Too Hot for the NFL? Cardi B’s Spicy Ad for NYX Got Neutered for the Super Bowl

Meantime, more beauty and other traditionally female-skewing brands are buying into the football telecast. (Super Bowl ads this year came from e.l.f. Cosmetics, CeraVe—both first-timers at the Big Game—and Dove). 

While marketers want to maintain a cordial relationship with the powerful sports league, choosing their words carefully or opting not to discuss the controversy, advocates for diversity and inclusion have no such constraints. And they didn’t hold back in their criticism of what they called censorship of the female perspective and the NFL potentially setting a “stay in your lane” precedent.

“The hypocrisy of the NFL being ‘offended’ by sexual innuendo is the most NFL thing the NFL could do,” Erin Gallagher, CEO and founder of Ella, told Adweek. “As 51% of the population, half of the labor force and 85% of consumer buying power, women are not a niche market—we are the damn market. And an all-women creative team marketing a women-owned product to women should get the air time it deserves.”

Rejecting the NYX ad “shows a lack of respect for women, period,” Gallagher said. “If the NFL doesn’t want to take women’s money seriously, I encourage women-owned brands to move their advertising dollars to women’s sports—it’s time to swing the pendulum.”

Mita Mallick, head of DEI at Carta and author of best-selling book Reimagine Inclusion, posed a hypothetical:

“Let’s say this situation was reversed—a creative team of mostly men or all men, came up with a commercial which flipped the script on stereotypes of women with lighthearted humor,” Mallick told Adweek. “Would the decision makers at the NFL have chosen to run that? Would they be more or less comfortable with lighthearted humor targeted towards women versus men?” 

Mallick said it’s important to examine the makeup of the decision makers and the representation, or lack thereof, in the room: “In this case, who decided what was acceptable to air or not acceptable to air?”

Pole dancers and lip plumpers

Pointing out inconsistencies in the NFL’s policies has become something of a cottage industry over the years, with critics slamming everything from the preponderance of alcohol ads during “all-family” programming to the recent entry of sports betting into the commercial pool. And a Ram ad in 2023 called “Premature Electrification” was filled with erectile dysfunction puns.

Also passing muster with the NFL but causing critics to claim a double standard: female pole dancers were part of the entertainment during Usher’s half-time performance.