Some of the most culturally significant advertising of the last two decades has centred on women - not as a target audience to flatter, but as a subject worth taking seriously. Campaigns like Always #LikeAGirl, Fearless Girl, and This Girl Can didn't just sell products; they changed how brands talk about gender and sparked conversations that went far beyond the media buy. This collection brings together the work that did it best.
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Collapse Feminism
- Repeater Books · Hollie Smith · 2024
Cover for Alice Cappelle's Collapse Feminism. The glitchy slash cutting through the word signals fracture and online conflict - feminism fought over and breaking apart on the internet.
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Forgotten Women
- Brazen · Melissa Four · 2024
Cover for Zing Tsjeng's Forgotten Women series. The quiet, classic typography gives overlooked women from history the dignified, canonical treatment they were long denied.
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Eve
- Hutchinson Heinemann · Henry Petrides · 2024
Cover for Cat Bohannon's Eve. Life sprouting from the title word and spanning eras from dinosaurs to humans visualises the book's deep-time argument about the female body driving evolution.
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Our Lady of the Forest
- Vintage · Gabriele Wilson · 2009
Cover for David Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest. The rapt young face fills the frame like an icon - fitting for a runaway girl who claims to see the Virgin Mary in the woods.
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The Enchanter
- Vintage · Megan Wilson · 2010
Cover for Nabokov's The Enchanter, a precursor to Lolita. The innocent seated girl amid fragments hints at the novella's dark subject - a predatory man's obsession, glimpsed obliquely.
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Something Is Out There
- Knopf · Peter Mendelsund · 2010
Cover for Richard Bausch's Something Is Out There. The lone child at the edge of a fog-bound field captures the collection's mood of ordinary lives shadowed by unnamed, looming dread.
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The Ghost Sequences
- Undertow Publications · Vince Haig · 2020
Cover for A.C. Wise's story collection The Ghost Sequences. The living women arranged into a hidden skull embodies the collection's quiet horror - death lurking within the everyday and the feminine.
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The Revolution of Little Girls
- Vintage · Barbara deWilde · 2011
Cover for Blanche McCrary Boyd's The Revolution of Little Girls. The sweet-but-defiant girl in pink against darkness captures the novel's Southern coming-of-age - femininity and rebellion entwined.
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Let Her Finish
- International Women's Day · JT Agency
Let Her Finish traces the shortage of women in senior roles back to something small enough to be tolerated: being interrupted. The film accumulates those everyday interruptions to show what they cost in confidence, visibility and promotion, and closes with the Creative Director experiencing the same
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Women's Day / Cementos Argos
- Cementos Argos · DENICOLÁS Colectivo Creativo
Construction is still pictured as men's work, but every woman driving a mixer, running a site or owning the hardware store settles the question in passing. Argos puts those women on the page and makes the point plainly: they were never the limit, and in an industry still building its own equality th
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We Are Bears
- Tous · LOLA MullenLowe · 2021
Part of TOUS's "We are Mothers, We are Bears" platform by LOLA MullenLowe, which uses the Spanish jewellery house's signature teddy-bear mascot as a metaphor for motherhood. The insight is that a mother is both tender and fierce - protective like a bear - so the film pairs quiet, intimate mother-and
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URVENTURES
- Arabian Automobiles Company · TBWA\RAAD · 2025
Arabian Automobiles and Nissan tackle the funding and mobility barriers facing women-led startups by turning the Nissan Urvan into a launchpad: instead of selling vans, they give women entrepreneurs fully equipped, branded Urvans in exchange for future equity. The insight: real empowerment is invest
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Inkvisible
- UN Women · Impact BBDO · 2024
Henna means happy marriage - so to expose the fact that one in three married women in Pakistan is abused, the bruises were drawn in henna: a black eye, fingers around a throat, in the medium of celebration. Worn by parliamentarians in government sessions, it helped drive a new bill increasing protec
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Feminine Arabic
