Her Street View
Touche pas à ma Pote
Issue 45 | December 2017
Agency
J. Walter Thompson Brussels
Creative Team
Creative Director Xavier Bouillon Creative Yagiz "Rudy" Ekren Creative Yves Cwajgenbaum
Production Team
Motion Designer Nicolas Grandry Illustrator Renaud Lavency Web Designer Natalia Konovaloff Digital Engineer Arun Luyckx
Other Credits
Client Pauline Pourtois Account Director Olivia Gathy
Date
March 2017
Background
In 2012, Sofie Peeters made a film called "Women of the Street", which showed the degree of abuse to which women in Belgium were subjected, when out and about.
It inspired Bea Ercolini to create the non-profit organisation Touche pas à ma Pote.
Despite legislation passed in 2014 outlawing "any gesture or behaviour intended to express contempt for a person because of his or her sex", research showed that 98% of women in Belgium had been harassed and insulted while walking on the streets.
Idea
Launched on International Women's Day, a campaign was launched using animated GIF banners and guerrilla posters in Brussels.
The idea was to show exactly what women had to endure on the streets. Partnering with Google Belgium, Google Street View was transformed into Her Street View.
The drag-and-drop Pegman became a Pegwoman. And as Pegwoman made her way through the street, thousands of speech bubbles, filled by real words heard by women on the streets, popped up as well as audible insults in a hyper-realistic soundscape.
All the insults were collected from real testimonials collected by the organisation.
Users were able to explore the city, and experience for themselves how unpleasant it was for a woman to walk out.
Results
Her Street View immediately generated a lot of discussion on social media.
In 3 Days;
620,000 impressions
111,000 video views
+37% brand awareness
The city gave a grant of €20,000 and a pledge was made to put more plain-clothes police on the streets to take action against harassment.
Our Thoughts
Since Pearl, the world's first awards-bot chose this as being the best idea from Belgium of the year (see pages 90-91), it seemed churlish not to feature it.
Google teams are not always accommodating to brands but it is good to see the Maps people making this possible, even if it was for just one day.
A great use of their platform.
Making your way through Street View and the catalogue of vulgarities and abuse would have been shocking to many men.
Shocking enough to send many on to the website, where they could watch the testimonies of real women who had been degraded by their experiences.
Shocking enough for the city authorities to want to do something about it.