Memac Ogilvy & Mather's Ad Campaign

Gender inequality is an issue that has spanned across the ages. The disparity between rights given to men versus women has been apparent since the beginnings of patriarchal societies. In this modern age, where human rights are being fought for on all fronts, it seems almost ludicrous to still see discrimination against half of the world's population through sexism. And yet, that is what Memac Ogilvy & Mather reveal in their still-picture ad campaign for UN Women dubbed "The Autocomplete Truth". This ad campaign was a internet viral success and had resulted in a revived dialogue into an age-old issue within the month of the ad-campaign being published. However, the dialogue only lasted about as long as it did to become popular and soon lost

In the ad campaign by Memac Ogilvy & Mather, women portraits are covered with autocomplete phrases from the search engine Google. Autocomplete is a feature that allows the search engine to suggest common search entries to try and save the user the time typing out the entire desired query. The hashtag, #womenshould, was chosen from the different autocomplete phrases in the women portraits in order for users of social media platforms such as Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and Facebook would be able to unite under a singular conversation topic. Towards the end of the video, titles like "Most Shared Ad of 2013" by Adweek and "Social Good Campaign of the Year" by Adcouncil popped up and are valuable for their accessible verification as well as accreditation for the viewers' convincing. Following these titles are statistics showing the ad campaign as responsible for 224 million Twitter impressions or for 1.2 billion global impressions. While one can speculate what an "impression" is and what worth it has; the ambiguity of this coupled with the lack of citations proves to be a chink in the armor that is the argument provided by UN

Throughout the video are arrangements of news headlines and screenshots of internet pages all stitched together to do two things: simulate the connection of people across the internet and show the mass amount of impact the ad campaign had. In one of the collages is a mixture of prominent and unfamiliar individuals covering their mouths with autocomplete suggestions concerning gays, feminists, men, old people, and even those with mental illness. Although it may seem like these differing topics would detract from the issue at hand, the clip is arranged so that the viewer doesn't have time to read them all and assumes that whatever image is being zoomed in on is the focus of the other images. Even if the viewer paused the video to read each individual autocomplete suggestions, it's still possible to argue that the focus of the video is on social activism as a whole and not just gender equality. Even though the collage of the individuals covering their mouths with Google searches seem "as if to silence their voices" actually symbolizes the unity of people acknowledging and talking about these social issues (UN Women). This alone is proof of the effect the ad campaign had on the international community. However, a single showing of proof isn't enough as the video provides several other visual shows of unity. If the audio is muted on the video, one can realize that camera angle