2024 Silver Innovation for Good

Agency: Ogilvy UK

Client: Mayor of London

Entry Title: Breaking the Silence

Executive Summary

Male violence against women starts with words. When confronted with such words, most men want to challenge misogyny - the problem is, 70% didn’t know how.

Strategy

In 2021, Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens abducted, raped and murdered Sarah Everard. Three days prior, he’d been reported for indecent exposure. Two years earlier, he’d exchanged grossly offensive misogynistic WhatsApp messages with fellow officers, ‘joking’ about sexual assault and rape. This chilling sequence underscores a grim reality: male violence against women starts with words.

The strategy was to break the silence men maintained when encountering such behaviour, not their social bond. The goal was to equip men with a tool to intervene when they witnessed their friends crossing the line.

To embed the tool into the cultural vernacular, creating a national conversation to mobilise society to make calling it out the norm, not the exception, was required.

Creativity

The solution was a single word: MAAATE. Drawing from the language of male friendships, it’s familiar. Stretch it out, and it carries weight. It respectfully signals “stop”, using vowel lengthening technique to convey it’s time to get serious.

To get people talking about it the team looked to the science behind how we spread a new behaviour, and designed a social credibility-first campaign model. Most people believe that social movements start from a central source. But it’s not true. People won’t adopt a risky behaviour if they hear it from a single source. It’s the number and diversity of sources that matters.

MAAATE was seeded with influencers months before launch. Hero creator, renowned UK comedian Romesh Ranganathan, devised an original comedy skit bringing the intervention to life. Traditional advertising was dropped in favour of an interactive film helmed by Top Boy director Koby Adom. The film invited the viewer to simulate intervention at pivotal moments by pressing the MAAATE button (instead of the skip button), with 270 possible outcomes.

A GIF to intervene in private chats unleashed an abundance of content across partner LADBible’s expansive network.

Results

Surpassing all expectations, MAAATE emerged as the most talked about campaign of 2023: over 35 articles in major papers dissecting its merits and shortcomings. From primetime broadcasts on BBC1, Piers Morgan Uncensored and ITV to radio discussions on BBC Radio 5 Live and Women’s Hour, it sparked fervent discussion.

One small word ignited a national conversation amassing an earned reach of 3.5 billion. The discourse surrounding MAAATE only fuelled its momentum, propelling the word into the public lexicon. It had impact, turning the target audience from the group least likely to intervene to the most likely.

Adjusted AVE was £648,642.

The Team

Ogilvy - Natalie Chester, Strategy Director