed the gender gap, advertisers view the pairing of men and sports as something common sense, and commercial’s content, not necessarily the products themselves, reflect this.

A football game is not the place for strictly female-oriented advertising, but as the Neilson ratings point out, it is not the place for strictly male dominated commercials either. If advertising truly wanted to target the audience tuning into the programming, they should neutralize their advertising campaigns.