When female directors get left out of the Oscars, we don’t get to experience the film industry in full equality. So instead of an ad or a film we wanted to create an alternate experience that activated around the Oscars to show the world how the Oscars should be. We created bespoke technology that hacked the Oscars and activated during the broadcast to increase awareness of the issue and changed how the world sees the film industry.

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.

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.

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.)

The only money we spent was the $6 needed to buy the domain. And we generated over $1 million in free media for female directors. The technology and the campaign to promote it was all built in house at the agency.