Beauty brand Dove is returning to the Super Bowl’s airwaves with a new ad for the first time since 2006, as part of the brand’s “#KeepHerConfident” campaign.

Dove will run a 30-second ad spot during the first quarter of this Sunday’s Super Bowl. The brand’s spot features girls competing in sports and is set to the classic Broadway song “Hard Knock Life.” The Super Bowl commercial from Dove highlights how low body confidence keeps girls out of sports, while reinforcing the idea that sports should be for everyone.

“We felt that the big game was a great opportunity to raise awareness around the important issue of body confidence in sports and to help make sports a place where everyone can thrive and belong,” Dove masterbrand lead in Canada Laura Douglas tells strategy. “Dove will use the big game’s massive stage as an opportunity to drive meaningful awareness to large-reaching but also targeted audience of this important issue and to help girls stay in sports.”

The brand’s Body Confident Sport campaign is boosted by recently announced partnerships with former collegiate athlete Kylie Kelce (pictured above), as well as former NFL player Steve Young, along with his daughters Summer and Laila, and tennis champion Venus Williams. 

The campaign is also part of the Dove Self-Esteem Project resource, which aims to reach one million young people each year. It offers a set of free digital tools for coaches co-developed by Dove and Nike to build body confidence in 11-to-17-year-old girls.

The campaign is inspired by research co-commissioned by Dove and Nike which found that 45% of girls drop out of sports by age 14 due to low body confidence, twice the rate of boys, with body confidence and self-esteem issues the biggest drive of this rate. 4,917 children of various ages and socio-economic backgrounds from Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Brazil, Germany, Italy and Japan participated in Dove and Nike’s 15-minute online survey.

Douglas says some Canadian-specific insights were used to formulate the brand’s local plans in Canada included finding that 44% of girls dropped out of sports when they were told they didn’t have the right body for it, 48% of girls who dropped out were mocked, criticized and bullied because of their body size and 44% of girls dropped out saying they were made fun of or how they looked when playing sports.

“Sports are really important for kids, as it can help them to feel strong and confident in themselves and empowered by what they can accomplish,” Douglas says.

“Dove wants to raise awareness of the issue this is causing for girls all across Canada. Dove has been hard at work building self-esteem and body confidence in the next generation via the Dove Self-Esteem Project. Dove as a brand in my opinion has a fiduciary responsibility as the world’s largest self-esteem provider to enable solution oriented, academically validated solutions to these issues to continue to raise the confidence and self-esteem of the next generation.”

Dove worked on the campaign with Ogilvy, Edelman, PHD, The Collectively, RazorFish, Mindshare and Media Monks.