Lilly Singh, host of A Little Late With Lilly Singh, will star in a feminist commercial during this year’s Super Bowl. The space-themed Olay ad will feature Singh alongside retired astronaut Nicole Scott and actress Busy Phillipps.
Singh, Phillipps, and Scott all portray female astronauts in the ad, which was inspired by the first all-woman spacewalk last year. The goal is to promote Olay’s #MakeSpaceForWomen campaign to get more girls into STEM subjects. Olay will donate $1 to Girls Who Code, an organization that supports women in computer science, every time someone mentions the hashtag on Twitter (up to $500,000).
An early teaser for the ad shows the three women striding toward an Olay space shuttle. Phillipps asks, “Who has the keys?” Singh replies, “I don’t know, I thought you did!”
Taraji P. Henson will also star as the head of mission control, and Katie Couric will star as a journalist.
“The Super Bowl is literally the Oscars of commercials,” Henson told Adweek during the ad shoot. “I feel like I made it!”
Singh came out as bisexual in 2019. Shortly after, she became the only LGBTQ person, the only woman, and the only person of color with her own late-night talk show on broadcast network TV. She doesn’t shy away from talking about her sexuality on her show — on Tuesday night, she delivered a monologue about her coming out journey.
The Super Bowl is the most-watched television event of the year. According to Adweek, women make up nearly half of the expected viewership. However, they appear in lead roles for Super Bowl ads only 27 percent of the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxP-2BY5FM0
Olay is owned by Procter & Gamble, a corporation with a history of LGBTQ-inclusive ads and messaging. Last year, another Procter & Gamble brand removed the Venus symbol from its pads to be more inclusive of trans and non-binary folks.
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