Ever since the beginning of the #MeToo movement in 2017, numerous companies have been trying to jump on the wagon and address such contoroversial topics as sexual harassment and/or feminism in their ad campaigns. It’s no surprise that these companies are getting praised for using the publicity for a good cause. Recently, Swiss beverage company Schweppes teamed up with Brazilian advertisement agency Ogilvy and decided to work on their new campaign called ‘Dress For Respect,’ aimed at shedding light on the sexual harassment of women in Brazil.
‘Dress for Respect’ is a smart dress, designed with powerful sensors, that are triggered when the wearer is touched
Image credits: Ogilvy
The smart clothes were made to sense and track when and where the person wearing the dress was touched. The campaign was made to shed light on the serious issue of sexual harassment and non-consensual public touching.
The video of the ad opens up by indicating the statistics from 2016 of harassment in Brazil’s nightclubs
Image credits: Ogilvy
It states that the staggering number of 86% of Brazilian women have been harassed in clubs. As for other types of harassment, according to Agência Brasil, wolf-whistling is the most common form of public harassment of women (77%), followed by staring (74%), sexual comments (57%) and cursing (39%). In addition, almost half of the Brazil’s female population have experienced groping at least once in the year of 2016.
But the men who were interviewed before the experiment started, were skeptical
Image credits: Ogilvy
One interviewed man rhetorically asks “Who will go out on a Thursday night to just dance?,” probably implying that the women who go to nightclubs are actively looking for a sexual partner instead of just wanting to have a good time dancing. The other man comments that he thinks that the women are “just whining…about everything!” However, the video footage that was shot afterwards speaks for itself. Non-consensual public touching is still a huge problem, and not only in Brazil, but all across the globe.
During the experiment, 3 women wore the ‘smart dress’ to a nightclub in São Paulo
Image credits: Ogilvy
Every time the three volunteers - Juliana, Tatiana and Luisa – were groped at the club, a signal from the dress was sent through WiFi to the researchers. Needless to say, the women were touched numerous times throughout this social experiment, even when they expressed their disapproval of it.
According to the data collected, the volunteers, in less than four hours, were touched 157 times
Image credits: Ogilvy
That is equal to being touched more than 40 times per hour! At the end of the video, after the evening was over, men from the club were invited to watch the footage of the experiment. Fortunately, they seemed really appalled by how rude people can be: “That’s so ridiculous,” one man commented. The other was shocked to see that a stranger was trying to lean in for a kiss with one of the women.