Sometime between 7:00 PM and 9:30 PM tonight, millions of grown men will grumble at the sight of female basketball players.
And in living rooms across the country, these lines are guaranteed to be recited verbatim:
But instead of coming out of the mouths of male sports fans, those words will be coming from Tamika Catchings, Candace Parker and Cheryl Ford.
The WNBA is debuting a new ad campaign during the NBA Playoffs that addresses the negative perception of women’s basketball directly. Each ad features a WNBA star with a monologue voicing the typical criticisms of the league, followed by a caption: “She wouldn’t say that. Would you?“
At the end of the ad, the players say the league’s new tagline, “Expect great.”
The campaign is part of a league wide effort to attract male sports fans. A recent study by the league found that men are the “gatekeepers of sports consumption.” In other words, men make the decisions about what sports to watch in person and on television.
As a result, the league has to go through men in order to get to its target audience of women and girls. Or, as NBA Marketing VP Hilary Shaev put it, “[t]he idea here is to target a gatekeeper as much to open the gate (for more women and children to be exposed to the game) as to target them for consumption.”
In the case of the Monarchs, this means instead of putting ads on Lifetime and Oxygen, the team “may increase ads on ESPN.” And in the case of the league as a whole, this means “[putting] the game out front and center.” The WNBA recently found that while most men downplay the skills of female players, “their perception of the WNBA improved by 25 percent” after they were shown highlights from games.
In each of the advertisements, the statements bashing women’s basketball are followed by a series of highlights from players in the league.
Whether or not the highlights contradicting the negative things the players are saying will resonate with male sports fans is left to be seen. There is every possibility most men will simply agree with the comments bashing women’s basketball and tune out the rest of the ad.
On a separate note, the ads very much resemble the current NBA Playoffs campaign. While there will be no split screen effect, each of the players will be sitting in front of the camera and reciting a monologue. Goodby, Silverstein & Partners is behind both ad campaigns.
