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

While fact-checking football records for a pitch, DDB found women hold many of the sport's top statistics, yet ungendered search queries returned men first — 'who scored the most international goals?' answered Cristiano Ronaldo, not Christine Sinclair (190 goals). Team Heroine wanted the internet itself corrected.

Give anyone a two-click tool that reports each biased search result to the search engine itself, so female athletes' real records get logged and fixed.

The campaign opened with a film of a young girl getting Ronaldo's wrong answer, then launched CorrectTheInternet.com listing dozens of biased queries with corrected facts; in two clicks visitors sent feedback through each engine's built-in report function. Weekly social posts, posters and an educators' pack kept pairing wrong results with the truth.

Won both the PR and Social & Influencer Grands Prix at Spikes Asia 2024 plus a Glass Spike, and DDB New Zealand became the country's Agency of the Year. Search engines began deploying features that surface women's sport and return female results alongside male ones.

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.

The insight was provable: ungendered queries like 'most international goals' returned Ronaldo instead of Sinclair, making algorithmic bias tangible.

Instead of an ad that complained, the tool used each search engine's own feedback function, so the fix happened inside the system being corrected.

A child asking the question made the bias feel personal and impossible to ignore, giving the movement a shareable opening film.

Sustained weekly wrong-result-versus-fact posts kept the issue alive after launch, turning a stunt into an ongoing correction campaign.

When the platform carries the bias, don't just make an ad about it — build a tool that fixes the bias at the source, and let the platform's own feedback loops do the correcting at scale.

At Spikes Asia 2024 the work collected the PR and Social & Influencer Grands Prix plus a Glass Spike, and DDB Group Aotearoa was named New Zealand Agency of the Year. The tool stayed open, so anyone could still report a biased result in two clicks. DDB said search engines responded by deploying new features to highlight women's sport and offer both male and female results — the bias that had existed for decades began to shift.