Since the launch of their “Face Anything” campaign in 2018, Olay has committed to fighting for the future of all women to be fearless to face anything. They pledged to stop retouching in their ads and committed to showing diverse representations of womanhood in front or and behind the camera.

In the Fall of 2019, they came to us to help them create their new brand ambition, and wanted to use the Super Bowl to do something smart and entertaining to tell the world. Inspired by Olay’s own heritage in science and technology, we decided on a 10-year commitment to enable more women to fearlessly pursue Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematic ( STEM) careers.

Our brief was to take Olay’s new purpose and make a call to action around STEM that would be the number one hashtag on Twitter during the 2020 Super Bowl.

If there were more women in STEM fields globally, the GDP of every nation on earth would experience exponential growth.

Catalyst, 2020

Around the world, girls and women are being systematically pushed out of science and math throughout their education. Girls are being fed the narrative that computers and coding are for boys, even though people who programmed the first digital computers — were women. This inaccurate narrative has helped to define who is considered a coder, and has created the “bro-techie” culture women are facing today.

It's this narrative that has led to a rapid decline in the number of women and girls in coding since 1990. Today, the number of women in coding has reached a low we haven’t seen since 1975.

We saw an opportunity to face this issue head on with our ad to raise awareness and effect change during advertising’s biggest night.

We knew our goal - to call attention to the exclusion of women in coding. But how? We needed a campaign that was hopeful, but serious, and addressed complex issues without alienating anyone from our message.

Using strategic insight as our foundation and a bit of creative inspiration following the first all-female space walk in October 2019 and the planned second space walk in January 2020, it all came together with a bit of cheeky wordplay to create #MakeSpaceForWomen.

The goal was to shoot the first-ever Super Bowl ad entirely created, directed, edited, produced by and starring women — a rallying cry for all women watching the Super Bowl and reminder to everyone else that we can make space for women in coding, at the Super Bowl, and in all areas of life. Because when we make space for women, we make space for everyone.

We knew that the number of women in science continued to decline. But why? Turned out many girls between the ages of 10-18 were being actively excluded or intimidated out of STEM educational paths by peers and teachers.

Knowing this, we partnered with a non-profit, educational organization “Girls Who Code” to shine a spotlight on the gender gap in science & technology as well as raise much-needed funds to address the problem where it starts.

To drive relevancy with millennial women with purchasing and political power, we assembled an all-star cast of women —Taraji Henson, Lilly Singh, Busy Philipps, Katie Couric and NASA Astronaut Nicole Stott (with a combined social media following of more than 28 million) — to engage this audience around our message of #MakeSpaceForWomen.

We created our 0:30 second ad around the idea that it's now time to #MakeSpaceForWomen. Directed by Jamie Babbit, she helped us tell our story during the game.

Mid-campaign the second-ever all-female spacewalk occurred, so we produced and secured a #MakeSpaceforWomen ad, adjacent to the news story in USA Today, congratulating the astronauts and making a donation to Girls Who Code in their names.

Leading up to the big game, our campaign implemented several digital hacks to drive heavy consumer conversation. For example, one search hack answered Super Bowl Sunday’s most commonly Googled question, “What time is the game?” with “Time To #MakeSpaceforWomen and the game starts at 6:30PM.”

To encourage engagement, Olay donated $1 for every use of #MakeSpaceForWomen during the game. We leveraged Twitter bumpers and paid KOLs to posts to promote dialogue around the initiative.

The response was overwhelming. We raised $700,000 for Girls Who Code within seconds of the ad running. The campaign over-delivered expectations and was the number one most talked about ad during the game, trending for 6 hours. Even JLO’s Halftime show couldn’t slow our momentum, making us Twitter’s Brand Bowl Award winner.

In all the campaign generated:

54,700,000 social impressions, including 265,000 Twitter mentions in three days for Olay and Girls Who Code.

1,500 press placements and more than 12.3 billion press impressions.

$700,000 for Girls Who Code (including two $100,000 donations)

12,000,000-plus YouTube Views

97% Positive and Neutral Sentiment for Olay and Girls Who Code

Further, #MakeSpaceForWomen has continued to be used a year later by women advocating for making space for women’s ideas and leadership.