Global ‘Correct the Internet’ campaign launches to make sportswomen more visible via DDB NZ
Who has scored the most goals in international football? The internet will generally tell you it’s Cristiano Ronaldo, when it’s actually women’s footballer, Christine Sinclair. DDB Group Aotearoa and FINCH are behind a global movement designed to highlight and correct the inconsistency of searchable facts that disadvantages sportswomen. Correct The Internet’s aim is to highlight and correct the inaccuracies in internet search results and make sportswomen more visible as a result.
The campaign is the collective work of an international group of like-minded people who saw the need to get behind the cause, championed by Rebecca Sowden, founding partner of Correct The Internet and owner of United Nations’ ‘Football for the Goals’ member Team Heroine – an international sports marketing consultancy.
The problem was first discovered when DDB was recently researching facts about the world’s top footballers as part of a pitch. The team discovered that women held many of football’s records. However, when asking simple, ungendered questions to find these facts, the internet was incorrectly putting men ahead of the statistically superior women in its search results
Lex Hodge, director at FINCH, says the campaign had been a hugely collaborative process with the team working collectively towards a single goal – correcting the internet to help make sportswomen more visible: “When this came to me, I was beyond excited. The quest for fairness, and the mana/strength to stand up and speak truth to power is so creatively liberating. There is no hesitation, no politics – the girl in the film just wants the truth. And that is what is so chilling – the place we gather information from just isn’t giving us the facts. It was important to me that through the film we gave the internet a feeling of real presence, power in numbers.”
FINCH produced a highly emotive video to launch the campaign which was shown at the NZ Football Ferns game against the USA women’s team at Eden Park on Saturday 21 January.
Rebecca Sowden says she is passionate about helping the world recognise all sporting heroes and empower the next generation of sportswomen: “Many of the world’s leading athletes are women. Many of the world’s sporting records are held by women. But when people search online for factual sporting information about athletes, the results favour the sportsmen, even when the sportswomen have greater statistics.
“Because the internet has learnt our bias many of its search engine results are inconsistent, often favouring men, and change depending on who is searching. Our goal is to empower the next generation of sportswomen by ensuring that when women are the best in the world, the internet reflects that.”
With its aim to empower women through the power of sport, Correct The Internet has also been endorsed by United Nations initiative, Football for the Goals (FFTG), as well as the support of organisations such as Women in Sport Aotearoa (WISPA), Women Sport Australia, and New Zealand Football, and many well-known athletes including English rugby’s Red Roses’ player, Shaunagh Brown, and NZ Football Fern Meikayla Moore.
Says Liz Knox, managing director – operations, DDB Group Aotearoa: “There’s no easy way to correct the inconsistencies in search results. However, if people report these issues using each search engine’s inbuilt feedback function, they can be logged and fixed. The problem is, most people aren’t familiar with the feedback function, and recent design changes on some of the larger search engines make it harder to find.
“So, we built a tool that makes sending feedback simpler. And our campaign is designed to get a global community of people willing to speak up and take tangible action to reverse some of the gender biases that have been ruling our search engines. Success will see a correction of these search results over time.”
A number of partners are supporting the campaign across their channels, with extensive social media, OOH, television, radio and PR activity.
Agency: DDB Group Aotearoa
Production: FINCH
Director: Lex Hodge
Managing Director/Executive Producer: Corey Esse
Executive Producer: Rebekah ‘Bex’ Kelly
Producer: Sarah Cook
DOP: Gin Loane
Second Camera: Ben Rowsell
Art Director: Sam Evans
Casting: Catch/FINCH
Post House for Edit: Atticus
Editor: Jack Hutchings
Post House for Grade : Atticus
Colourist: Pete Richie
Post House for VFX: Atticus
Lead VFX artist: Stu Bedford
Sound Company: Liquid Studios
Sound Person Craig: Matuschka
Music Company: Liquid Studios
Composer: Peter Van der Fluit
Partner and Supporters
Correct the Internet – Founding Partner: Rebecca Sowden
Team Heroine | Supporter of Football For the Goals: Rebecca Sowden
New Zealand Football
Women in Sport Aotearoa [WISPA]
Women in Sport Australia
Fearless Women
Eden Park
Mediaworks
PHD
Warner Discovery
Phantom Billstickers
TVNZ
UN Department of Global Communications – Outreach Division: Maher Nasser
49 Comments
Nice. It won’t stop the fact that more people prefer to watch men’s sports over women’s.
If only we could re-create the 1950s again hey?
It’s hard to sell cheese slices.
This is just lazy.
A true insight. But who is the client?
Hope it drives some positive change.
But the way to help is so clunky. Doubt anyone will actually do it. and if they do, it’ll takes millions to affect a search algorithm. Guess we’ll wait to see how the case study spins it.
To try and change something big is kinda the point…
Seller to customer:
“You’re a f*ckwit for not watching women’s sport. Here, buy my product.”
I’m not sure this guilt trip strategy is gonna work.
Part of it reminds me of Re:Scam. The Scam part.
The insight is amazing and something worth highlighting. But it’s hard to believe that this idea came from a guy got his fiancé to make him lunch everyday at work.
Have a look at the global clients twitter feed. 132 followers. Do the maths. And see you in Cannes.
Gonna hate.
Players gonna play.
This is cool.
I’m actually a bit embarrassed about many of these negative comments. NZ and Australia have led the world in women’s sports- to their great credit. This is a brilliant idea that builds on that positive heritage. A brilliant idea from here. Makes me wonder who writes these comments and what their motivations are.
