Correct The Internet: clicks fix biased search — Spikes 2024 double Grand Prix

In early 2024, while fact-checking football records for a pitch, DDB New Zealand discovered that women hold many of the sport's top statistics — yet simple, ungendered questions returned men first. Ask the internet 'who scored the most goals in international football?' and it answered Cristiano Ronaldo, when Canada's Christine Sinclair holds the record with 190 international goals to his 118.

Team Heroine, an international sports marketing consultancy founded by Rebecca Sowden, partnered with DDB to correct the algorithm itself. The campaign opened with a film of a young girl asking that question and being told the wrong answer, then launched CorrectTheInternet.com, which listed dozens of biased search queries alongside the correct facts. With two clicks, visitors could send feedback through each search engine's built-in report function — 'the internet has learnt our bias. We created it. We have the power to fix it.'

Weekly social posts, posters, a PR pack and an educators' kit kept pairing wrong results with corrected ones, so the effort became a movement rather than a single film. At Spikes Asia 2024 the work won both the PR and Social & Influencer Grands Prix plus a Glass Spike, and search engines began rolling out features that highlight women's sport and return female results alongside male ones.