So what’s behind the sudden shift? It seems like advertisers are finally realizing they need to start paying more attention to women. Last year, 47% of Super Bowl viewers were women, and as we know, women control 85% of consumer spending. Clearly, advertising to women during the Super Bowl is just good business sense. If those numbers aren’t convincing enough, there’s also the fact that women are much more active on social media; as Kat Gordon put it “Ads with female appeal = best return on $4 million price-tag.”

While the effort to turn down the sexist messages in the ads is truly appreciated, we still had to wonder what caused so many of this year’s ads to fall flat? Our best guess is that when you take male-focused, and often sexist, humor off the table, you’re left with a lot of male creative directors who don’t know what to do other than turn to what they think is the only thing women will respond to: emotion. This year’s Super Bowl is another blatant example of why agencies need to increase the number of women creative directors (which is currently at a measly 11%). Women respond to more than just sappy messages, we promise! You just need the right women to show you how to do it.

Finally, while these ads are a great first step, let’s remember that they are just that, a first step. Ann Friedman put it well in her New York Magazine article: “[The Ads] open up a great opportunity to press the advertisers for details on how they’re putting their purported ideals into practice. How much of its annual profit is Always diverting to girls’ empowerment programs? What sort of paternity-leave policies are in place at Dove and Nissan — and do those companies support better federal family-leave laws for all parents? How is the NFL changing its policies, not just its messaging, toward players who abuse their partners?”

One thing is for sure, we’re making progress. We think that 2015 will see even more women use their voice (and dollar) to demand change, and hopefully next year’s Super Bowl will be filled with advertisers that are doing more to really understand women.

Regardless of what happens on the field there are a few reasons why this Super Bowl is unique.

1. You can stream it for free
NBC will stream the entire game online and on the NBC Sports Live app for free. This will be the second time that NBC streams the game but it’s the first time that they will include the pregame and halftime show coverage. The halftime show will also be live-streamed on YouTube.
2. It will air in Spanish
For the first time ever the Super Bowl will air live in Spanish. NBC will broadcast the game on their Spanish language network mun2 which will be relaunched as NBC Universo on February 1st. The vast majority of the advertisers bought spots on both NBC and NBC Universo. It is expected that some will air their English ads while others are said to have created unique Spanish ads.
3. More focus on women
No doubt it’s been a tough year for the NFL. This season they faced issues of domestic violence, child abuse and rape. These stories, and the way the NFL handled them, made some women question their allegiance to this league and the advertisers who stood with it. The NFL has done a great deal to try and make things right and now advertisers are stepping up with ads that acknowledge the sport’s growing female fan base. Last year 45% of Super Bowl viewers were female and this year’s halftime show (with Katy Perry as the headline performer) and the ads that will air during the game are expected to reflect that executives have taken notice of those numbers.

Whether you watch the game because you love the sport or the because you love the ads, this is sure to be an exciting one. We’re looking forward to see who wins big both on and off the field!

Women who love this sport have long dealt with being misunderstood and underrepresented; we turned a blind eye to the fact that the NFL and those surrounding it didn’t really care about us. We’ve dealt with being offered mostly pink jerseys and bejeweled shirts (this was finally fixed this year), we’ve dealt with being misrepresented in commercials like this one for NFL Fantasy football or this one from Fox Sports, and we’ve dealt with being talked down to from sites like ESPN. However, the days of turning a blind eye and shrugging it off have come to an end.

We can no longer blindly support a league that hands out four-game suspensions for taking Adderall and two-game suspensions for knocking your wife unconscious. How should we interpret and react to this? Do we boycott? As Katie Nolan from Fox put it, boycotting will simply “remove the critical thinkers from the conversation.” So while boycotting probably isn’t the best solution, we do need to call the NFL to task, and although that may start with Goodell, it certainly does not end there. The problem is bigger than Goodell, the Ray Rice situation isn’t a one time issue but the result of a systematic problem in the league.

Does that mean that Goodell shouldn’t get fired? Absolutely not. Getting rid of Goodell would be a good start. Not because he dropped the ball this one time, but because in 2012 he identified the rising number of players being arrested for domestic violence (the most common crime for which NFL players are arrested) and promised to do something about it. Not only did he not do anything about it, he continued to let players get away with it.

Whether Goodell stays or goes we, as women and as football fans, need to make sure that the league continues to address this issue long after the media is tired of reporting about it. So far the NFL has provided $3 million of promotional time for anti-domestic violence campaign ads. The league also pledged a multiyear, multimillion-dollar commitment of money and other resources to the National Domestic Violence hotline, which has seen an 84% spike in calls since the Rice video was made public. We’ll pretend for a second that this isn’t just a huge PR scramble to make people feel better about football and call these actions a good start. But we need more. We need the NFL to send a clear message to players that this behavior will not be tolerated. But that means they need to provide players a place to get help if they feel prone to getting violent. The NFL must educate players early on how to treat women and deal with anger. You have to be aggressive to play football, so let’s make sure these players know how to handle that aggressiveness when they’re not on the field. And let’s get to players as soon as the problem starts manifesting itself. A perfect example is Jameis Winston; he’ll most likely play in the NFL one day but he’s already acting out and getting away with it. This is the perfect time to offer him some serious guidance because pretending his behavior is not going to get worse is simply laughable and as Goodell himself put it “ignorance is not an excuse.”

Bottom line, the NFL has FINALLY figured out that their female fans are important, they are finally listening to what we want. Let’s make sure they know what we want is a league that cares about women and one that sets the right example.