Both links are reuploads, because McCann's own postings have moved around over the years. The photograph above is one of the later castings, in Paternoster Square in London, not the original on Broad Street. That it exists at all is part of the story below.
State Street Global Advisors is an asset manager. It had an index fund, ticker SHE, that invested in companies with more women in senior leadership. That is a worthy product and an almost impossible thing to advertise, because nobody has ever changed their pension allocation because of a poster.
The tension the campaign found is that the financial district already has a monument, and it says something. The Charging Bull has stood near Wall Street since 1989 as the agreed symbol of the market: aggressive, male, unstoppable, admired. It is the most photographed object in the district and thousands of tourists pose with it every day.
So the real insight is not about women in boardrooms. It is that the argument was already installed in the street, in bronze, and everyone was queueing to be photographed with it. You do not need to build an audience for an argument that has a permanent audience already standing in front of it.
Do not make an ad about the bull. Put a small girl in front of it, and let her stare it down.
Kristen Visbal's bronze, roughly four feet tall, hands on hips, chin up, installed overnight on 7 March 2017, the day before International Women's Day, directly in the path of an eleven-foot bull. No copy on a billboard, no film, no launch event. One object, one plaque, and a sightline.
The mechanic is the sightline and nothing else. The statue is not interesting in isolation, as anybody who has seen one of the later castings standing on its own in a plaza can confirm. It is only interesting pointed at something. The bull supplies the antagonist, the scale, the meaning and the existing crowd. The girl supplies about four feet of bronze.
The rollout was almost entirely borrowed. It went up on a one-week permit. Within days the photographs were everywhere, the permit was extended to thirty days, then to February 2018, then the city moved her to a permanent-ish spot facing the New York Stock Exchange. Every extension was a news story in itself, and each one was granted because of public pressure the campaign had generated. The client spent on a sculpture and a permit application, and the world's press paid for the media.
There is a second mechanic underneath the famous one, and it is the part that gets forgotten. State Street was, at the same time, actually voting its shares against boards with no women on them. The statue was the visible end of a real governance policy, which is why it survived the first wave of scrutiny at all.
The stupid: an asset manager's entire flagship campaign is a small statue, with no media buy, whose meaning depends completely on a piece of public art it does not own, made by an artist it did not consult, standing on ground it does not control, on a permit that expires in seven days. If the city says no, or the bull's sculptor gets an injunction on day two, there is no campaign at all, because there is no other asset. There is no plan B. There is a girl and a bull and a hope.
The smart: it is a fight the opponent cannot win. Any attempt to remove her reads as the financial establishment removing a little girl for being defiant, which is a better story than the original. The bull's sculptor did object, loudly and legitimately, and it only made the statue more famous. The scale gap is the argument, so the message needs no words. And a physical object in a public place is the one media format that cannot be scrolled past, blocked, skipped or bought out from under you by a competitor.
The steal: before you build an audience, look for an argument that already has one. Somebody else's monument, ritual, queue or landmark is a stage you do not have to pay for, and standing next to it costs a fraction of building your own.
We like it for the economy of it. Almost everything that made this campaign work was already there and belonged to somebody else. That is a real discipline, and the opposite of the instinct that says a big idea needs a big build.
We also think it is the most instructive campaign in this newsletter about what happens next, and that is not entirely a compliment. See the straight talk below. An idea that borrows its meaning from a context can also have its meaning taken back by that context, and this one did, repeatedly. That is not a reason to avoid the move. It is a reason to be honest about what you are signing up for when the public owns your symbol.
Straight talk, and this one needs a lot of it. The $7.4 million publicity estimate is a marketing-analyst number from April 2017, made of TV, online, print, radio and social valuations, and figures like that are always generous. There is no clean public figure for what the campaign did to inflows into the SHE fund, which is the number that would actually settle the argument.
And the campaign's own credibility took real damage. Seven months after installing a statue about women in leadership, on 6 October 2017, State Street agreed to pay $5 million to settle claims that it had underpaid around 300 female employees. That is not a detail, it is the whole claim being contradicted by the claimant. Arturo Di Modica, who made the Charging Bull, objected publicly that his work had been turned into the villain of an advertisement without his consent, and he was not wrong about the mechanics. The company later sued the sculptor over unauthorised replicas, which were reportedly selling for as much as $250,000, and settled in 2024. By 2025 State Street had stepped back from its diversity commitments. We still rate the idea as an extraordinary piece of work. We would be lying if we presented it as an unqualified good.
Client: State Street Global Advisors
Agency: McCann New York
Sculptor: Kristen Visbal
Installed: 7 March 2017, Bowling Green, facing the Charging Bull
Moved: December 2018, to Broad Street facing the New York Stock Exchange
Wikipedia, permits, relocation, the settlement and the litigation
Campaign, the Titanium Grand Prix
Fast Company, the Glass Lion Grand Prix
PRovoke, the PR Grand Prix
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: