The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2022
Buick's See Her Greatness hides women's-sport highlights behind audio and a QR code
Women get under 10% of sports media coverage, so Buick aired their greatest moments as audio-only ads and made listeners scan a QR code to watch.
Buick
What it had to solve
Women make up 40% of athletes but receive less than 10% of sports media coverage. Buick, the automaker with the largest percentage of women owners and a longtime NCAA sponsor, asked a sharper question: how do you get people to actually want to watch women's sport?
How it works
Women make up 40% of athletes but get less than 10% of the sports media coverage. Buick, the automaker with the largest percentage of women owners and a longtime sponsor of the NCAA, decided to do something about it.
The question was not how to show more women's sport but how to make people want to watch it. Leo Burnett Detroit answered by featuring the greatest moments in women's sport without showing them: an immersive audio experience that makes you want to see the plays.
Each ad simply displayed a QR code that people could scan to watch the videos. The work is archived in D&AD's awards archive as a media reference for the idea of building desire instead of assuming it.
Why it lands
- Withholding the picture turns a passive impression into a want: the audience has to seek out the play.
- The QR code makes the ad itself a working bridge from audio to women's sport content.
- Buick's audience, the largest share of women owners among automakers, gave the brand standing to make the argument.
- The gap the campaign names (seen far less than played) is restaged inside the ad, so the form carries the message.
What it did
The work inverted the normal sports-ad logic: instead of grabbing attention with images, it withheld the image until viewers chose to seek out the play. It is archived in D&AD's awards archive, where the mechanism — audio that makes you want to see — is the documented idea.
What you can take
To change what people watch, work on desire rather than supply: withholding the moment and letting the audience complete the picture can turn indifference into active interest.
Since then
See Her Greatness launched in March 2022 around the NCAA women's tournament, and Buick extended it in 2023 with athlete-led work and a TikTok challenge built on the same platform. The D&AD archive records no reach figures, so the case stands on the mechanism: hide the moment, make the audience complete the picture, and the wanting itself becomes the campaign.
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