The objective of the campaign was to reignite a conversation everyone thought was finished, paving the way for real change towards gender equality. We wanted to design something that was strikingly powerful, yet simple enough to be understood by everyone, and further more ownable, inspiring individuals to replicate their own messages of equality through our design.
The Brief
In today’s day and age, it’s practically unthinkable to consider gender inequality as a persisting issue. UN Women however, sees that despite decades of global advancement, discrimination and prejudice towards women is still rampant worldwide. UN Women needed to lay this bare to a multicultural audience, and raise awareness in a compelling way that gender bias still prevails on a global scale.
How the final design was conceived
Using Google’s autocomplete function, fed by over 6 billion searches every day, we held up a mirror to the world and exposed the hidden truth on gender bias that still prevails. The shocking search results became a fundamental part of our design. We used the search bar in an impactful way, covering the mouths of women to portray in vivid form the silencing effects of these negative perceptions. We featured portraits of women from diverse ethnicities to reinforce the global aspect of gender inequality that still persists today.
Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market
Our posters became the Most Shared Ad of 2013 (Adweek) and Social Good Campaign of 2013 (Ad Council). The campaign reached 755 Million Global Impressions and 134 Million Twitter Impressions. More than mass media coverage in every continent (BBC, The Guardian, Time, Huffington Post, CNN, Times of India and countless more) the posters drove people to debate the topic on social media, TV talk shows, radio, blogs, PR summits and in classrooms worldwide. Through the campaign hashtag (#womenshould), our posters transformed the world into one enormous UN forum for the people, putting gender equality back on the global agenda.