The Decline of the Sexual Super Bowl Ad

A friend recently mentioned to me that there were basically no sexual Super Bowl ads this year. In fact, I’ve heard people speculating for a while now that the eating-a-burger-in-a-bikini-style ads are on the decline.

I then woke up to a the following news in Data is Plural: the good people at 538 watched 233 Super Bowl ads between 2000-2021(!!!) and coded up info on them. Included in that coding? Whether each ad “uses sex to sell a product”. Here’s the raw data.¹

So, here I plot the % of ads from their sample that “use sex to sell a product” over the years 2000-2021. Indeed, the strategy of “sex sells” seems to be on the decline.

library(tidyverse); library(data.table);library(scales);library(emoGG)
superbowl<-fread("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fivethirtyeight/superbowl-ads/main/superbowl-ads.csv")

superbowl%>%group_by(year)%>%
  summarise(tot=n(),
            use_sex=sum(use_sex==T),
            sex_rate=use_sex/tot)%>%
  ggplot(aes(x=year, y=sex_rate))+
  geom_emoji(emoji="1f351", size=.04)+
  scale_y_continuous(limits=c(0,.65), breaks=seq(0,.6,0.1), 
                     labels = percent_format(accuracy = 1))+
  scale_x_continuous(breaks=seq(2000,2020, 2))+
  theme_minimal()+
  theme(text=element_text(family="Palatino", size=15), 
        plot.title = element_text(size=25),
        plot.title.position = "plot")+
  ggtitle("The Decline of the Sexual Super Bowl Ad")+
  geom_smooth(method = lm, se = FALSE, color=alpha("#E69F00",0.5))+
  labs(x="", y="% ads that use sex to sell a product\n", 
       caption="Data: FiveThirtyEight Super Bowl Ads Dataset | Graph: Alex Albright\n\n(Note: Sample limited to ads 'from the 10 brands that had the most [ads] in Super Bowls from\n2000 to 2020, according to data from superbowl-ads.com, with matching videos found on YouTube')")

`summarise()` ungrouping output (override with `.groups` argument)

ggsave("sexual_superbowl_ads.png", width=7.25, height=6.5, dpi=300)

Quick note: there are lots of options for customizing the points here. I picked the classic peach emoji but you could use a relevant superbowl ad screengrab or even a football in a bikini or whatever really. Feel free to remix to your hearts content. The code is just the simple chunk above.

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1. Sample: ads “from the 10 brands that had the most advertisements in Super Bowls from 2000 to 2020, according to data from superbowl-ads.com, with matching videos found on YouTube”↩︎