Over all, Univision’s World Cup viewership has climbed 38 percent, to an average of 3.3 million a game through the semifinals — an increase large enough to suggest that more women were going to watch the games regardless of any direct appeals to them. But Univision wanted to be certain that it attracted as many women as possible to matches at a time when they were likely to be watching the network.

Image A frame from a Univision ad campaign.

“It wasn’t so much a challenge but an opportunity,” said Jessica Rodriguez, executive vice president for the Univision Agency, which runs the media planning for the company’s television, radio and digital operations. “When you think of World Cup, you think men will be there and they’ll watch. The World Cup was being in Brazil, and so many of our countries were being represented on our home turf, in daytime.”

She added, “So we overtly focused on women in our campaign — and we went unabashedly after them.”

On June 17, something unusual happened in terms of gender: 1.6 million women ages 18 to 49 watched the Brazil-Mexico match, a shade more than the 1.5 million male viewers in the same age group.

In addition to running the campaign emphasizing the players’ attributes, Univision produced an ad with two men and a woman watching soccer in a bar that Rodriguez said probably would have been an all-male gathering four years ago; carried a daily 15-minute segment on the morning show “Despierta América” with a group of women discussing the games; and regularly informed viewers of its World Cup studio shows about players’ wives and children.