Background

MACOMM, Official Affiliate of Dentsu in Bangladesh stands for and practices gender equality and empowerment in its process and operations. MACOMM ensures women friendly work environment which includes equal pay policy, work with child for female team members, maternity allowance, maternity leaves, enforcement of no tolerance policy for any sexual harassment case in office and transportation arrangement for female members for late evening work engagements. Yet as an agency, it carries the guilt of being part of the advertising eco-system which, in effort to glamorize the selling of brands and products, ends up in exploitation of women on screen. So the agency planned a unique campaign revolving the Women's Day in March 2019 to initiate awareness around the problem through a campaign - create a video based content, completely non-commercial in nature, which brings out the shades of exploitation of women in advertising industry of Bangladesh and create attention to the matter. The need to ensure the content's organic strength was maximum since there were budgetary constraints. The objective of the campaign was to use social media FB to reach maximum audience, raise awareness, induce talkability and initiate conversations around the subject of exploitation of women in advertising in Bangladesh.

Describe the cultural/social/political climate in your region and the significance of your campaign within this context

For the last 10 years, Bangladesh has been thriving as one of the fastest growing economy of the world. Among the country’s, inspiring and stable GDP growth, export success, infrastructure developments, financial empowerment, evolution of digital life, self-sustainability, women empowerment and socio-financial inclusiveness of women their contribution to national economy progressions have stood out. Yet the malice and impacts of social violence against women, sexual exploitation of women including sexual harassment and rape are significant in numbers. And this rise of prejudice, inequality and violence towards women is attributed to multi-faceted reasons of which inappropriate and disrespectful positioning of women in media and advertising plays a catalyst role towards aggravating the problem.

Describe the creative idea

The back drop of the creative idea generation was to look into the advertising industry and seek out one of the realistic scenario among many, where women are inappropriately projected with sexual connotations to sell products. And one such common occurrence is soap ads where women appearances are stretched to levels of sexual teasers and allurement in the pretext of rationalization of conveyance of the ultimate satisfaction in using a soap. Thus, the creative idea was to create a demo soap ad and explicitly bring out the moments, which will clearly depict the "non-direct" sexual exploitation of women in advertising. And the presentation of the video creative was in such a way that people looking at the video will initially feel, this is another soap commercial until the message unfolds.

Describe the strategy

Unlike all other issues, the sexual exploitation of women in advertising is explicit around us on screen and off screen and thus we did our research on soap ads around the world including our local market Bangladesh which worked as the base for our insights. The target audience for the campaign was both male and female 16+, across the country. The strategic approach was to launch the Facebook only social media campaign around Women's Day in March 2019.

Describe the execution

Facebook was chosen as the social media platform with both reach and video views as the two core campaign KPI parameters. The duration of the campaign was 5 days from March 8th to March 12th, 2019. The budget for the campaign was only USD275.

Describe the results/impact

The results were staggering, considering the short duration of the campaign which was 5 days from 8thMarch to 12th March and minimum level budget of the campaign which was only USD275. 2.73 million people were reached, over 0.1 million engagements were achieved which included like, share and conversations. Women spoke out with anger calling out for change, men acknowledged the problem and shared their opinion and a strong voice was unified in the conversations to put a halt to such levels of sexual exploitation of women in advertising including soap ads. Overall, the campaign delivered the objectives set at the start.