Advertising: Sexist search engine suggestions make for superb UN campaign

We’ve already seen Google’s predictive search function used in a charming creative way this year but now that same technology has been harnessed to socio-political ends, with blisteringly powerful results.

Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai came up with this superb campaign for the United Nations to show in a really direct, relatable way just how prevalent sexism remains in modern society. Starting with the simple premise of entering a Google search that begins “Women cannot…” or “Women should…” they saw what the algorithm threw up as suggestions. The brilliance of this idea is that everybody’s to blame as Google’s search function is based on popularity of previous search terms. By placing the results over the women’s mouths in the photographs, the result is unsettling, thought-provoking and undeniably worrying.