Auto-Complete?

Great advertisements not only exist in the private sector. Creativity can also be found in advocacy campaigns of NGOs and international organizations. This is the ad that strikes me most recently.

Here’s a simple and powerful campaign idea from UN Women using real suggested search terms from Google’s autocomplete feature. The “Auto-Complete Truth” campaign exploded across social media and generated worldwide discussion, aka gone viral. “This campaign uses the world’s most popular search engine (Google) to show how gender inequality is a worldwide problem. The adverts show the results of genuine searches, highlighting popular opinions across the Internet.” said by the creator, Christopher Hunt from Ogilvy & Mather Dubai.

This campaign, however, also raised concerns and debates. Some people thought that the creators edit the results of the Google searches you did for this campaign. In a follow up interview by Adweek, a question was raised about whether they have taken out some irrelevant suggestions or even edited the results to focus on the most egregious examples of sexism. According to Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai, none of the searches were engineered to produce the results. In order to raise awareness of the inequality women face, they did choose to highlight the most compelling answers, to deliver the most impact, however the search results from Google autocorrect were not falsified in any way.

I think the reasons for the success for the UN Women campaign are truth and simplicity. With eye-catching images (carefully included different demographics) and autocomplete results, the ads caught people’s attention and encouraged them to search it on Google. When they realized that what the ads were telling was true, they were then educated and might start concerning this issue.

So tell me, my dear readers, do you think the creator had edited the results of the autocomplete?