Grey London Seeing change starts with valuing change

Out of all the industries in the world, ours holds a great deal of power. We can tell ourselves “it’s just pictures and words” in the middle of a stressful day, but the work we create drives culture. It contributes to the media landscape that shapes thinking, impacts perceptions and drives home ideas about the world. Our work and our clients live in culture every day. As an industry, we’re many things, but powerless isn’t one of them.

At Grey, we decided to use this power for good: to take down the epidemic of male violence against women. Not an easy feat, we know – it’s a goliath of a problem. One so huge, many of us often feel dwarfed by the shadow of it. But it’s a fight we believe we can win – if we all take it on together.

The work we create drives culture. It contributes to the media landscape that shapes thinking, impacts perceptions and drives home ideas about the world.”

Founded by a group of tired, angry women and non-binary people who decided to fight back against the epidemic of male violence, Unite For Her gives everyone in the creative industry an opportunity to change the world for good.

Violence against women and girls starts long before the fist. It starts in societal attitudes about gender, formed from many different factors – including the work we create. We broke down those factors, researching them thoroughly and turned them into 12 pin-point briefs. They’re ready for any agency or client to take on, add their own layer of strategy, and create work that answers the brief. They’re free for everyone, and as time goes on, we plan to add more.

In some ways, pulling off Unite For Her wasn’t easy.

It took us around a year to launch – fitting in meetings, emails, research, brief-writing and everything else around our day jobs. But in other ways, it was the easiest thing in the world. With a group of people who share the same passion to make a difference, and the encouragement of an agency that wanted to see it work.

And because of our open culture, the intersectional experience of different women came naturally to us.

We checked ourselves throughout the process from a trans perspective, a POC perspective, a socio-economic perspective. We constantly considered our privileges and made sure we were creating something that had the greatest opportunity to make change for the greatest number of women possible.

We took it on ourselves to fight back against the powerless feeling this epidemic of violence creates. And that proactivity came naturally to us –because at Grey, it’s part of our DNA. We’re encouraged to come up with proactive ideas for our clients – we enter them into a quarterly Creative Council, where they’re honed with the help of our creative leaders. The very best ideas are taken up to our global network, giving creative teams at any stage of their career exposure to some of our most senior creative leaders. And we’re given the reins to make change happen internally too – with our Hack Grey programme, teams of us come together to make real, tangible, lasting change. Whether that’s to our sustainability efforts, or to our briefings.