The idea came as a direct result from the issue at hand. That women only make up 23% of the Egyptian workforce. The three ads depict different industries usually dominated by men. In these executions we then hid one single woman, and challenged the reader to find her. A task much easier said than done. With this style of execution, we got people to spend more time looking at the ads, meaning more time to communicate our message that it shouldn’t be this hard to find women in areas such as science, politics and technology.

To bring our idea to life, we went with an intricate illustration style with rich details that would make it interesting for the reader to really spend time and explore the ads.

Hand drawn in an isometric perspective, the different environments were created layer by layer, before being colored digitally. The hundreds of characters are all unique, but of course only one per ad is a woman. In total, it took the illustrators almost two months to finish the campaign.

This campaign started locally in Egypt, but soon spread across social media. Publications in Egypt and several other countries wrote about the ads. The popular social media site Playground even created a video with the ads that was seen over 1.2 million times. Other highlights include being featured on Japanese TV, and on UN Women’s global social media accounts, sharing our message with their millions of followers.