We are an organisation tasked with driving nationwide change in the culture, behaviours and power imbalances that drive violence against women and their children. Our goal is an Australia where women are not only safe, but respected, valued and treated as equals in private and public life.

Sexist jokes, objectification and ‘inappropriate’ comments are amongst the most consistent predictors of this violence, but in Australia there is widespread acceptance of these behaviours and attitudes. In fact, only 14% of Australians are likely to act when they see disrespect towards women.

Research informing the brief found that whilst many people would like to intervene when they see this kind of behaviour, they simply don’t know how.

To empower and support bystanders so they are motivated to respond to these situations, we needed to create something innovative and engaging that would drive real world change – inspiring these people to act.

Violence against women is a serious, albeit under represented problem in Australian society. On average one woman a week dies as a result of domestic violence and one in four women have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner. These figures are representative of broader gender discrimination which unequally values men and women from an early age.

The imbalance is exacerbated through stereotyped representations of gender in the media and public life and the normalisation of sexist behaviour. Most commonly, this appears in the form of ‘casual’ disrespect towards women such as comments and jokes. These are the underlying drivers on a terrifying spectrum, the tip of which is violence against women.

‘Doing Nothing Does Harm’ aims to equip Australians with the tools to confront these instances of casual sexism head on, thereby stopping violence before it happens. More than this, it shows that intervention can be easily implemented and have a lasting impact on those around us.

The experience uses five interactive videos where a man starts peppering the conversation with inappropriate and derogatory comments about women. When he makes the comment, a button appears, asking the viewer to ‘do something.’ This dictates the outcome of the interaction.

Beyond merely encouraging users to act though, the interactive experience also flipped the concept of ‘retargeting’ on its head. Whereas traditional advertising retargets users based on their interaction with the communication, our campaign ‘de-targeted’ those who interacted with our ads, rewarding viewers for pro-social behaviour with this message: THANKS FOR DOING SOMETHING TO STOP SEXIST BEHAVIOUR. YOU WON’T SEE THESE ADS AGAIN. In short, if they took action to stop the behaviour, they’d never see the ads again. In contrast, those that failed to interact would be served the ad again and again, the sexist comments worsening and the Info Cards (buttons) encouraging users to intervene becoming increasingly pointed.

2015 research found that only 14% of Australians are likely to act when they see disrespect towards women. Furthermore, our consumer audit showed that men and women aged 25-35 were the most likely to recognise inappropriate sexist behaviour, but be unmotivated to act. This audit also told us that in order for this group to take action, we needed to make them feel certain that their actions would cause positive change and not make a situation worse.

Our corresponding communication strategy explored how sexist situations would ‘play out’ if intervention was normalised. Because not all sexism in Australia is widely recognised, the scenarios were also crafted to represent varying levels of explicitness. By replicating real life situations online, we equated the easy action of ‘clicking’ with acting, hereby increasing the likelihood of our audience taking real life action.

YouTube info cards (buttons) appear on screen for 7 seconds, perfectly, about the same amount of time you have to act when you hear a derogatory comment, before the moment passes. But to enable this existing functionality to deliver our message, we worked directly with Google’s creative development team to implement our interactivity and ‘de-targeting’ approach.

The media agency then developed a solution to leverage the innovation with Google to ensure we maximised reach of our audience digitally, sequentially serving each worsening scenario to our target audiences until they decided to take action and ‘do something’ to stop the behaviour. If the user chooses to do nothing, they continue to be targeted with the campaign and served more scenarios where inappropriate behaviour continues, worsening with each video. If they interact to stop the behaviour, they’ll never see the ads (or the behaviour) again – just like in real life.

Firstly, let’s remember that the population size of Australians aged 25-35 is 3.7 million people (Roy Morgan Single Source, Dec 2018).

Our very targeted campaign achieved a cumulative reach of 3.4 million, with over 12 million cumulative impressions. The idea achieved a further PR reach of 18.8 million and almost 10,000 card clicks. Not huge numbers by Cannes standards, however…

…a post-campaign survey found that half of those who saw the campaign said it had motivated them to act when they see disrespect towards women (Urbis Campaign Tracking Research, 2019). This response is hugely significant and a clear reaction to the relevance of the topic and the public support we have tapped into.

Also proof that with an innovative approach to media and communications, we can change people’s behaviour towards sexism, one click at a time.