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Misogyny in marketing is, unfortunately, nothing new. Whilst today’s marketing aimed at women is more sophisticated than the 1950s adverts promising a kitchen tool will bring a wife eternal happiness, the spectre of explicit misogyny in marketing is never too far away. 2025 has seen a series of questionable marketing campaigns, from Sydney Sweeney’s notorious American Eagle advert with eugenics undertones and references to the sexual exploitation of a then 13-year-old Brook Shields, to the overuse of creepy AI avatars in advertising. The latest unfortunate episode involves Sky Sports new Tiktok channel Halo, self-described as the “lil sis” of the broadcaster’s main channel.
Sky Sports is just the latest in a series of brands that attempt to capitalise on micro-niches rooted in social media communities without adequately understanding the importance of tone and context. The channel has been criticised for focusing more on matcha and labubu-based marketing than sports, let alone highlighting female athletes. Almost half of the channel’s first eleven videos related to men’s sports, despite the channel claiming to uplift women’s’ sport. Girls on the Ball, an organisation dedicated to highlighting women’s’ football, tweeted in response to the launch “Can’t imagine this is what women sports fans want.”
One marketing clip posted on the channel captioned a clip of Manchester City players Rayan Cherki and Erling Haaland working to score against Bournemouth, “How the matcha + hot girl walks combo hits”. Labelling the channel infantilising is an understatement. It blatantly assumes women cannot understand sport in normal terms, needing their attention to be captured with dumbed-down catchphrases and irrelevant TikTok trends. Across the board, it has been seen as an insult to female sports fans, and a greater insult to female athletes.
The original launch post on Sky Sports’ website read: “Sky Sports has launched Sky Sports Halo, a brand-new TikTok channel created specifically to engage and entertain female sports fans, providing an inclusive platform for women to enjoy all sports, while amplifying female voices.” It has since been deleted, with Sky Sports binning the channel entirely. Perhaps the need for a separate women’s space can be understood, with women’s sport still being sidelined and fans subject to misogynistic jibes, despite 2024 being the most watched year ever in women’s sport. Sky Sports latest project, though, has clearly missed the mark in addressing both the demand for more attention on women’s sports and the treatment of female fans in wider sports culture.
At a time when studies find male football fans still hold overwhelmingly negative attitudes to women’s’ sport, the need for positive marketing and promotion couldn’t be higher. Female athletes deserve to be taken seriously, just as their male counterparts are. Whilst the marketing of Halo was obviously a mistake, it bears the question – who was responsible? Contrary to predictions that the failure was a result of an out-of-touch, majority male team, Director of Sky Sports News Mark Allford claims that a “young (100% female) project team” were behind Halo. It is likely, then, that Halo is a result of a greater focus on social media soundbites and an attempt to appear ‘modern’, rather than a genuine consideration of how to make sports accessible for fans.
The decision to scrap Halo, whilst understandable, also feels like a missed opportunity. If a project dedicated to women’s sports can be scrapped so quickly, what does that say about Sky Sports’ level of commitment to promoting women’s sport? To be fair to the broadcaster, Sky Sports is already the biggest investor in women’s’ sport across the UK and Ireland. Having previously consulted with a whole host of talented sports content creators on successful marketing projects aimed at a female audience, it is surprising that Halo has been so disappointing. In order to regain the trust of its’ audience, Sky Sports needs to treat female fans as what they are: sports fans, with the capacity to understand the complexities of sport without pink bubble font.
Image: Jeffrey F Lin, August 24th 2018 // Unsplash Content License
Edited by Gemma Gradwell
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