Does women’s sport advertising need to stop trying so hard?
There’s heaps of exciting new work coming out in celebration of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, but Shadi Sarreshtehdarzadeh, strategy director at 72andSunny ANZ, wonders if the temporary buzz masks a serious problem.
With the FIFA Women’s World Cup kicking off today, we’ll see an influx of advertising featuring women’s football. Amazing.
Sports advertising is the best. It’s full of emotion and it speaks to us on a real human level. It’s epic. But when it comes to advertising women’s sport, it feels like we’ve been so focused on the inequality, that we’re not treating women’s football equally.
The work’s been mostly focused on levelling the playing field, and it’s been brilliant.
We’ve had work that raises awareness of the disparities between men’s and women’s football from UN Women & Paulista Football Federation shining the light on the gender pay gap with Scoreboard for change.
We’ve had work that encourages men to take accountability for the problem from EE and Saatchi & Saatchi in the UK with Not Her Problem.
We’ve had incredible work inspiring women to get into football from Nike and W+K with Never Settle, Never Done.
And there’s heaps of exciting new work coming out in celebration of this year’s event, the epic Adidas work Play Until They Can’t Look Away being a prime example of celebrating women in football.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a huge inequality problem, and work needs to be done to combat it.
There’s the gender pay gap. Some countries are doing better than others, but even in Australia where we have the smallest salary pay gap and a groundbreaking equality agreement for revenue profit splits, women are still paid on average -549% less than men.
More crucially though, there’s a huge wave of sexism and misogyny. Despite the hype surrounding the Lionesses in Euro 2022, it’s been reported that there’s been a 400% increase in sexist and misogynistic online abuse. Why would any woman choose to sign themselves up for that?
But if we really want to achieve equality, we need to be focusing on normalising women playing sport, creating behaviour change through social norming by treating it the same way we treat men’s sport – as a regular, every day activity.
When we point fingers at men for being the problem, they will only point fingers back at us – the misogynistic abuse female footballers receive is rooted in defensiveness from men. ‘Male footballers get paid more than women’ is rebutted with ‘women don’t play as well as men’ etc. It’s easy to get defensive when you feel like you’re being attacked.
Only by seeing women playing more frequently are men going to feel more comfortable with the concept of women kicking balls (depending on the type of ball). 72andSunny LA’s Diane Flores spot at the Superbowl was a prime example of this – the world’s biggest sporting event, that’s all about men, with NFL’s big spot of the year, and rather than focus on the male game, it heroes a female player and the female sport. It’s not about inequality, it’s just badass. Here at 72andSunny Aus, we’re trying to do more of it ourselves, with our Google x AFL spot, placing a girl in a role that would stereotypically be filled with a boy. And let’s not forget the iconic Nike American Woman spot that paved the way for womens football almost a decade ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLNZdPDb5ps
As an industry, we need to move on and shift the focus from raising awareness to true behaviour change. We need to make women’s sport a normal, every day activity, in the same way that it is for men.
Let’s start by showing it all year round. Sure, ramp it up when there’s a big event on, but if we want women to be taking up sport, they need to be seeing it all year round as a regular activity.
Let’s show the male players that are idolised around the world supporting and cheering on female players, like Messi in the latest spot The Bud is Hers to Take from Budweiser.
Let’s focus on celebrating women playing sport, rather than pointing the finger at what’s holding them back. Positivity breeds positivity, and vice versa.
Because if we’re going to move women’s sport forward, we need to stop focusing on the negative and start focusing on the positive.
And most importantly, let’s show us ladies kicking balls and kicking ass.
Shadi Sarreshtehdarzadeh is strategy director at 72andSunny ANZ.
