“Sexual Ornament” or “Spiritual Trainer”? Envisioning and Marketing to a Female Audience Through the NHL’s “Inside the Warrior” Advertising Campaign

Abstract

This study investigates the unique association between female hockey fans, dominant conceptions of gender in sport, and the role of cultural intermediaries in the cultural production of media texts. In particular, it focuses on the National Hockey League's ''Inside the Warrior'' advertising campaign created by marketing agency Conductor (for the relaunch of the League after the 2004-2005 lockout), that was, in part, envisioned for and marketed to target female audience. Using insights revealed through in-depth semistructured interviews with two cultural intermediaries, the critical analysis in this article focuses on how the cultural intermediaries from Conductor imagined and conceptualised female hockey fans as a target audience, engages in a comparative analysis between the creative strategies in the production of the ''Inside the Warrior'' campaign and characteristics of female narratives to attract a female audience, and discusses the accommodation of resistance to the stereotypical representations of gender in the ''Inside the Warrior'' campaign by the cultural intermediaries. These

Advertising the 2015 Cricket World Cup

“…In terms of numbers, poses, and prevalence, these women are not cast as secondary or supplementary to the one male fan. The CWC poster counters stereotypical images of female fans, such as those identified in commercial media by Wenner (2012) and Gee (2015), that depict women supporters in sexualized, nurturing, and supporting roles or characterize their modes of support as insignificant and inauthentic.…”

“…In the field of female sports fan research, this framework has been effectively employed by scholars such as Gee in her study of an advertising campaign for the National Hockey League marketed towards women (2015). Her approach involved interviewing advertising creatives to consider the influence of cultural producers in shaping the depiction of women within the campaign and conceptualizing female hockey fans as their target audience as well as taking into account fan responses to the advertisement (Gee, 2015).…”

Looks, Liveliness, and Laughter: Visual Representations in Commercial Sports for Children

“…In addition, his work also pointed at the interrelated nature of sport, gender, race, and commodification, which could be seen in marketing strategies, for example, by Nike (see also McKay, 1995). This interrelation has been expanded on more recently by others who have shown a blend of representational characteristics (Gee, 2015;Ho & Tanaka, 2021;Horne, 2006;Jackson & Andrews, 2005;Mocarski & Billings, 2014;Toffoletti, 2017). For example, to reach a new female audience for the 2015 Cricket World Cup, advertisements were to promote an idea of cricket as inclusive and transnational, but instead, a particular idea of Australianness as White and male was conveyed.…”