An Entire Week of Only Women Athlete’s News. The Portuguese NGO Raparigas Da Bola Hacked Portugal’s Leading Sports Newspaper.

The group Raparigas da Bola (English translation: Ball Girls) released its latest guerrilla activation to try and reduce gender inequality in sports media coverage.

In the week that marks International Women’s Day, the group highlights the following message: what’s the point in celebrating the date if the front covers of sports newspapers are still predominantly covering only male athletes. 

From 7th to 11th march, Raparigas da Bola will change the news by putting women on the front cover of the Portugal’s biggest-selling Sports Newspaper. They‘ll do so by taking advantage of AR – Augmented Reality – which will allow everyone that accesses RaparigasNaBola.pt to have the experience of seeing the news of the day turned into female-athlete only news.

The idea was created by the agency Havas Lisbon, which for the second year is helping the group to give more visibility to this cause. Last year they highlighted the inequality of exposure given by the top 3, tier-one, sports newspapers to female athletes with an action launched one day after International Women’s Day.

The initiative, #WomenAlsoPlay, involved reproducing an exact representation of each of the 3 newspapers on 9th march as two-tone infographics: one color for men and one for women, to illustrate just how biased media coverage is towards male athletes.

The last campaign reached 52 times more people than the entire audience of the biggest sports newspaper in the country and was awarded dozens of times at the best advertising festivals around the world.This year’s activation was developed and implemented by Studio Akt Creative. The news is being developed in collaboration with the NGO Raparigas da Bola and the journalists Cláudia Martins and Cláudia Torres.

CREDITS

Agency: Havas Worldwide Portugal
ECD: Paulo Pinto
Creative Directors: Ana Torres, José Vieira
Senior Copywriter: Bernardo Tavares
Senior Art Director: Sávio Hatherly
Content: Cláudia Lopes, Cláudia Martins
Designer: Tito Gouveia

Source: Havas Lisbon

  Bernardo Tavares, Havas Lisbon, Havas Worldwide Portugal, Paulo Pinto