Advertising Technique: Shocking Truth

Source: Design Taxi

Most people have an unconscious bias against women in the workplace.  Fact.

Even cultural nuances like selecting your sex on an immigration form (M comes before F), referring to a mixed group as "guys" or calling a group of grown women "girls" hint at sexism.

The Ad Agency, Ogilvy & Mather, highlighted rampant sexism in its new ad campaign for UN Women.  They used real Google searches and showed the "auto complete" results.

Here's how autocomplete works:

"As you type, autocomplete predicts and displays queries to choose from. The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google."  

It's a good proxy for the most popular queries using the start of the sentence as a reference.

After seeing this ad, I assumed it was only applicable to more restrictive societies.  I'm in the US this week and tried it out myself.  Here's some of my results:

Those are some pretty telling results.

We shouldn't work, vote or go to college.
We should stay home.
We can't have it all.

If you really want to know someone, look at their Google search history.
If you really want to know public opinion, look at Google autocomplete.

There's still a long way to go in the women's rights movement.