Orange tricked football fans into admiring women's skill with deepfaked faces

Research commissioned around the campaign found that more than two-thirds of male football fans still held negative attitudes toward women's football, despite the sport's growing visibility — a bias that direct appeals ('women's football deserves respect') rarely move, because an audience already holding the belief can simply reject or tune out an argument aimed at changing their mind.

Orange, a 24-year sponsor of the French Football Federation, needed a way to build interest in the French women's national team ahead of the July–August 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup that wouldn't read as another earnest appeal to fairness that skeptical fans could dismiss on arrival.

Agency Marcel combed through footage from more than 80 archived matches and used deepfake VFX to digitally replace French women's national team players' faces with those of famous men's stars like Kylian Mbappé and Antoine Griezmann in a highlight reel, released to look like a genuine men's-team compilation — then revealed partway through that every spectacular play shown had actually been performed by the women's team, letting viewers' own unprompted admiration for the skill on screen become the thing that dismantled their assumption.

Deepfaked women's faces onto men's stars in a reel, so fans admired the skill before learning the truth, making their own praise the proof that defeated their bias.

Removing the identity label disables the defensive filter against persuasion.

Admiration forms before the bias-triggering reveal, making it hard to retract.

The viewer's own reaction becomes evidence that contradicts their bias.

The reveal forces a reckoning with an opinion already formed and expressed.

To overcome bias, let people experience the work without the label, so their own positive reaction becomes the proof.

The campaign, launched 28 June 2023 across L'Équipe, BeIN Sports, FFF platforms and social media, drew roughly 15 million total ad views, generated more than 50 articles of press coverage, earned prime-time TV news mentions, and was shared by France's Sports Minister and by World Cup-winning athletes.