It's 2017 and thank God women really have nothing left to complain about. Human trafficking is but a memory. Forced female genital mutilation is a relic of the past. Women all over the world are allowed to drive, and vote and serve in government. Thankfully it is no longer the custom to be charged with a crime if you've been raped. Women all over the world now enjoy all the freedoms men have, including leaving the house without their husband's permission. We're so enlightened now that Amnesty International calls for decriminalizing prostitution, based on the advice of a pimp. As long as everyone calls women 'menstruators' and follow the British Medical Association's advice not to call mothers "mother" everything will be fine, and conversation interruptions will be the worst thing to happen.
We're so evolved, we can finally get into nuances now. Like Manterrupting: That horrible phenomenon where a highly successful and very rich woman like Hillary Clinton or Taylor Swift or Adele or even-- a news anchor has to endure being talked over in settings where people are talked over, like TV-panels and political debates. As a man I can safely say that never happens to me, especially in advertising where there are no egos and every agency iIve ever worked for has a "no asshole" policy and the CEOs are always open-eared.
As an example of an agency flexing its app designing and design chops in time for International Women's Day it's great. As a choice of cause to solve, though? With everything women have to endure around the world, including Brazil it seems like creative minds could've gotten together and come up with another idea.
To suggest that being interrupted is the same thing as not having free speech is an insult to those women living in countries where they really don't have free speech. As for this app. I'm not sure how it's supposed to help. Apparently Woman Interrupted uses your microphone to detect instances of manterruptions. Don't worry, it doesn't record the conversation. It just reads our vocal frequencies to "detect," you record an interruption and then it shows you how many times you've been interrupted. One would think you'd know if you were being interrupted. More importantly, how do you think the conversation will go if you whip out your phone, place it on the desk and touch a red button? Is the idea to then show the graph to someone interrupting you and say "Don't interrupt me?"
Beyond watching the video and sharing to "create awareness," it sort of feels like the app is a flashy afte thought. All you really needed for this to be effective is to show the first half of the spot with women being interrupted. Point taken. I am interested to see what the measure of success is here, besides publicity. If they analyze the data perhaps they can see the number of interruptions dropping, but attributing that success to the app without any other context is dubious at best.
Agency: BETC Sao Paulo
Lets brush aside the fact that this idea looks like it was shaken up through the magic 8-ball sites the Grand Prix Generator or the Cannes-O-matic, that it's an award-bait app based the current zeitgeist, much like the that migrant spotting app was last year.
So, I did go to download the app to see how it worked. On Android it has issues. After it forces me to create an account connected to either my Google or my Facebook, it wants me to "tap on the screen and repeat this phrase three times," but it never shows me the phrase to repeat. Unless they mean the "..this phrase..." bit.
Oh, and when I create an account I can select whether I am male or female, which is information it could have gathered from Facebook or Google - and information anyone can lie on. The app wants to be allowed to record and save conversations, and when denying that but allowing access to microphone so it may hear conversations, it will not work. Naturally they promise they won't save the recordings, but since I don't trust people or some apps I just deleted it.
I'd test the app out when having a conversation with a ten year old kid, because holy hell do kids interrupt. Is that kidsteruption?
As usual it's something that looks at the issue backwards. The issue isn't that people with inflated egos (Kanye) interrupt, the issue is that women, in general, are socialised not to.
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