Latha Sarathy, CEO of Salient HQ and Chief Research Officer at Videotape.ai, returns to break down the research behind gender representation, the Bad Bunny halftime show, and why brands can’t fake trust anymore.
83% of women said diversity in ads directly increases their purchase intent. That’s not a soft opinion stat, that’s a number Latha Sarathy’s team has seen show up consistently, study after study. And yet roughly 40% of this year’s Super Bowl ads featured women, still short of parity with the actual population. That gap between what moves the needle and what brands actually do is the whole story of this episode.
Latha Sarathy joined us for the second time on Deconstructing Data. She’s the CEO and founder of Salient HQ, a fractional research agency she started after leaving her role as Chief Research Officer at the ANA (the Association of National Advertisers), where she ran research and measurement for SeeHer, the industry’s initiative on gender equality in media and marketing. She’s also Chief Research Officer at Videotape.ai, where every study includes video selfie responses so researchers hear real voices and see real faces instead of just reading survey checkboxes.
Is gender representation in advertising actually improving?
Short answer: not really, and the data has been consistent for years.
“We saw every single time that sales increased for women, but for men, for people of color, it was a very clear-cut connection. But when we also looked at trending in Super Bowl advertising, we never saw parity of women represented in terms of ads in the Super Bowl compared to the percentage of women in the population.”
— Latha Sarathy, CEO, Salient HQ
The correlation between accurate representation and sales ROI is well established at this point. What hasn’t caught up is actual ad content. And it’s not a small oversight, women influence 87% of purchasing decisions, a number Latha’s research keeps confirming again and again.
“83% of women said that diversity in ads were extremely or very important to them and increase their purchase intent. And we’ve seen this consistently all of the research I’ve done.”
— Latha Sarathy, CEO, Salient HQ
What surprised me most was her read on the last couple of years: the underlying consumer sentiment hasn’t shifted much, but the industry’s willingness to talk about it publicly has dropped, largely due to political pressure. The issue didn’t go away. It just went quiet.
Why did the Bad Bunny halftime show actually work?
We got into this one because it was impossible not to. Latha’s team ran a full study on it through Videotape, and the numbers back up what a lot of people felt watching it live.
“The NFL perspective of choosing Bad Bunny was very, very smart because it understood the cultural pulse of the country, but it was also economically very pragmatic.”
— Latha Sarathy, CEO, Salient HQ
The NFL’s own senior vice president of marketing has said league growth isn’t mathematically possible without Latino audiences. 39 million Latinos watched the Super Bowl. And the halftime show didn’t just play well with that audience, it played well broadly:
“The fact that this show aligned to a cultural reality in this country, it’s a win-win. Non-Hispanics also saw this as a celebration and an evolution of American music.”
— Latha Sarathy, CEO, Salient HQ
The data backs it up: 68% of non-Hispanics rated the show positively, and 87% of respondents said they did not think the choice of Bad Bunny was unAmerican. One detail that genuinely surprised me: Duolingo saw a 35% increase in Spanish language learners during and after the show. That’s a halftime show generating measurable behavior change days later, which is a pretty remarkable outcome for twelve minutes of television.
Why does brand authenticity matter more than ever right now?
This is the thread that ran through the whole conversation, and it’s the part every marketer should sit with. Latha’s framing of trust was the sharpest line of the episode:
“Trust is becoming more of the market differentiator for brands. And here’s the key thing about trust. You really can’t fake it. Not in the long run. Because trust is built on transparency and consistency.”
— Latha Sarathy, CEO, Salient HQ
We talked through the Serena Williams GLP-1 ad as a case study in this exact tension, a brand pivot that felt jarring against her prior positioning around body acceptance. Latha’s take wasn’t to pass judgment but to point to the underlying principle: any shift only works if it’s authentic and the brand is willing to own it going forward, not flip back the moment it gets uncomfortable.
That inconsistency is exactly what erodes trust over time, and it applies at the brand level too. Companies leaned into DEI-adjacent messaging heavily after 2020, then many quietly pulled back once the pressure shifted.
“If you’re going to flip-flop or if you’re not going to be consistent, you’re going to lose trust and that eventually is going to erode brand loyalty in my opinion.”
— Latha Sarathy, CEO, Salient HQ
What does the purchase data say about authentic representation?
The receipts, so to speak:
“67% of Hispanics and 52% of non-Hispanics said they were extremely or very likely to purchase from brands that had authentic representation.”
— Latha Sarathy, CEO, Salient HQ
That’s not a niche audience effect, it’s a majority-to-plurality effect across both groups. And it lines up with the broader point Latha’s made repeatedly across her career in research: brands consistently underestimate their own audience.
“Brands under, or media in general, underestimate consumers… people want to be seen, they want to be heard, they want to be reflected, they want to know that they are important.”
— Latha Sarathy, CEO, Salient HQ
The bigger picture
What stuck with me most from this conversation is that none of this is soft, feel-good marketing advice. It’s ROI. Representation correlates with sales. Cultural alignment correlates with purchase intent. Consistency correlates with trust, and trust is becoming the actual differentiator brands compete on, especially as AI makes production and distribution cheaper and easier for everyone. When everyone can make a technically competent ad, the brands that stand out are the ones that actually understand and reflect the people they’re selling to, and stay consistent about it.
We’re already talking about making this an annual post-Super Bowl conversation with Latha. If the data holds the way it has the last two years, I suspect we’ll be having a very similar conversation again next February.
To connect with Latha, find her on LinkedIn or check out her work at salienthq.com.
And if you’re thinking about how to actually understand and reach your audience with the kind of precision this conversation calls for, that’s exactly what we do at BDEX. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
Video
Watch the full episode: Super Bowl Advertising Through the Lens of Data
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
