How does a successful man look like?

According to today’s advertising work, he’s casually leaning on his expensive car, surrounded by women, his luxury watch peeking out from the sleeve of his tailor-made suit, his face dead serious.

But what do actual men say when we ask them about success?

For more and more of them it means being happy with their day-to-day life, having good relationships, and being able to practice self-care.

But what happens when society still expects them to want money and power?

They become frustrated and directionless, sometimes even turning to radical and misogynistic ideas of manhood.

The Unstereotype Alliance, convened by UN Women, set a goal to redefine the narrative around male success by showing young, impressionable Gen Z men the many ways success can look like. Despite what they see in advertising.

You can choose what success means to you.

We illustrate this idea with a moment of choice that’s familiar to all of our target audience: choosing your skin in a video game.

Our print grabs their attention by using the visual style of the character selection page of Fortnite, where players can choose how they want to appear in the game, alluding to ’more skins’ that can only be purchased for money in games like Fortnite. But instead of the regular characters of the game (action figures, superheroes, etc.) we show all the ways a man can be successful in a non-traditional way. They are all a version of the character on the right, representing some roles and objectives that offer an alternative to the stereotypical image of a successful man.

We don’t want to tell young men how their success should look like. We want to tell them that they have the opportunity to choose, and find their own path toward a personal feeling of success. But at the same time they need some direction and some familiarity to show them that this is something that they are capable of. They are in control, and they are ready.

We chose the video game genre because its visual style is instantly recognizable not only for our target audience (men aged 18-27), but for a much wider audience. Since the most popular video game in the world is Fortnite, we chose to increase familiarity with direct references to its user interface, without directly copying elements (therefore avoiding legal limitations).