The film Suffragette, released last month, dramatizes the efforts of women across the United States to push for equal rights and a political voice in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Though this is a period piece starring Meryl Streep and Cary Mulligan, its makers want to remind us that the fight for equality continues today in such unlikely places as, say, the advertising industry.
In order to highlight that fact, L.A.’s Zambezi created this video to promote the Focus Features flick, enlisting girls aged 7-14 to highlight discouraging stats that might even surprise Harry “I thought this was done” Potter and adding a British narrator to make things a bit more official.
The concept is simple and effective: was this fact true in 1915 or 2015? You will probably not be surprised to learn that the answer is the same in every case.
The campaign has earned a fair amount of attention, with nearly half a million views on Facebook and 600K on YouTube so far this week.
It’s also been very active on Instagram under the #HopeForOurDaughters hashtag; the film site includes an array of easily shareable content like this image of one Susan B. Anthony, and Focus Features has promised to donate a dollar to Equality Now every time the tag appears on ‘gram.
Here’s another relevant statistic: 11.6 percent of creative directors are women. 9.6 percent of those are copywriters and 3 percent are art directors. Let’s not even get into how many of them are white.
91 percent of women polled in a Greenfield Online study also said they don’t think advertisers understand them.
Those numbers are from 2014.
Credits
CEO + Founder: Chris Raih
Managing Director: Pete Brown
Executive Creative Director: Josh DiMarcantonio
Executive Producer: Alex Cohn
Senior Producer: Andrew Gage
Associate Creative Director, Art Director: Nick Rodgers
Associate Creative Director, Copywriter: Ben George
Copywriter: Jack-Anthony Collier
Jr. Copywriter: Kishan Saujani
Jr. Art Director: Paula Coral
Account Director: Luke Lamson
Account Executive: Nicole Younger
Director of Digital: Ricardo Diaz
Chief Strategy Officer: Kristina Jenkins
Junior Strategist: Keely Galgano
Production Company: Pulse Commercials
Director: Lucy Walker
President, Executive Producer: Kira Cartensen
Executive Producer, Head of Production : Hillary Rogers
Producer: Sarah Feeley
Production Supervisor: Dannikke Walkker
Editing House: Zambezi
Editor: Ling Ly