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It’s not easy to pitch a product and capture a nation’s pluralism in 30 seconds, but the e.l.f. Cosmetics ad in Super Bowl 58 was a notable effort. With the inimitable Judge Judy presiding from the bench, “In e.l.f. We Trust”—presented as a legal dispute about spending on overpriced cosmetics—was truly a big tent.
Retired NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho (born to Nigerian parents) played the bailiff; Meghan Trainor served as the TV correspondent; and Suits series actors Rick Hoffman and Gina Torres appeared as the litigants. Meanwhile, the jury box brimmed with personalities including openly gay comedian Benito Skinner and Heidi N Closet, the drag queen who ruled two seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
As e.l.f. CMO Kory Marchisotto said in a statement on Sunday morning, the company was “leaning into the true diversity of the Big Game and carving a path that proves beauty not only belongs there, but everywhere.”
Well, beauty may well be everywhere, but in many of last night’s Super Bowl ads, diversity wasn’t.
That was the upshot of an analysis of all 72 spots conducted by Alltold, which bills itself as a “people-first responsible AI company with tools to measure inclusion in ads.” The firm applied its proprietary AI analytics to gauge representation in six fields—skin tone, gender expression, body size, age, sexual orientation and visible disabilities.
So, how’d the ads do? Let’s hit the encouraging news first.
Women on the rise
The portrayal of people with feminine gender expression, as the report put it, in Super Bowl 58 ads continued on its slow but still steady climb.
From a single-digit low in 1984, the prevalence of ads portraying the female gender hit 40% this year. (That’s below the 50.4% of the overall population that’s female, per U.S. Census data, but it’s still higher than it’s historically been.)
“We’ve seen slow progress over 50 years,” Alltold CEO and cofounder Morgan Gregory told ADWEEK, “but it’s very much a two steps forward, one step back type of pattern.”
Last night’s advertisers were moderately generous with the time they allotted to characters that the AI system read as female: 43 ads gave them 40% or less of screen time; only 10 ads gave them more than 80%. Some standouts included Doritos’ “Dina & Mita” spot and Booking.com’s “Book Who You Want to Be,” both of which had female leads.
