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Advertising to NFL fans, trailblazing women in media & copy resource of the week
Kimberly Houston
September 08, 2024
Hey, hi, howdy, and welcome to Issue #25 of The Subhead, a bi-weekly newsletter about copywriting, marketing & media, and a look at some of the women who make it great.
In today’s edition:
✨ This week in freelancing
✨ 47% of NFL fans are women … and why that matters
✨ Trailblazing Women in Media: Daisy Alioto
✨ Copy Resource of the Week: Bad Copywriting Examples
✨ Just for Fun
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This week in freelancing …
This week was … weird. I took the Friday before Labor Day off, along with Labor Day itself on Monday 09/02, for a glorious 4-day weekend. I can’t remember the last time I took off four days in a row!
That said, I did do some work over the holiday weekend, because as a self-employed person, I haven’t found a way yet to take four full days off in their entirety.
But starting the week on Tuesday this week rather than Monday? That sure was nice. 😊
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47% of NFL fans are women … and advertisers are starting to take note
Here’s something I read the day after the Super Bowl way back in February that’s stayed with me ever since.
It comes from The Broadsheet, Fortune's newsletter for and about the world's most powerful women, written by Emma Hinchliffe.
Turns out, while there was lots of ink spilled about Taylor Swift this year and her impact on how many women watched the game as a result of her relationship with Travis Kelce, as The Broadsheet pointed out in its 02/12/24 issue, women make up 47% of NFL fans:
“What’s new isn’t that women watched the Super Bowl, but that advertisers and the NFL acknowledged them.”
Further, according to The Broadsheet:
“In 2012, 65% of Super Bowl ads that featured women were in some way sexist, according to California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s organization the Representation Project. That stat has steadily declined over the past decade; in 2022, the most recent year with data available, 6.3% of ads with women were identified as sexist.”
There’s still sexist marketing out there to be sure, but this is progress.
If you’re curious, you can learn more here about gender bias in advertising, from an organization at the forefront of championing equitable representation in media for over 20 years.
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Trailblazing Women in Media: Daisy Alioto
Daisy Alioto is CEO and co-founder of Dirt Media. Dirt is a daily newsletter that explores design, fashion, streaming content, internet culture, books, and the blockchain, and shares news roundups and recommendation links. Also known as “the cult digital entertainment newsletter that’s partly funded by sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs),” Dirt was launched in December 2020, and has 18,000 subscribers, as of this writing. Alioto’s co-founder is Kyle Chayka, contributing writer for The New Yorker.
Alioto’s journalism and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, TIME, New York Magazine, The New Republic, GQ, Longreads, Los Angeles Review of Books, Curbed, Vox, CityLab, Condé Nast Traveler, and many other publications.
On her vision for Dirt:
“I think every media company, for the most part, will need to have multiple revenue streams and multiple platforms. I see it almost like a streetwear brand where you foster a strong impulse to collect around the media model. Dirt’s big idea early on was to embrace an e-commerce component. I could buy hundreds of things from Supreme, but for most magazines, you can usually only get a subscription or tote bag. Why are we under-serving our super fans?
Whether people value those digital goods in the same way that they value other aspects of the brand is still sort of being worked out, but I think it holds up in an environment where AI can create cheap, easy content. People will not be willing to pay for anything that could be done by ChatGPT. You have to be creating something that cannot be duplicated by a bot. Human-made, bespoke, thoughtful, multidimensional media with a strong culture of collecting around it is now in the same box as [luxury goods company] LVMH.”
You can learn more about Daisy Alioto and Dirt at the inline links above, and / or check out:
While paid newsletter tiers are common, Dirt is among the first to finance its operations through NFT sales.
Daisy Alioto has big ambitions for her small media empire.
Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto on human-made media, implicit censorship, and the Pisces of it all.
Her LinkedIn profile here, her personal website here, and the Dirt Media website here.
Her interview on the Longform podcast here.
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Copy Resource of the Week: Bad Copywriting Examples
In this section, I usually share a resource that tells you how to do something related to copywriting.
But last time, I shared a resource about how not to do something, i.e., cliché phrases to retire from your writing.
I’ve got a similar what-not-to-do for you this week.
As a person who learns best from real! live! examples!, I loved these before-and-afters of copy that went from lackluster to compelling with a few simple tweaks.
From weak calls-to-action to no proof of claims, and lack of clarity to murky USPs, see real-life examples of bad copywriting – and how they were transformed into something much better – here:
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Just for Fun
I adored this piece about a diverse group of Southern women who have found success as comedians, with “a candor and dialect that makes even the painful, the political and the personal rip-rorious.”
As these women in comedy will tell you, cracking jokes can be the best way — sometimes the only way — to handle the pain that life throws at us.
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That’s it for this week, my friend.
As always, thanks for reading, I appreciate you!
Be well. Stay curious. See you again in two weeks, on September 22.
Warmly,
Kimberly