You can only get a million dollars worth of media for zero dollars when something blows up in PR. We carefully crafted this campaign as the perfect headline. And we got that headline again and again and again. We got covered by BBC in the UK, Forbes magazine in the US, and Hindustan Times in India. Making for a million dollar global media campaign while spending zero dollars on media.

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. For PR, the challenge was getting the word out, both to highlight the injustice of it all but also to make people aware of our platform so that people knew to log on to our site and stream the Oscars through our platform on the night of the show.

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.

We knew that to generate global media coverage that spreads like wildfire, we had to create enough story, enough assets and enough fresh content for the story to stay fresh. Instead of press-releases and media packets, we created a live PR asset site for outlets to access. On the site, we had our copywriters write the perfect articles for lazy publishers to steal bits from.

Then we mapped out our first reachouts with the right small publications that we knew would get the bigger guys buzzing for exclusives. For example, we practically wrote the Chicago Tribune article to perfection— just so we’d get Forbes buzzing to get more of the story. The Guardian article led the BBC to interview our team.

We also used our interviews sparingly. Our creatives with trade pubs. Our technologists with tech pubs. Our founder with entrepreneurial magazines. And our partner organizations for the film industry.

On the night of the Oscars, GiveHerABreak had 75 people logging on per second.

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.)