2014 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

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

We launched our integrated campaign through Press & Outdoor, revealing for the first time shocking autocomplete results, which initiated people to join a global discussion on gender equality through our campaign hashtag #womenshould. We then expanded the conversation through an online film, contrasting the milestones of women over the last century with today’s search results. We seeded this film across news sites and blogs in various languages. We then collaborated with educational institutions around the world, inspiring debates as part of their curriculum. We then maximized exposure through key international PR events (2013 Global PR Summit) which further promoted a debate on social media. Through an integrated media strategy and impactful imagery, our message traveled far beyond the borders of print, transcending through multiple channels which all worked together to transform the world into one enormous UN forum for the people, with social media at the center of it all.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

In today’s modern age, it’s almost unthinkable to consider gender inequality as a persisting issue. UN Women however, sees that despite decades of global advancement, discrimination against women is still rampant worldwide. We needed to lay this bare to a multicultural audience, in the effort to reignite a conversation everyone thought was resolved. Using Google’s autocomplete function, fed by over 6 billion searches daily, 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 integrated media campaign, driving men and women to debate the topic on social media, TV talk shows, radio stations, blogs, PR summits and in classrooms worldwide. Through the campaign hashtag (#womenshould), we transformed the globe into one enormous UN forum for the people, paving the way for real change.