Changing views

We are proud to an­nounce our new in­ter­view se­ries. Our goal is to share in­for­ma­tion and ex­pe­ri­ences on how peo­ple all around the world man­aged to ac­ti­vate peo­ple. What does it take? Why would one do it? And how is it done? There are so many ways to ac­ti­vate peo­ple, let us ex­pe­ri­ence as many as pos­si­ble.

This very first talk is with Mind­share, the Agency be­hind Dove’s Im­age_Hack cam­paign. Head of so­cial, Mette Bier­bum, was kind enough to an­swer our ques­tions on how to ac­ti­vate peo­ple for a cause. Thanks for the in­sights, Mette!

Brand­soul: Why did you want to ac­ti­vate peo­ple?

Mind­share: We want­ed to ac­ti­vate peo­ple, be­cause we saw a need for change in the way that women are por­trayed in the me­dia land­scape. To­day, 7 out of 10 women (The Dove Glob­al Beau­ty and Con­fi­dence Re­port 2016) be­lieve that me­dia and ad­ver­tis­ing set an un­re­al­is­tic stan­dard of beau­ty most women can’t ever achieve.

The way it start­ed out, was by ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the dif­fi­cul­ty in find­ing pic­tures in var­i­ous im­age banks that ac­tu­al­ly por­trayed women as strong, in­de­pen­dent and equal to men. If we don’t pro­vide the ad­ver­tis­ing in­dus­try with non-stereo­typ­i­cal im­ages of women it’s go­ing to be very hard to change the me­dia land scape and this is why we start­ed work­ing on the idea, that end­ed with Im­age_Hack.

Brand­soul: How did you ac­ti­vate peo­ple?

Mind­share: We teamed up with pho­tog­ra­phers to make se­ries of strong and in­de­pen­dent women and then with brands, who want­ed to use the im­ages for ad­ver­tis­ing.

We launched Im­age_Hack the 8^th of March, on Women’s In­ter­na­tion­al Day with our cam­paign film and a print ad for the BTB mar­ket in the Dan­ish news­pa­per Børsen. We want­ed to tar­get the agen­cies and ad­ver­tis­ers as they are the ones who can change the por­tray­al of women in ad­ver­tis­ing. In April, the cam­paign was men­tioned on Ad­week, which meant we got a lot of me­dia cov­er­age and even more at­ten­tion from brands and pho­tog­ra­phers, who want­ed to sup­port the cause.

Brand­soul: What was the ben­e­fit?

Mind­share: We got a lot of me­dia cov­er­age which was im­por­tant to get the mes­sage out. For me per­son­al­ly, this top­ic is of high im­por­tance, as I be­lieve that we, as agen­cies and ad­ver­tis­ers have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to por­tray women the way they should be por­trayed: as strong and in­de­pen­dent.

Brand­soul: How long did it take to es­tab­lish the move­ment?

Mind­share: We got the idea in Au­gust, 2016. The project was very am­bi­tious, as we not on­ly want­ed to show the prob­lem with­in the in­dus­try but al­so to pro­vide a way to fix it. Hope­ful­ly the cam­paign will in­spire cre­ative teams, ad­ver­tis­ers and agen­cies to cre­ate new cam­paigns with the per­spec­tive of us­ing non-stereo­typ­i­cal im­ages of women in mind.

Stay tuned for more in­ter­views on the sub­ject on this chan­nel. We are look­ing for­ward to more fruit­ful en­coun­ters.

Image: Pixabay CC0