Advice for Nike and the NFL

It's okay to just make girls sports ads about wholesome parental involvement

Subscriber Ben with a snarky email for me. How dare he.

Hey Ethan,

I noticed there were a couple womens sports commercials during the Super Bowl and wanted to make sure you were okay (winking emoji).

Kidding aside, if you do write about this I’d be super curious to see if you can get any industry people to go on record as to why athletic brands continue to lean into girls and womens sports. There are clearly reasons; those reasons clearly go beyond some amorphous "wokeism."

Cheers,

Ben

Ben’s referring to two ads that made some waves. Nike devoted their lone Super Bowl spot to girl power, and the NFL ran a 1980’s themed flag football commercial wherein a young woman athletically triumphed over some meatheads. One of my main takeaways from the Nike ad was that it’s another instance of the company pretending Caitlin Clark is just one of many spokespeople on roster, rather than a potential billion dollar business unto herself. But that’s a post for another day.

As I said in my inaugural article for this site, there’s a clear business imperative for Nike in pitching women’s sports. Nike has a mostly male customer base, is hungry for growth, and thus is enticed by the Undecided Whale of female market share. Sure they’ve been dominant with boys and men, but what if they somehow woo the demographic that accounts for even more clothing purchases in the United States? That’s the business-minded idea, anyway.

I don’t think that currently struggling Nike is going about their strategy in the right way, which I’ll get into. The same could be said for the NFL’s girl boss-infused flag football ad. Both mega corporations are producing content that seems more fit for 2019, and such messaging didn’t even really work back then. My observation about what’s missing is simple, but the sort of people who produce ads are less liable to channel simplicity. I’m arguing for the sort of family-based sentimentality you’d get from Don Draper’s “Carousel Speech.” I got this epiphany, if you can really call it that, on Super Bowl Sunday, about a couple hours before seeing these commercials…