- Twitter · VML Dubai · 2021
Arabic grammar can address women as women, yet modern usage defaults to the masculine - so women are rarely addressed as themselves. Twitter used 140 characters to spark the shift, championing the feminine form in everyday digital conversation. The insight: inclusion in the Middle East starts inside
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Care That Comes From The Heart: Fly with Her
- Philippine Airlines · BBDO Guerrero · 2025
Philippine Airlines' 'Fly With Her', launched on International Women's Day: a ₱10 million scholarship pledge through the PAL Foundation to train aspiring Filipina pilots and grow female representation in the cockpit. The insight: diversity campaigns in aviation usually celebrate the few women alread
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The Show Must Go On
- Amazon · Lucky Generals · 2020
Amazon's 'The Show Must Go On': a young ballerina's performance is cancelled, so her neighbourhood stages it - torchlit, distanced, to Queen's anthem. The insight: the retailer casts itself as the enabler of other people's resilience; the box on the doorstep is only the prop, the community is the sh
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Beauty Tips by Reshma: How to get perfect red lips
- make love not scars · ogilvy & mather · 2016
'Make Acid Unavailable to the Common Man': the after-effects of acid attacks - peeled skin, lost sight, a lifetime of visible pain - as the case for restricting over-the-counter acid sales. The insight: the weapon is a household purchase; the campaign attacks availability, the one variable regulatio
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Keep Girls in School
- Whisper · leo burnett india · 2021
Whisper's 'Keep Girls in School': in India, where menstruating women are treated as unholy, girls without period education and products drop out of school. The insight: the feminine-care brand attacks the dropout statistic rather than the product benefit - hygiene as the infrastructure of education.
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Goal of the Century
- hyundai · innocean worldwide · 2023
Hyundai's 'Goal of the Century' for the FIFA Women's World Cup: the automaker's sustainability-and-football platform expanded to the women's game under #HowFarWeveCome. The insight: a sponsor's longevity in football becomes an argument about progress itself - how far the game, the planet and the wom
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My Eyes Are Up Here
- XYXX · The Womb · 2024
XYXX's 'My Eyes Are Up Here' with creator Vir Saini: an everyday social behaviour - where eyes drift - flipped onto men, using humour to make audiences reconsider something rarely questioned. The insight: the male-gaze conversation lands differently when a men's brand runs it on its own customers.
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Schoolgirl Newscasters
- EBM · BBDO Pakistan & Impact BBDO · 2023
'Schoolgirl Newscasters' from Pakistan: where 53.6% of women lack access to education and the country ranks 145th of 156 on gender gap, schoolgirls read the news themselves. The insight: the girls whose education is deemed unnecessary demonstrate it live on air - the format is the counter-argument.
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This Daughter’s Day, tell your sons it’s just a period
- Stayfree® · DDB Mudra · 2022
Stayfree's Daughter's Day campaign #ItsJustAPeriod: boys told periods are none of their business grow into men who cannot discuss them - husbands and fathers who perpetuate the stigma. The insight: menstruation education targets girls and thereby preserves the taboo; the fix is telling parents to ta
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#AStatueForTheGirls
- Terre des hommes · ACNE · 2021
For International Women's Day, Terre des Hommes pointed out that almost every statue in Milan, and most of Italy, honours a man. The insight: public monuments quietly encode whose lives we consider worth commemorating, so three perspective billboards let passers-by visually replace an existing male
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Child Wedding Cards: Campaign That Changed Child Marriage Laws
- UN Women · IMPACT BBDO / Dubai · 2024
In Pakistan, where nearly 19 million girls are married before 18, UN Women needed to move the country's highest religious lawmakers, not just the public. The insight: a change this personal had to arrive as something they couldn't dismiss, so real child-marriage wedding invitations were sent to deci
What separates strong female-led campaigns from cynical ones is specificity. The work that lasts doesn't traffic in vague empowerment - it identifies a precise truth, names it clearly, and builds from there. If you're working on a brief in this space, this archive is a useful filter for what's been done well and what's become a cliché to avoid.