UN Women Australia is the United Nations entity in the Pacific region responsible for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. This includes expanding women’s leadership and participation, ending all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls, and ending poverty by empowering women economically.

The 2022 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report revealed that global gender equality was 132 years away – an increase from 2021, which stated equality was 100 years away. The pandemic, the resulting recession, and other worldwide political factors contributed to this new figure.

UN Women wanted to communicate this incomprehensible timeline and create a sense of urgency. The primary goal was awareness – alerting people to the fact so they could act. In doing this, we were tasked with communicating an old problem in a new light in order to break through our national complacency.

In the next 132 years, futurists expect humans to walk on Mars, have widespread brain enhancements, elevators to space and a colony on the Moon. All before women are equal on Earth. It means that space won’t be our final field to conquer, nor will medical technical technology or artificial intelligence.

Gender equality will be.

Our idea, ‘Equality: Our final frontier’ put the timeline to reach gender equality into perspective, using society’s progress elsewhere to contrast the lack of progress toward gender equality.

This colourful but depressing vision, created in AI enhanced animation, shows the ridiculousness of some of those innovations set in a futuristic world across film, digital outdoor screens and social.

In 2021, gender equality was set to take 100 years to achieve. However, 1 pandemic year and multiple political decisions across the world set women back 32 years. If we’re not careful, and allow progress to be stalled, we could be further from equality in 100 years than we are now. And women are the ones that pay the price.

Equality is not inevitable, and it won’t happen on its own - so we needed to remind Australians that unless we work at gender equality every day, and give to programs that support and accelerate equality, we will never achieve it.

Our campaign had to do three things: we needed to invoke people to make up for lost time due to the pandemic. We needed to show the issue as both a local and international problem. And it needed to be attention-grabbing enough to shock people out of their complacency.

To illustrate how far away gender equality is, we crafted a futuristic, sci-fi look and feel. This utopic and optimistic treatment juxtaposed the World Economic Forum’s dire gender equality predictions.

With only 3 months from concept approval to release, we leaned into the rise of AI as artist. We turned live action footage into animation using AI software. From there, we built an idyllic futuristic landscape – one where each scene is beautiful enough to frame as a standalone piece. Watercolour textures and a palette of warm purple and orange hues made it feel like a utopia we all want to go to.

Art direction was imperative to the film’s story telling. Our heroine walks from a protest, along a timeline into the future. Considered typography, integrated into buildings, signs and advertisements, helped us signpost milestones elegantly.

In DOOH and Social, we used headlines that contrasted single milestones against equality. We combined two visual languages: a futuristic aesthetic with protest placard brashness. We used a well-known typographic styling of sci-fi movies – bold 3D letter blocks, floating in outer space. Headline hierarchy reflected the order of societal priorities: a large, 3D technological milestone, followed by a gender equality prediction continued as a subhead, or afterthought. Textures, colour palettes and illustrated elements adopted from our film wove all the campaign elements together.

This was a new visual departure for UN Women. Space Age visuals are completely unexpected for a gender equality advert, so the campaign disarmed our audience by getting them excited about a bright, ambitious future before delivering a damning message about equality – a milestone due to be reached last.

To illustrate how far away gender equality is, we crafted a futuristic, sci-fi look and feel. This utopic and optimistic treatment juxtaposed the World Economic Forum’s dire gender equality predictions.

Art direction was imperative to the film’s story telling. Our heroine walks from a protest, along a timeline into the future. Considered typography, integrated into buildings, signs and advertisements, helped us signpost milestones elegantly.

In DOOH and Social, we used headlines that contrasted single milestones against equality. We combined two visual languages: a futuristic aesthetic with protest placard brashness. We used a well-known typographic styling of sci-fi movies – bold 3D letter blocks, floating in outer space. Headline hierarchy reflected the order of societal priorities: a large, 3D technological milestone, followed by a gender equality prediction continued as a subhead, or afterthought. Textures, colour palettes and illustrated elements adopted from our film wove all the campaign elements together.