DDB Group Aotearoa

Client: Team Heroine
Product: Initiative
Title: Correct the Internet
Media: OOH, TVC, Radio, Social, Earned PR
Country: New Zealand
Date Of Campaign: 21/01/2023

Background: The internet has a bias. Search algorithms are trained on human behaviour, designed to give us what they think we’re looking for. Now, they’ve learnt our bias towards men.Asked simple, non-gendered questions, like “who has scored the most goals in international football?”, search engines prioritise the more recognised male athletes, even when facts say it’s a female athlete - making women and their achievements invisible.So Team Heroine, a women’s sport marketing agency that seeks to connect female athletes with brands to ensure they're better recognized in a world where women’s sport receives just 0.4% of media coverage and 4% of total sponsorship, aimed to correct the internet's bias.Our objective was to highlight the incorrect searches and get as many people as possible report these inaccuracies to the search engines so they could be corrected, and the achievements of sportswomen would become visible for all to see.

Idea: We created an initiative that used the power of the people who use the internet, to right the wrongs of it. Our mission: Correct The Internet and make the achievements of sportswomen visible.The only way to correct search engines is by people sending feedback when they find something wrong. So we developed a tool that highlighted the incorrect searches that create the bias, and allowed people to report them with just a couple of clicks. New incorrect searches were revealed each day, showing the world the problem and inspiring them to take action. To ensure search engines didn’t dismiss our feedback as bots, we created hundreds of unique report messages to be sent from different user IP addresses around the world. Our simplified way of giving feedback made it quick and easy to report feedback on a scale the search engines couldn’t ignore, making them to take action too.

Results: Our campaign reached over 1 billion people globally. Had 120+ pieces of media coverage, including BBC, NBC, Fox News, Sky Sport & Forbes. Millions of people reported to search engines through our tool, social channels, and the media. And we’re now supported by over 50 global brands, including the United Nations.When we started, the search results never showed sportswomen. Although people can be served different results based on location, demographic and search history, we are now beginning to see change to many of the searches, correctly recognizing a female.A problem that has existed within search engines for decades has new momentum and is being solved, with search engines deploying new features to highlight women’s sport, offering both male and female results on searches.And now, Correct The Internet is part of UK/international government enquiries into misinformation, to help change the future of the internet.