Harbingers of doom can be pretty easy to overlook, especially when they’re doing their harbingering in a place where calamity is always just around the corner. Back in the late spring of 2020, when New York was still on lockdown and things seemed even more fraught with peril than usual, Providence (in the guise of a Mister Softee truck) gave my Brooklyn neighborhood a sneak preview of what is now known as the Taylor Swift Effect.
Screaming into a little waxed-paper megaphone he’d fashioned out of a coffee cup, a gentleman who appeared to have been on at least a nodding acquaintance with psychosis declaimed an improvised sermon of sorts to a cluster of people making their way into Prospect Park. The theme of the address mostly had to do with Taylor Swift and witchcraft, although the occult stuff was punctuated by claims that the pop star had stolen much of her catalogue of hits from the haranguer himself. After a few minutes of that kind of thing, the guy wadded up his cup and drove off in an ice cream truck that had been idling by the curb.
Since the day when I had my eyes opened to Taylor Swift’s sorcery, the singer has gone on to form a romantic alliance with Travis Kelce, an amiable lunk who also happens to be one of the NFL’s all-time greatest tight ends. So far, so good: At around the same time the two started making goo-goo eyes at each other, Swift became a billionaire. Kelce’s now on his way to his fourth Super Bowl. Meanwhile, a not-insignificant number of people seem to believe that the relationship is a psyop ginned up by the Deep State to ensure that Joe Biden is reelected in November. And you thought the Taylor Truther who made off with the Mister Softee truck was nutty.
Now, as much as we’ve done our bit to question the received narrative regarding T-Swizzle’s impact on the NFL’s TV ratings, the Super Bowl is a whole ‘nother can of worms. As Fox Sports’ research/analytics guru Mike Mulvihill observed earlier this week on X, while he’s been “pretty skeptical all year that Taylor Swift is having any actual impact on NFL viewing … the Super Bowl is a different beast.” Mulvihill went on to suggest that “there will be some identifiable impact in the demos,” which is to say that the phantom hordes of Swifties who didn’t quite move the needle in the regular season should make their presence known in a more quantifiable fashion on Feb. 11.
Not that CBS or the NFL necessarily need a boost from Swift’s female-skewing fan base. Since the league began ramping up efforts to bring more women into the fold nearly 15 years ago, the impact of its marketing strategy has been hard to overlook. Women now make up more than one-third of the regular-season NFL TV audience, and when the Big Game kicks off, the ratio is closer to 50-50. Industry wags like to characterize the Oscars as “the Super Bowl for women,” but with nearly 50 million ladies of all ages tuning in each year—a turnout that’s three times the size of the overall Academy Awards audience—the Super Bowl is the Super Bowl for women.
The Super Bowl’s unparalleled ability to reach women goes a long way toward explaining why we’ve been seeing more female-targeted ads airing during America’s greatest secular holiday TV spree. Way back in 2012, David Beckham showed up in his skivvies for the fashion retailer H&M, a gambit that was out of keeping with the usual wrack of spots featuring hapless guys getting hit in the balls and animals doing things not normally associated with animals. As the Giants secured their second championship win over Tom Brady & Co., an aggrieved substratum of NBC’s 111.3 million viewers raged about the H&M spot—from a distance of 12 years, it’s hard to remember if they were more mad about the underpants or just the idea of an English soccer guy popping up in a real football game—and at least one screaming head managed to tweet his way into a six-week suspension from his CNN gig.
Beckham and his wife, Lady Posh (I’m not Googling it) will team up this year for an ad for Uber Eats, and while the retired midfielder will probably keep his trousers on for this one, the return engagement is just one of several spots designed to cash in on the Super Bowl’s big tent. Long after L’Oreal bailed on the Oscars, its NYX Professional Makeup brand has snapped up the company’s first-ever Big Game spot, a 30-second effort that celebrates “the power of women.” Also in the mix are the typographically iffy e.l.f. Cosmetics and Dove, which returns to the NFL spotlight after a 14-year absence. In collaboration with Nike, the Dove spot encourages girls and younger women to “stay in sports.”
As much as it may be tempting to suggest that these brands are all hopping on the Taylor Swift bandwagon, the process of planning for and producing a Super Bowl spot is more crockpot than microwave. In other words, it’s more likely that the decision to make the $7 billion ad buys were made well in advance of the launch of the Romance of the Century.
The NFL’s audience demographics have justified marketing investments on this scale for some time now, and while the cosmetics people aren’t necessarily targeting the fans who’ve bought up 200 million copies of her records, their presence should prove to be a nice bonus. Among the groups that could see a considerable bump this year are tweens 12-17 and their younger sisters; as it happens, women already account for around 46% of the Super Bowl’s deliveries of young adults (18-34), so any gains on that front would be the sprinkles on CBS’ demographic sundae.
If Taylor Swift’s new-found interest in the spread West Coast offense merely indicates that she’s catching up to a Sunday ritual that a whole lot of women embraced long before her, the league and its network partners will be keeping a close eye on the broadcast’s ratings composition. Never one to rest on its hegemonic laurels, the NFL won’t be satisfied until every last man, woman and child on the planet has pledged their allegiance to the game. With the most famous woman on earth now among the ranks of the faithful, the league’s outreach efforts can only become even more fruitful.
If the NFL hasn’t yet convinced your sister or your mom or your grandmother or your daughter to buy a Cairo Santos jersey, you can always encourage them to spend their money on a Taylor-adjacent Super Bowl prop bet. One harrowing wager on the offshore betting boards asks gamblers to speculate on whether or not Kelce will take a knee when the confetti drops in Vegas. No, not that kind of knee—the prop in question asks if he’ll propose to his special friend after the game.
At the time of this writing, the line was +1060 “yes” and -3000 “no.” True love is dead.
