The Most Shared Ad of 2013 (Adweek). Social Good Campaign of 2013 (Ad Council). The campaign reached 755 Million Global Impressions and 134 Million Twitter Impressions. More than just mass media coverage in every continent (BBC, The Guardian, Time, Huffington Post, CNN, Times of India, Folha de Sao Paulo and countless more) it drove men and women to debate the topic on social media, TV shows, radio, blogs, PR summits and in classrooms worldwide, transforming established media channels into one collective forum for debate on gender equality.
Creative Execution
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. The shocking search results became the faces of our campaign, driving people to join a global discussion on social media through the campaign hashtag (#womenshould). The conversation was further amplified through outdoor, posters, an online film that was seeded throughout news sites, blogs and social media, as well as exposure through Global PR summits and educational debates in classrooms worldwide. The impactful nature of the imagery allowed our message to travel far beyond the original borders of a print medium, transcending through multiple channels which all worked together to transform the world into one enormous UN forum for the people, with our campaign hashtag at the center of it all.
Insights, Strategy and the Idea
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, an audience that perceives gender inequality to be an issue of the past, or an issue only affecting those in societies far away from them. We needed to reignite a conversation everyone thought was finished, paving the way for real change. We knew for this to happen, a bold and powerful communication approach was necessary, one that could effectively offer a newly established entity such as UN Women, the global exposure needed to reaffirm its humanitarian efforts for women around the world, paving the way for real change.