2014 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Our campaign was originally launched in the region, but as it exposed an undeniably universal fact about gender equality worldwide through Google autocomplete, and through its impactful use of imagery, it transcended beyond the Middle East itself, and beyond the original print medium itself. The campaign became a viral sensation, inspiring people around the world to not only try it for themselves on Google, but to experiment with global perceptions on a vast array of other social issues. As a result, individuals and organizations globally were motivated to replicate our campaign’s design and create branded content of their own, a design process which was made simple to reproduce. This flurry of content became a newfound outlet to expose other inequalities in the world, allowing people with different agendas to become owners of our campaign phenomenon as well.

Results

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. 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. 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 them to cover the mouths of women in order to portray in vivid form the silencing effects of these negative perceptions. We featured women from diverse ethnicities; reinforcing the global aspect of gender inequality that still persists today.

With each creation of content that emerged across social media, individuals were citing the UN Women campaign as their main inspiration, adding our hashtag #womenshould to content shared. This connected all replicas created back to our campaign, further attracting audiences who have not been exposed to our message. Online newspapers also reported on this wave of content as it unfolded. Gender equality became a spotlighted topic at Global PR Summits, creating further content in addition to coverage on TV talk shows, radio and educational presentations in schools worldwide. This allowed the campaign to go beyond advertising to drive further content.

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 campaign drove people to debate the topic on social media, TV talk shows, radio, blogs, PR summits and in classrooms worldwide. Furthermore, it inspired individuals around the world to create their own content as a replica of our iconic design. From religion, politics, sexual orientation, race to video gaming, mental illness and even ageism, the content that has spurred as a result of our campaign allowed countless communities worldwide to voice their societal concerns and expose inequalities that needed to be talked about too, paving the way for real change.