The Representation Project partnered with TWTW Companies to further explore these issues, surveying 500 women nationwide with daughters ages zero to ten years old. Questions focused on personal body image and how mothers feel this will affect their daughters. Highlights from the full report titled “Mothers, Daughters & Body Image” include:

• 84% of mothers say too much emphasis is placed on physical beauty for women and girls and 65% think it is likely their daughter will struggle with her body image at some point.
• 90% of respondents have struggled with body image themselves with 51% having negative thoughts about their body at least once a day.
• 54% said they would feel like a failure if their daughter grew up to feel about her body the way she (the mother) does, but only 33% have addressed body image directly or indirectly with their daughters.

To address these startling statistics, The Representation Project is publishing the #BuildConfidence Toolkit, helping mothers and caregivers proactively build positive self-esteem and body image with their children. The kit features helpful tips and resources developed in partnership with Common Sense Media, Dove Self-Esteem Project, and Girls Leadership Institute. The Representation Project is providing the #BuildConfidence Toolkit to mothers and caregivers free of charge as a gift on Mother’s Day.

To kick off the campaign, The Representation Project is hosting a Twitter chat on Friday May 8 at 1 PM EST. The chat will celebrate mothers and caregivers for instilling positive self-esteem and body confidence in their children by asking such questions as, “How did you mom/caregiver teach you to love your body?” and as “What makes your mom awesome?”

The #BuildConfidence campaign premieres with an original video from Jennifer Siebel Newsom. In the coming months, it will also highlight the importance of fathers, caregivers, and other mentors.

More information can be found at therepresentationproject.org/buildconfidence.

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!

• 21 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
• Women are 57% of college graduates and 63% of masters degree holders, but that majority is not represented in leadership positions in the work place.
• Women hold only 14% of executive officer positions and 16% of board seats.
• Congress is 18% female.
• In 1970, Women were paid $0.59 for every dollar men made. It’s now $0.77.

These numbers are true across most industries and advertising is certainly no exception. Even though over 80% of purchasing decisions are made by women, the people who create the messages targeted to them, are overwhelmingly men.

Three years ago Kat Gordon, a woman who had spent years in the advertising world, decided that something needed to be done about these numbers and created the 3% Conference. Why 3 percent? That was the percentage of women creative directors in the US when Kat created the conference. This year, at the third annual 3% Conference, the team reported that the number is now 11 percent!

When the staff at twtw found out about this conference we knew we had to go check it out. So last week we hopped on the plane and headed to beautiful San Francisco for what ended up being two inspiration-filled days. It was fantastic to be surrounded by so many awe-inspiring women (and men). People from in and outside of the industry spoke on topics varying from ways to raise the number past 11 percent, to how to fight off mediocrity. There were a lot of great moments but here are some of our favorite takeaways.

Dyllan McGee

Dyllan is the mastermind behind the MAKERS project. She has spent several years filming the stories of influential women. In her seriously stirring talk she tells us that she’s learned that we must take credit for what we’ve done. Women have been written out of some important stories in history often because they didn’t stand up and claim their work. Women must be proud of their accomplishments and must not be too modest to take credit!

John Gerzema 

The famed author of the Athena Doctrine gave a great talk where he shared his experience traveling around the world to find out what makes a good leader. He found that “feminine leadership and values are now more popular than the macho paradigm of the past.” Through his research he discovered that 66% of people agreed that the world would be a better place if men thought more like women. He also advised women on the importance of bringing their “whole selves” to work.

Rick Boyko 

The advertising legend left us with this advice “We need to start to think about collective creativity by bringing all kinds of minds (critical thinkers and creative thinkers) together to spark deeper creative thinking.”

Todd Henry 

The author of the book Die Empty asked “Why do we so often settle for mediocrity?” To fight mediocrity we must first determine what is holding us back. Is it dissonance (the gap between the why and what); fear (perceived consequences of failure); or expectation escalation (maximizing efficiency at the cost of excellence).

Seth Matlins

Seth created the Truth in Advertising Act. He pleaded that the advertising agency start making changes because the over-photoshop bodies are causing real problems especially with the youth who often resort to extreme measures to emulate what they see on TV.

Cindy Gallop 

Cindy closed the conference with this great quote “A decade is too long to watch the world be deprived of the talent and perspectives of female creative leadership.”

The 3% Conference inspired us in many ways and we’re looking forward to putting what we learned to work. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for next year’s 3% Conference (we hear it might be in NYC)!

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.

Twtw polled 600 men and women to find how Always, Pantene, CoverGirl, and Verizon’s ads were being received and what, if any, effect they were having on viewers. The results of the survey clearly indicated why campaigns like this are necessary. An incredible 81% of women said they could relate to the “over apologizing” demonstrated in the Pantene ad. Similarly, 71% of women said they related to those in the Always ad who perceived “like a girl” to be a negative phrase.

The high number of people relating to the characters in the ad is not the only indication of why these commercials are crucial, one in four (26%) people were made aware of the issues in the ad for the first time, which indicates how important these campaigns are for awareness. Also impressive, eight in ten (80%) people found the ads to be inspiring and admitted that the ad made them more aware that things they say can have an unintended negative impact (79%).

While spreading awareness and inspiration are undoubtedly great accomplishments, could these ads actually manage to get people to consider changing their behavior? However, these ads may have managed to accomplish just that; an astounding 65% of those polled said they were likely to try to change their actions as a result of seeing the commercials. A potentially not surprising revelation was the disparity in the numbers of men and women who claimed they would change their behavior. Three-fourths of women wanted to make a change while only 46% of men felt the same.

There was no significant difference between parents and those without children on likelihood to change behavior as a result of seeing the ads. However, parents were more likely to be considering the issues for the first time and were also more inspired by the empowerment messages.

After identifying that these ads are successfully raising awareness and motivating change, the question remains: are these feel-good campaigns changing the perception of the brands sponsoring them? The survey indicated that people feel the motivations behind the advertisements are mostly altruistic. Respondents expressed that the companies had created the ads primarily to inspire young women (56%) and bring awareness to the issues (53%) rather than to sell their product (22%) or improve their image (31%). Additionally, nearly three in five people (59%) had a more positive opinion of the brand after seeing the ad, and almost half of people (45%) said they would be more likely to purchase the brand more frequently after seeing the commercial.

Overall these ads seem to be a win-win, they send a positive and inspiring message that appears to resonate with audiences while leaving viewers with a more positive image of the brand. Hopefully more brands will follow these companies’ examples and start selling their products while spreading positive messages.

UPDATE: 

We’re thrilled to see Chevrolet continue the movement of empowerment ads with this ad featuring Little League star, Mo’ne Davis!

Methodology: 

twtw companies conducted an online poll of 600 adult men and women on July 21, 2014. Each participant was shown one of four ads and then asked a series of questions to measure their response to the advertisement. The four ads shown were: Verizon’s “Inspire her mind,” Pantene’s “Not Sorry,” CoverGirl’s “Girls Can,” and Always’s “Like a Girl.”