As Vodafone, we accept that gender equality is one of the essential condition of social development and we are constantly working to ensure safe and egalitarian working environment that has zero tolerance for any kind of violence. Based on this vision we created projects that aim to provide equal opportunity and prevent violence against women such as Red Light, Reconnect, Business Against Domestic Violence that reinforces women empowerment.

In order to make more radical changes with the experience and courage we mustered up of all of our projects, we wanted to broaden the framework of gender equality campaigns that only held around Women's Day every year. Instead of just raising awareness we aimed to penetrate our way of thinking and initiate an innovative and long-term movement.

The language used in mainstream media fundamentally affects our way of thinking. Intentionally or unintentionally used sexist statements nurture this invisible violence environment

Turkish is a very challenging language with a unique grammatical structure and many hard-to-detect nuances. We developed the one and only artificial intelligence that both fully understands Turkish language and detects sexist discourse and idioms.

Disrupting people to gather their attention was critical in creative execution. Our artificial intelligence, Red Line, was integrated to both written and visual media in execution to highlight and cross the sexist discourses. This was at the core of all creative content and its power derived from its simplicity.

Sexist expressions dwelled in Turkish language fundamentally affects our way of thinking. Even the mainstream media and opinion leaders are heavily using sexist discourses intentionally or unintentionally. People associate themselves with characters of TV series who use psychological violence by language. Based on this, we need to touch the media channels that play a major role in the dissemination and adaptation of the language and correct the language they use to create a radical change in how society thinks and behave.

With Red Line project, we aimed to create awareness towards the sexist discourse that’s normalized in every day’s language and spread the word via most considered/consumed media outlets in Turkey as TV and Newspapers.

In order to achieve that goal, it was critical to reach a wide audience in a disruptive and continuous way, to first grab people’s attention and then create the change.

We’ve partnered with two mass media channels, Hürriyet.com.tr and Star TV, reaching millions each every day and started the project on 8 March 2018. By integrating Red Line to columnists’ online pages on Hurriyet.com.tr, we enabled both readers and columnists to detect and cross sexist usages in language that they have not noticed before. Well-known columnists and influencers participated both via announcing the campaign and auditing their pieces to eliminate the sexist statements.

On the following route of the project, we used 2 popular Turkish TV series and changed the scripts in the scene by eliminating sexist expressions using the Red Line AI, letting the viewers know about what we did by real-time sub-bands. On 8th, 9th of March, the TV series were broadcasted with our Red Line manifesto filmed with popular scriptwriters where they explained how they used the Red Line AI while putting together their scripts.

In the first stage of the project, 6K columns were analyzed to understand the semantic structure of Turkish Language and sexist usages that penetrated to language. Readers analyzed the 6 million news, 15 million visitors detected the sexist statements using the Red Line button on hurriyet.com.tr. As of January, the use of sexist words decreased from 11% to 0% on hurriyet.com.tr.

We’ve reached 11.1 million TV audience via two TV Series, within 4 different TV channel we broadcasted Red-line special TV spot to reach a wide range of TV audience.

In the perceptual results, we achieved +1 point in the brand score supporting the women's development, +6 points in the responsible brand score that gave back to the communities, and +2 points in the score that we are happy to be the customer of this brand compared to the same period last year.