Procter & Gamble Co.'s Olay will make a surprise appearance in the Super Bowl—a relatively rare entry from a women's beauty brand—with a 30-second spot from Saatchi & Saatchi in the first quarter of the Feb. 3 CBS broadcast.
It's a first for Olay, and the first beauty brand in the game since the small "It's a 10" salon haircare brand aired an ad in 2017 obliquely poking fun at President Trump's hair. The last women's beauty brand to air an ad in the Super Bowl before that was Unilever's Dove in 2006, though the brand's male counterpart Dove Men+Care ran ads in 2010 and 2015.
"I can't go into detail on the creative approach," says Stephanie Robertson, director of North American skincare for P&G, "but can say that it is unexpected."
Research shows that around half of NFL viewers are women, yet only a quarter of the ads on football broadcasts have a woman in a leading role, Robertson says. "We want to change this dynamic by reaching women on TV's biggest stage with a message that we hope viewers will find entertaining," she says, including men.
P&G has had a history in recent years of bringing brands into the game from categories that had been absent or sparsely represented, including cleaning with Tide, Febreze and Mr. Clean and feminine protection with Always.
