After Decades Of ‘Beer Babe’ Commercials, Liquor Ads Could Improve NFL’s Gender Relations (Excerpt)
Forbes
By Tara Nurin, Contributor
June 9, 2017
When the National Football League (NFL) announced last week that it would try allowing spirits companies to run commercials during games for the first time in league history, it announced a long list of restrictions along with it. Among them: a limit on the number of 30-second spots per game, including pre- and post-game coverage; no sponsorships; no targeting youth; no direct sales messaging and no football themes. Additionally, every ad has to include a prominent social responsibility message and at least 20% of game-season ads have to focus exclusively on social responsibility, whether that’s language against underage drinking or drunk driving or preaching for saving the whales or conserving water.
But there’s one notable topic that the NFL didn’t address, and that’s women. As everyone knows, women have long been relegated to sexual-object status in sports advertising, namely in beer commercials, which began crowding sports broadcasts — baseball, originally — after the 1947 World Series. Sports advertising, beer and chauvinism is so intertwined that it’s blamed for helping to establish the American concept of beer as a man’s drink. Just two years ago, Bud Light (official beer sponsor of the NFL) apologized and yanked a message on a bottle that formed part of its #Up for Whatever campaign that launched during the Super Bowl in 2015. Critics fumed at their belief that the slogan, “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night,” promoted date rape.
Point being, beer has denigrated women practically forever, and while liquor companies can’t directly pitch their product or associate it with the sport they’re financially supporting, they’re free to beam whatever gender messages they want. At first, this seemed like cause for concern. But somewhat surprisingly, instead of worrying that spirits companies might double down on beer’s sexual stereotyping, two influential women who study these trends are viewing the new advertising opportunity as a positive opportunity for women, not to mention an ideal time for advertisers and the NFL to pick up much more of the sought-after female market.
“What an opportunity to differentiate themselves in their own industry by being a spirits company that depicts women as empowered and professional and strong,” says Bernadette Casey, executive editor of PRWeek, a magazine that covers the marketing industry and produces the annual Hall of Femme awards to recognize female leaders in marketing. “When there’s a ban there’s no chance for any kind of evolving. This is the opportunity for brands to rise up and show what they can do.”
“Women are an enormous growth market for whiskey and other companies wondering, ‘How can we be a drink of choice for women?’” agrees Kat Gordon, founder of The 3% Movement, a campaign to increase the number of female creative directors from their current 11% of the total (formerly 3%).
These women say that viewers can look for positive signs in commercials’ taglines; story lines; scripts; takeaway messages; and the level of active participation by women. Questions to ask include: Are the women speaking? Is the tone respectful? Are women portrayed as empowered?
Both Casey and Gordon agree that they’re encouraged by progress over the past few years, both in beer as well as spirits advertising, which didn’t appear on TV until 1996, when Advertising Age says broadcast networks gradually dropped a self-imposed ban.
“We’ve all kind of seen that partying element. I think there’s a more important story to tell,” Casey says.