To see some work that will really make a difference for future generations
sure. it may not stop the fact that people prefer to watch men’s sport. but isn’t the point here about correcting incorrect information? it’s a powerful piece
Why have an idea when you can just choose a cause instead?
This idea is raising awareness for an important issue. The time it took to write a comment is the same it would have taken to take part in this initiative. Jump off your high horse. Yawn. Go women in sport! And no I don’t work at DDB.
Some of these comments prove exactly why work like this is necessary. I hope this goes well.
I’ll put it another way:
“Our computer isn’t as fast or as quick as the one you just bought, but if you don’t buy our slow and underpowered computer then we’re going to call you a f*ckwit and shame you into buying one, thanxxxx.”
For a big ad agency, I’m not convinced DDB knows how to sell a product or solve a marketing problem.
But, obviously this is a scam. Just in time for Cannes.
tell us you’re scared of women without telling us you’re scared of women
https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/campaign-google-searches-show-sexism-article-1.1494436
And what have you done to help women’s sport?
Congrats DDB – great campaign
This comment section is genuinely embarrassing for the industry and New Zealand. You should all be using your real names to post your lazy, repetitive criticism and thinly veiled misogyny. Go to therapy lol
Problem is, with men claiming to being women in sports, I gave up on it. So it’s like doing a clean up after the world series.
This work is epic.
Only knock is not having a real client.
Shame they couldn’t sell this to a steinlager who have long sponsored men’s sport but never tipped toes into the women’s game.
A bank would of also have been great.
But a domestic client wouldn’t of given it global legs as well.
Did you need to get CR7’s approval for this?
Rest of NZ industry bitches and moans.
Rest of world celebrates kiwi creativity.
A tale as old as time.
Go women in sport!
Super cool work. Congrats DDB. And also: The misogyny seeping through some of the comments is surprising. I thought we were cooler than that. I really did. Come on fellas, it’s important work and not a threat to your masculinity.
Couldn’t agree more.
The comment section is a dumpster fire as usual. A clear sign that the work is brilliant, when has-been and mediocre stagger out of the woodwork to shit on a campaign they wish they had done.
Is it okay to have issues with this without being called a misogynist?
Yes. @What UX? and @A cool insight did so articulately below. But if you were to belittle the need for the work, make sweeping statements about men’s sport being superior, or compare female athletes to slow computers then it might be pointed out to you that your critique is coming from a place of harmful bias. I genuinely hope that distinction is clear to you.
‘Meet the superhumans’ made me want to watch the Special Olympics because it demonstrated the incredible physical hurdles the athletes had to overcome in order to compete. It was brilliant and changed the game.
This campaign, however, complained about a search algorithm.
But, yeah, misogyny if it makes you feel better.
This is demonstrating the incredible sporting achievements of female athletes that are going largely unrecognised. It could be a game changer. But, yeah, complaining about a search algorithm if it makes you feel better.
Settle down sweetheart.
Germaine with an i. Sweetheart.
Nice. Im super jealous.
And a cool project/purpose. But it kinda just stays there for me. I was looking for the clever part, after the insight.
‘Helping correct the internet with ‘
I guess the question is are we judging the purpose or the idea?
I like the cause, for sure. But this feels like a disingenuous way to solve it – and a bit of an awards attempt. I really encourage people evaluating this at face value, to give it a go.
The user experience is just awful, and I am sure that the dozen or so feedback messages that DDB staff send for the results section of their casestudy, will be ignored by some AI or bot over at Google.
I really wanted to love this. But I can’t stand it when great causes receive sloppy solves from an agency. Shame.
Great idea. Terrible film, really lets it down.
There’s a generation of 55 year old plus CEOs, CCOs and ECDs who established the culture of shitting on other agency’s work for personal gain way back in the early 2000s, now that they’ve all retired why don’t we take a breath and end their legacy. Have an opinion but at least try to appear intelligent when you have one.
This is ddb at its woke ‘best’. When world champion women’s teams stop getting beat by U15 boys teams I will take women’s sport more seriously. OMG. Can someone get me a bucket?
I worked on UX and this was a very long process of deep user testing.
You may not like it – but that doesn’t matter because it’s based on what users actual do.
It passes all the accessibility tests and reduces the steps that the UI on the search engines try to hide from the user.
The use of individual IP addresses gets around any ‘Google Bot’ as you put.
Each time a user logs an incorrect search result this will go into the search engines system for bugs.
Enough times the same bug is logged, from different users in different places around the world, the higher the priority the bug us asigned.
Between internal pressure on the Engineering side and PR pressure on the Sales side we hope to fix the internet.
I work at DDB.
I can confirm we are very WOKE!
PEACE OUT SUSAN!
Hope the vomit stops soon xx
Firstly the ad made, and shown above, is not “highly emotive”, not in the slightest but I guess that is own to whoever is reviewing,
Secondly, you say this campaign is about “When women are the best, the internet should say that” type of thing. Fact is that you should have chosen a different topic for your ad. Cristiano Ronaldo is probably about 700 gazillion times better than the woman mentioned in the ad. In the UK, professional women footballers are about the same standard as the best non-league teams.
The internet isn’t biased at all, it just tells us from the most important point of view. 99% of all women’s sport is substandard to men’s.
So you don’t think that when you ask a non-gendered question, you should get a non-gendered, statistically accurate response?
If Ronaldo is ‘a gazillion times better than the woman in the ad’ then the data should prove that out…
this comment section is far more interestion than the actual post. oh and sorry to whomever i replied to i just wanted this comment to be real