Women watched the Super Bowl before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce (2024)

– Taylor’s version. Among the estimated 200 million viewers of last night’s Super Bowl was a new demographic: the Swifties. With Taylor Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce’s team, the Kansas City Chiefs, in the NFL final, fans of the superstar tuned in.

Advertisers and brands took advantage of the opportunity to reach the Swiftie demographic. There were ads for products popular with young women, like e.l.f. Beauty and the female-founded soda brand Poppi. The NFL ran an ad for its merch shop that featured diverse fans wearing all kinds of football gear beyond the typical men’s jerseys (and inked a licensing deal with Kristin Juszczyk, who makes custom team apparel worn by Swift and other partners of players). There was a Verizon ad featuring Beyoncé (followed by a Beyoncé album announcement!). Cetaphil was the most on-the-nose with a pre-Super Bowl ad showing a father and daughter bonding over their new shared interest, with the dad adding friendship bracelets to his usual gameday gear and offering his daughter a jersey with Swift’s lucky number 13. The marketing rush is a sign of Swift’s singular economic power—noted by the Fed and now by Super Bowl advertisers.

And yet, while there was much hype around Taylor Swift-themed Super Bowl parties, this is hardly the first time women have watched the big game. Women made up 47% of NFL fans, according to 2020 data.

What’s new isn’t that women watched the Super Bowl, but that advertisers and the NFL acknowledged them.

In 2012, 65% of Super Bowl ads that featured women were in some way sexist, according to California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s organization the Representation Project. That stat has steadily declined over the past decade; in 2022, the most recent year with data available, 6.3% of ads with women were identified as sexist.

For advertisers to go from objectifying women to catering to them in a decade is a major shift for America’s biggest annual TV broadcast.

The NFL has courted female fans, too; last year, I interviewed Las Vegas Raiders president Sandra Douglass Morgan (who hosted the Super Bowl at Vegas’s Allegiant Stadium last night) at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit. She described her efforts not to recruit more female fans but to create a more welcoming experience for the many female fans who are already there, from a “more casual” gameday experience in the stadium to merch for women that doesn’t look like cheerleader uniforms. The Swiftie Super Bowl amped up those efforts with a superstar-sized spotlight.

Swift fans who paid close attention to their first Super Bowl hopefully enjoyed the game, with the Chiefs pulling off an overtime win. Some of the hubbub around Swift’s attendance at Chiefs games has gotten a little out of control (did Japan’s U.S. embassy really need to release a statement confirming she’d be able to make it to Vegas from her Eras tour stop in Tokyo?). But the Swiftie football season has proven that women were watching all along.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

The Broadsheet isFortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribehere.

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PARTING WORDS

"A lot of people don’t believe that some women can be feminine and sexy and smart at the same time. You just prove yourself by doing what you do best."

—Dolly Parton describing the key to her success