Roy is an award show for Swedish commercial films. The creative brief was to get agencies to send their next script to at least one female director.

We started this by using and rearranging a well known riddle tricking people into thinking in gender stereotypes. In the following ad we played with the stereotype that women are overtly dramatic by exclaiming that ”Women have a thing for drama!”. For ad number three we listed the forty most classic TV-ads in Swedish history, with the names of the directors (whom all happened to be male.) A classic snack-commercial titled ”Where are the ladies?” was high-lighted to put focus on the issue. In the final ad we put out a thread on ”Flashback”, a reddit-esque chat forum known to house a lot of misogynic and prejudiced contributors. We printed some of the typical comments as a demonstration that there are still work left to be done.

We used modern phenomenons and references, but tried to keep the feel very classic. We wanted to show that although a lot has happened technically on the TV-ad scene, some problems still remain the same.?

Roy is an award for Swedish commercials, and as such it has drawn a lot of criticism for the male overrepresentation among the laureates. So Roy wanted to do something about this. But giving the awards to anyone but the best was never an option. Instead we used the attention around the awards show as a call for sending more scripts to female directors. Hopefully this will lead to more films being directed by women in the end. We did a series of 4 ads in total running up to the awards show, but we started the campaign by spreading the film in the right circles using both e-mails and social media channels.

The topic trended in Swedish media during fall. The issue was discussed both in Swedens leading national newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) and on the morning news of the biggest TV station (SVT1). The ads were awarded three times in a row in the ”best-of-the-month”-section in the leading Swedish advertising magazine (Resumé), and the film was also given international attention, picked up by for instance Lürzer’s Archive and becoming choice of the week at Best ads on TV. It’s hard to give statistics on attitude shifts but we’re seeing a significant change on the rosters of Swedish production companies, where everyone suddenly became eager to represent at least one female director. Money wise the whole campaign was produced pro bono, with no media budget.