Nowadays Brazil is a divided country. On one hand we have a broad discussion about gender equality and women empowerment, on the other, the country has a congressman running for the upcoming presidential elections who said during a session in Congress that he might rape a congresswoman if she weren’t ugly. This happened in a country in which one rape happens every 15 minutes. And considering the matter from a broader perspective, in the U.S., Mr. Trump defends the same conservative ideas. This takes its toll on the gaming world, a virtual place where boys and girls are just learning about social manners. In this context, our idea played the role of an amplifier of girl’s voices in order to educate boys and draw parents’ attention.

We discovered that many girls were hiding their identities behind male nicknames in order to protect themselves while playing. It was very unfair. It had to end. To reach both boys and girls, we would need to count on their idols: the gamer influencers. So we invited the biggest male influencers to participate in an experience: they should change their nicknames to female names and play online for one day. We also asked them to share this experience with their fans and invite them to do the same. And so, they did. From then on the movement spread organically all over the world.

First, we asked the main game influencers to participate in the experience of playing under a female name and share it with all their followers in their YouTube channel. After that, we gathered the most impressive experiences in a single video to give another boost to the campaign. The organic content produced by followers and the strength of our influencers quickly made the media aware of the movement and it became news everywhere.

More than 115 million media impressions with no investment, more than 200,000 social media interactions in different platforms, 98.6% of positive mentions, more than 40 hours of organic content posted on YouTube either of people taking part in the experience or talking about the problem, and most importantly: as we can see in many social media comments, countless girls were encouraged to never hide again thanks to the campaign. That’s a huge contribution to gender equality especially because we were dealing with kids, young boys and girls that were still making up their minds about gender and their roles in society.

Vivo wanted to make a statement: girls need to be respected while playing, too. Despite all the broadcasted campaigns promoting equality, the scenario in the gaming world wasn’t being affected. To make gamers aware we came up with a simple strategy: if users didn’t listen to a brand, they would certainly listen to their idols. So, we invited the main gamer influencers to join our campaign. It took only one week to draw the media’s attention and make thousands of gamers aware of the gender inequality issue. People started to use the campaign’s hashtag #MyGameMyName in their posts in all social media platforms supporting our movement.

Vivo is the biggest internet provider in Brazil. In the last years the brand has embraced equality as a key message in all its campaigns. And gender equality is one of its main concerns. So, when the brand found out that an industry twice as large as Hollywood’s was silent about sexual harassment in online games, it promptly took a stand for girls. After all there are 1.8 billion gamers online everyday. Half of them are girls and they all have suffered some form of harassment while playing. That should stop as soon as possible.