What women's football ads say about us

Despite recent progress, women’s football still trails behind men’s in terms of mainstream media interest, investment, and advertising spend. One misconception is that it’s less exciting to watch – a myth that French telco Orange deftly debunked with its viral Women’s World Cup?ad?last month.

If you’ve not seen it, the ad appears to be a standard sizzle reel of football highlights from the French men’s team, known as Les Bleus.?But halfway through, there’s a twist: the footage you just watched was actually of the French women’s team, deepfaked to look like their male counterparts. ‘Only les Bleus can give us these emotions,’ the ad reads. ‘But that’s not them you’ve just seen.’

The video has been viewed more than 100 million times, receiving praise for its use of VFX and clever confrontation of bias – which got us thinking about women’s football ads, and what they say about attitudes to women’s football.?

Last week, Contagious spoke to Ghislain Tenneson, CSO at Marcel, the Paris-based agency behind the spot, who?said?that despite the Women’s World Cup in 2019 marking ‘a tipping point in the awareness of women’s football in France, there are still a lot of biases to tackle’.

‘We didn’t have to look very far to hear or read about all the prejudices people have around women’s football,’ he admitted. ‘You can hear them at any dinner with your family or friends.’?

The ad cuts through that prejudice, showing that if you really love football, it doesn’t matter who is playing. But it does so by tricking the audience – which tells us something about the French perspective on women’s football.?

In England, Nike and Wieden+Kennedy’s campaign for the national team during the 2022 Women’s Euros showed that there's nothing like a win to challenge bias. It hijacked a word ‘that fans of the England men’s team have been waiting to say for 55 years and singing about for 25 years’: home.

When the Lionesses did indeed bring the trophy home, that four-letter word (emblazoned above a Nike swoosh) was everywhere. It tapped into a specifically English nostalgia (the country hadn’t won a major tournament since 1966 and had only had female players playing as full-time professionals for four years), giving fans something to rally behind, regardless of gender.

In ads for women’s football from Latin American countries, the messaging addresses a culture of misogyny and inequality. Ahead of the 2019 Women’s World Cup campaign, Nike in Brazil?launched?a collection of footballs resembling doll heads, inspired by the insight that, as a little girl, Brazilian footballer Andressa Alves used to rip heads off unwanted dolls, just to have something to practice with.?

That same year, Telemundo, the official network of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Argentina,?highlighted?the gender pay gap in football by offering three professional women football players ‘second jobs’ as reporters, panellists, weather forecasters and sportscasters for a day.??

In the US, which was an early adopter of women's football and led the pack for years,?women's football campaigns aren't contending with the same social barriers. Budweiser’s Future Official Sponsors of the NWSL?campaign?focuses on financial (rather than cultural) investment, calling on big brands for sponsorship, while the US team's official World Cup 2023?ad?was characterised by an all-American (bordering on jingoistic) confidence.

If you want to know what attitudes towards women's football might look like in the coming years, Nike’s 2023 Women’s World Cup ad,?What The Football,?is full of hope. It brings together some of the world’s biggest stars in a multiverse celebration of the future of the game. No tricks, no comparisons to men or pandering to cynics – just pure star power. Watch it?here.

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