Years before Taylor Swift attended that first storied NFL game in Kansas City in 2023, female viewership of the game was growing. But despite the uptick in female fandom and viewership, most Super Bowl ads don’t feature women in central roles.
In 2024, the number of women aged 18-24 who tuned into the Big Game jumped by a reported 24%. And since 2021, women’s favorability toward the NFL increased by 13 points, rising to 55% in January, according to marketing intelligence firm Morning Consult.
But while Taylor Swift’s courtship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce undoubtedly drew a new audience of viewers to the game in a phenomenon that observers have dubbed the Taylor Swift effect, the pop star was adding to double-digit growth in female viewership that the NFL first witnessed five years ago, said Marissa Solis, svp of global brand and consumer marketing for the NFL.
“In those last five years, even before the Taylor Swift effect, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth in female fandom and viewership,” Solis told ADWEEK.
Women represent 49% of Super Bowl viewers, Solis said. But so far, Super Bowl advertisers have failed to adapt to those changing demographics, according to data from market research firm Zappi. One way to measure female representation in films is with the Bechdel test. For a movie to pass, it must include two or more women talking to each other about something other than a man. While not always applicable to 30- or 60-second ads, the test is a framework for understanding representation in culture.
Female representation is falling
Women appeared in 78% of Super Bowl ads last year, but only 28% showed women in a central role, according to Zappi’s data. That’s a drop from 32% in 2023, pre-Taylor Swift effect. Similarly, ads where women had a speaking or narrating role dropped from 64% to 54% between 2023 and 2025.
“Women are now half the audience, but rarely the center of the story in the ads,” Nataly Kelly, chief marketing officer at Zappi, told ADWEEK. “So they’re on screen, but they’re not driving the narrative.”
Zappi’s data measures whether ads are holding viewers attention, invoking an emotional response, and increasing a viewer’s inclination to purchase.
In terms of what ads women liked best, they like ads targeted to a broad audience, according to Zappi. Four of the top five top ads ranked among women were also ranked in the top five ads overall. By comparison, just two of of the top ranked ads among men were in the top five ads overall.
