In all 92 years of the Academy Awards, only five women have been nominated for Best Director, and only one has ever won. In 2019, despite a record number of critically-acclaimed female-directed films, no women were nominated for best director...again.

So instead of letting another year go by without women, we hacked the biggest award show in Hollywood. GiveHerABreak created technology that replaced the commercials during the Oscars with female-directed films.

When men are deemed “Best Director” 99.9% of the time, this suggests to the world that men are better at this than women. It discourages women from making films. And it perpetuates the cycle of male dominance in the film industry. Films shape the way we see the world. When the Academy says man-made films are the best—the ones we have to see—we adopt their point-of-view. We see stories through the lens of men, adopting this as the “best” way to see things. The world is so much bigger than that...it’s time to widen our lens.

We created GiveHerABreak to widen that lens. To get the Oscars audience to see the world through the female perspective. Women have stories to tell, and we need to see them, recognize them and celebrate them.

The Academy completely excluded female filmmakers from their show. So we played in the space that they weren’t paying attention to: the ad breaks. We created technology that replaced commercials with trailers from snubbed female directors, hijacking the Oscars live stream and getting thousands of viewers to see the show the way it should be: with amazing, award-worthy work created by women of the film industry.

Our target audience was big. We wanted to reach every single person watching the Oscars, but the campaign had to start with the group that was frustrated the most—female creatives. So we partnered with organizations like Women in Film and Free The Bid to create a collective of groups with their own followings. This would not only get us reach, but also bring authenticity as these organizations would be sourcing the incredible female directors we’d highlight.

Our communications strategy was simple. We created social content at the awareness level, then created bespoke content for the popular films and directors that were left out, so people could galvanize around certain individuals and films. This got directors, producers and celebrities into the conversation. During the show, we created bespoke content for each trailer so it could get shared in real-time and get more viewers off their broadcast and onto our platform.

GiveHerABreak is an Oscars streaming platform that replaces ads during the show with female-directed films. The technology acts like a channel switcher. It iFrames your cable broadcast, overlaying it with a digital mask, and during the ads, it pulls trailers of female directed films from the internet. When the show comes back, we switch back to the award show.

We worked closely with organizations like Women in Film, Free the Bid and FIlm Fatales to help compile our list of female-directed films and make sure our idea wasn’t just helpful in theory, but could actually have an impact in the female film community.

On the night of the Oscars, GiveHerABreak had 75 people logging on per second. We had to buy extra cloud servers twice during the broadcast.

The platform’s reach went beyond what any of us had planned for, starting a worldwide conversation spanning all the way to the red carpet, where Natalie Portman’s Dior gown, embroidered with all the snubbed female-directors names, shared across social with #GiveHerABreak.

In the end, GiveHerABreak went viral, giving female directors $1 million in free media and the spotlight that they deserve.

But the biggest result we could have hoped for—a year later, in 2021, a historic number of female directors were nominated. (FINALLY.)