Tackling sexist hate with EE
Client: EE
Strategic Service: Integrated Campaign Strategy
Team: Sophie DeGraft Johnson & Libby Conroy (Business Leads), Ophelia Stimpson (Strategy Lead), Will John & Sarah Heavens (Creative Leads), Saatchi & Saatchi.
Opportunity
Goal: Tackle online hate during the Women’s Euros
Market: UK
Audience: Adult men
As a technology leader, EE is committed to making life online safer and happier for people in the UK.
In 2021, BT (a then-home nations football sponsor and EE’s sister company) founded Hope United, a campaign platform and team of football ambassadors and formed to tackle online hate during the Men’s Euros.
EE inherited the home nations football sponsorship from BT for 2022 and wanted to use the moment of the Women’s Euros to bring Hope United to the fore, tackling online hate once more.
Insight
Online hate in the context of the women’s game brings with it the added layer of gender, and the need to be sensitive to how women’s lived experiences differ to men’s. Our challenge was to create a brand-new expression of our Hope United platform to deal with sexist hate as a specific issue.
Sexist hate disappears women, in football and beyond. While sexist words might seem surface level, they build a culture of misogyny that impacts women’s experience in the real world. We conducted bespoke research that found 67% of the UK believe that if men stopped aiming hate and criticism at women online, the level of online sexist abuse would greatly reduce (YouGov). This led us to a very simple insight. Online sexist hate is not women’s problem to solve. It’s men’s.
We needed a campaign with attitude. Something that would inspire men to take more of the burden and help tackle the issue, without painting women as helpless victims.
Execution
Enter Hope United 2.0. A team of inspiring home nations football ambassadors including Rio Ferdinand, Lucy Bronze, Demi Stokes and Jordan Henderson assembled to make sexist hate not her problem.
Our hero ‘Problems’ TVC explores the many problems women face in everyday life – with the conclusion that sexist hate should never be one of them. The film unapologetically heroes our female Hope United ambassadors and is based on their real experiences of being both women and professional athletes at the top of their game.
We also developed a suite of digital skills – ‘Hope Drills’ – delivered by our Hope United ambassadors. Each Hope Drill manifests as a short form video to show men (and in fact the nation at large) how to challenge and report sexist hate online, and women how to protect themselves from hate in digital spaces.
