Every campaign teaches you something you didn’t plan on learning. Some of our biggest lessons come from watching how women in different communities respond to a campaign once it’s out in the world.
Gender Equality Week (Sept. 21–27) felt like a good moment to reflect on some of those lessons.
She’s not one identity, she’s several, at once.
For a Women’s Day campaign with Panasonic, the creative concept was built around a simple idea: no woman is just one thing.
The lesson wasn’t really about the grid format. It was about resisting the instinct to pick one image of “woman” and run with it. A single hero shot, no matter how beautifully done, can only ever tell one story. Letting a woman be a professional, a mother, a friend, and an individual – sometimes all in the same scroll – felt more honest than trying to capture her in one frame.
Cultural moments carry meaning language alone can’t.
A Lunar New Year skincare campaign we built for Neutrogena taught a related but different lesson. Getting the Simplified Chinese copy right was only step one. The real work was in understanding what the season means renewal, presenting your best self, starting the year with intention and letting that meaning shape the creative, rather than just decorating a product shot with plum blossoms and gold trim. A woman preparing for Lunar New Year isn’t just shopping; she’s marking a moment. Campaigns that understood that distinction felt like they were speaking with her, not just to her.
The small details carry the most weight.
It’s rarely the big, obvious things that make a woman feel like a campaign was made for her. It’s smaller choices the tone of a phrase, the setting of an image, whether a moment shown feels familiar rather than generic. We’ve learned to spend more time here than anywhere else, because this is usually where authenticity is won or lost.
What this has shaped in how we work.
None of this came from a single campaign, it’s built up over time, across communities, across briefs. A few things we now try to hold onto in every project: We resist reducing her to one image or one moment. We treat cultural context as the foundation of a creative idea, not a layer added at the end. And we’ve learned to sit a little longer in the small details.
Research backs up what we’ve seen firsthand: consumers increasingly notice when representation feels genuine versus performative, and it shapes what they do next, recent research found 63% of consumers say diverse representation in advertising matters to them, and close to half say it influences whether they buy from a brand at all.
