Halo’s failure showed exactly what happens when brands market to women without giving women authority, writes Nishma Patel Robb. Until power shifts, even well-funded initiatives will keep missing the target.
The European Super League lasted 48 hours. Sky Sports’ Halo TikTok channel managed three days. When your women’s sports initiative gets binned faster than football’s most universally hated idea, you haven’t just cocked up the marketing. You’ve told us exactly who had power in that room.
Let’s be clear: Sky has genuinely invested in women’s sports. They back grassroots programmes. They’ve championed getting more girls into sport. This wasn’t malicious. It was something more insidious – decades of male bias creating a blind spot so massive the broadcaster described Halo as Sky Sports’s “lil sis,” drowned in pink, sprinkled with matcha references, and launched with videos of men.
That’s what happens when years of seeing the world through one particular lens becomes your operating system.
The marketing problem
Marketing to women has become its own crisis. We’ve conflated understanding an audience with assuming we understand them. We’ve replaced insight with Instagram aesthetics. We’ve hired diversity but not distributed power.
Someone senior looked at “lil sis” and thought: yes, perfect. Someone greenlit an all-pink aesthetic for sports coverage. Someone approved launching with male athletes. Those someones weren’t women.
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Through whose gaze, exactly?
“Through a female lens” became marketing’s favorite phrase without anyone asking what it actually means. It doesn’t mean segregating women’s sports into a cutesy corner. It means ALL sport – male and female – created and led by diverse teams who understand their audiences because they are their audiences.
Women have always been interested in sport. Both kinds. The one men play and the one men ignored. Ian Wright nailed it: “Women’s football was never the problem – men blocking it for 50 years was. Give girls the same chance to play as boys and the game takes care of itself.”
We don’t need sport yassified or dipped in pastel. We need the same depth, quality, and respect given to men’s sports. On the main channel. Not tucked away like a side project.
The media diet nobody questions
Here’s where it gets properly dangerous. The most influential media – the podcasts shaping executive thinking and the content driving cultural conversation – remains overwhelmingly male.
If the podcasts you’re quoting in strategy decks and the voices filling your LinkedIn feed are 90% male, of course “lil sis” doesn’t sound as catastrophic in the room as it does to the world outside. When your media diet is that homogenous, you don’t just miss perspectives – you forget other perspectives exist.
Hulu’s “All’s Fair” with Kim Kardashian just proved this spectacularly. The show flopped with critics, scraping the bottom of review aggregators, and when you scratch beneath the surface, you find the pilot was written and directed entirely by men. A show ostensibly about women’s empowerment, told through a completely male lens. The result? Expensive, embarrassing, and instructive.
Contrast that with the women who didn’t wait for permission or a brief. Reese Witherspoon, Rihanna, Emma Grede… they built empires by trusting they understood their audiences better than anyone telling them what women wanted. When you get this right, it delivers fortunes.
The three-day lesson
Here’s what guts me about Halo: it took three days to get real feedback on a project that was likely months in the making. Three days for the audience to tell Sky exactly what was wrong. Months of development, strategy meetings, budget approvals – and nobody with actual power listened to the women who could have stopped this before launch.
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How many young women were genuinely empowered on Halo? Not consulted. Not employed. Empowered? With decision-making authority, budget control, and the power to say “this is fucking terrible” and make it stick?
Representation without power is just set dressing
It’s not just hiring women. It’s not asking their opinion. It’s creating conditions where they can push back without fear. It’s trusting them with actual power.
Sky could have pivoted at pace. Brought in women creators who already have that audience’s trust. Handed them actual control. Evolved in public. Instead, they panicked and pulled the plug entirely.
Women control 85% of consumer spending. We’re the fastest-growing audience for sports content. We’re launching businesses and reshaping industries. And we’re still being served content created predominantly by men, for men, with women as an afterthought marketed to in pink.
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What needs to change
If it’s for women and no woman has sign-off, it doesn’t go live. Simple as that. Not input. Not consultation. Veto power. Decision-making authority on audience-specific projects must sit with people from that audience. Otherwise, you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping male intuition about women happens to be correct.
The real tragedy isn’t that Halo failed. It’s that it failed in a way that makes brands more scared to try, while actually proving the opposite: when you don’t genuinely empower women to lead, nothing works.
Sky has resources, talent, and Dana Strong – a CEO who fiercely champions women in sport. But good intentions without structural power produce expensive, embarrassing gestures that insult the very audience you're trying to reach.
The industry can do infinitely better. But only if we’re willing to examine who holds power, who makes decisions, and whether we’re actually ready to trust women to lead conversations about what women want.
Otherwise, we’ll keep watching the same broken system repainted in different shades of pink.
Nishma Patel Robb is co-founder of HERA Media and founder of Glittersphere