The demographics of Super Bowl viewers is changing but are the ads?

Spurred on by the #metoo and other similar movements, the past several months have been extremely influential in the push for women’s rights and equality. And that was reflected in the Super Bowl LII advertisements, however, the men still stole the show when it came to the advertisements.

This year’s Super Bowl commercials featured few — if any — advertisements that suggested stereotypical or sexist themes that could be construed as derogatory to women. On the surface that sounds like a good thing, right? Well, what appears to have happened was many advertisers, in what was most likely in an effort to avoid controversy, decided to just remove women from the narrative of the advertisements all together. And while, yes, that avoids stereotyping women and the correlating controversy, it does little to solve any inequality issues.

To prove that point, men appeared in advertisements more than twice as many times as women, according to Jeanine Poggi’s article, Super Bowl so male. One could possibly attribute such inequality to viewer demographics that reflects a dominate male audience. But for the Super Bowl this year, that simply was not the case; there was nearly an even split of viewership between men and women. According to Rob Salkowitz’s article, Data Shows Women Paid More Attention To Super Bowl LII Than Men, of the approximately 100+ million people that watched the game, or 49% were women; that is up by nine percent from the 2009 Super Bowl.

Beyond the even audience distribution, there is really no reason for gender disparity in advertising because there is little reason to believe that a female character can not be as influential as male character. For example, the book, Media Effects Research: A Basic Overview, by Glenn G. Sparks featured research by Richard Jackson Harris that concluded that voice-overs by a male voice have no more persuasion effect than a female voice.

And this sort of information begs for an explanation; why are advertisers not adapting to the changing demographic?

Answering the why is rather difficult, if not impossible, because we, the media consumers, are unable to fully understand the advertisers’ thoughts. We are, however, able to other solutions. And a solution is needed because if inequality is portrayed through the media, a construction of social reality may influence the spread of a message that always puts men in power.

Thankfully one solution is actually quite simple, it will just require some creative, out of the box thinking. There is nothing — other than a lack of creativity — stopping marketers from replacing some male characters with female characters. No need to portray the genders in different ways, just use an equal gender distribution of characters. If a movement is made to reach equality in Super Bowl advertisements — or really all advertisements — advertisers may be more likely to equally represent men and women in advertisements. And that is much better than than decreasing stereotypes by removing women all together from ads.

The change really isn’t that big, but it could yield a much healthier society in the future. So, as consumers of media, our challenge is to hold advertisers to a high standard of equality, not just an avoidance of stereotypes.

After all, women do control a majority of purchasing decisions.