CFG and Thinkmodo Turned Hidden Cameras Into a Viral Social Experiment
"What Girls Look At" is a September 2011 digital campaign created by Thinkmodo for CFG — identified in available records as Cosmo For Guys, a Hearst-published iPhone and iPad magazine app — in which actor Anthony Marks wore four hidden cameras to capture where women on New York City streets directed their gaze during real, unscripted encounters.
The campaign operates as a social experiment, not a conventional advertisement. Thinkmodo fitted Marks with concealed cameras positioned at his crotch, biceps, buttocks, and eyeglasses, then sent him onto the streets of New York City to interact naturally with women passing by. The resulting footage was assembled into a single digital video asset designed to travel organically across social platforms and news media. According to Clapboard.com, the campaign generated more than 5.6 million views, a figure that underscores the scale of the organic distribution achieved through a single piece of content with a production footprint no larger than one actor and a camera rig.
In the United States, the digital media landscape of 2011 was at an inflection point. Viral video as a paid-for creative strategy was still relatively novel, and brands that could generate genuine editorial coverage through content — rather than media spend — held a significant efficiency advantage. CFG, as a digitally native magazine property, needed awareness that matched its format: shareable, platform-native, and conversation-worthy. "What Girls Look At" answered all three requirements within a single, high-concept execution. The campaign was published in September 2011 and remains one of the more frequently cited examples of the hidden-camera social experiment format in early digital advertising history.
Thinkmodo built "What Girls Look At" on a consumer insight that required no research brief to validate: curiosity about how one is perceived by the opposite sex is universal and highly shareable. The creative directors Michael Krivicka and James Percelay translated that insight into a format — the covert social experiment — that promised an honest, unfiltered answer rather than an aspirational one. That honesty was the media hook.
In the United States in 2011, the media and entertainment sector was navigating a pronounced shift toward digital consumption. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, internet advertising in the United States was growing rapidly, with digital formats increasingly commanding budgets that had historically belonged to print. CFG, as an iPad and iPhone magazine app produced by Hearst, sat directly at the intersection of legacy print credibility and new digital distribution. Its audience — men with an appetite for lifestyle content — was precisely the demographic that shared provocative, socially observational video on platforms such as YouTube and early Facebook.
Competing titles and apps in the men's lifestyle media category, including digital extensions of established print brands such as Maxim and GQ, were also investing in digital content strategies during this period. What distinguished the CFG campaign was its decision to generate editorial coverage rather than purchased reach. As reported by Adweek on September 14, 2011, the campaign was framed in news coverage as a social experiment testing whether women's gaze confirmed or contradicted conventional assumptions — a framing that invited participation and debate rather than passive consumption. That editorial positioning gave the video a second wave of distribution through media coverage that no paid placement could have replicated at equivalent cost.
Michael Krivicka directed, produced, and edited "What Girls Look At." The execution depended entirely on the invisibility of its apparatus: four hidden cameras mounted on actor Anthony Marks at positions — crotch, biceps, buttocks, and eyeglasses — chosen to correspond to the body zones presumed most likely to attract a woman's attention. The choice of mounting locations was itself the creative idea; the camera positions were the hypothesis being tested.
James Percelay co-created the concept alongside Krivicka, with both serving as creative directors at Thinkmodo, the New York City agency they founded. Thinkmodo's practice in this period was oriented toward what might be called experiential stunts designed for digital amplification — productions that generated genuine public reactions rather than simulated ones. "What Girls Look At" fits that model precisely. Anthony Marks, the actor at the centre of the experiment, was required to move naturally through crowded New York City streets without drawing attention to the camera rig, a performance challenge that determined whether the footage read as authentic documentary or staged content.
The editing, handled by Krivicka, assembled the multi-angle footage into a montage format that allowed viewers to draw their own conclusions from the data. The montage structure was essential to the campaign's credibility: it presented volume of evidence rather than selected highlights, which reinforced the social experiment framing rather than undermining it. For a digital media property like CFG, the production approach was strategically economical — a small crew, a real location, and a single actor generated a content asset capable of reaching millions of viewers in the United States and beyond without a media buy of corresponding scale.
No verified third-party performance data for "What Girls Look At" is publicly available beyond view count. According to Clapboard.com, the campaign accumulated more than 5.6 million views — a meaningful threshold for a single digital asset released in September 2011, when the competition for online attention was intensifying but the bar for viral distribution remained achievable without algorithmic paid amplification at scale.
No documented awards for the campaign exist across the records of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC, as confirmed by Clapboard.com. The absence of formal recognition does not diminish the campaign's structural achievement: a concept with near-zero production infrastructure generated editorial coverage in Adweek and organic distribution sufficient to reach millions of viewers in the United States, demonstrating that the idea itself — not media investment — was the primary distribution engine.
Clapboard scores "What Girls Look At" at 74 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual clarity and efficient conversion of a single insight into a self-distributing content asset, tempered by the absence of measurable brand or business outcomes in the public record and the inherent limitations of a one-asset campaign in sustaining brand presence beyond initial impact. For a digitally native media brand like CFG, operating in a crowded United States entertainment and lifestyle market, the campaign achieved its most plausible primary objective: it made CFG a name worth searching for.
"What Girls Look At" is a September 2011 digital campaign for CFG, created by Thinkmodo in New York City. Actor Anthony Marks wore four hidden cameras on New York City streets to record where women's eyes traveled, producing a viral montage video that according to Clapboard.com reached more than 5.6 million views.
Thinkmodo created the campaign, with Michael Krivicka and James Percelay serving as creative directors. Krivicka also directed, produced, and edited the video. Actor Anthony Marks was the on-screen subject who walked New York City streets wearing the concealed four-camera rig that captured the footage central to the experiment.
CFG refers to Cosmo For Guys, a Hearst-published iPhone and iPad magazine app. It was a digitally native men's lifestyle media property operating in the United States. The hidden-camera campaign was designed to drive awareness of the app among a male audience likely to share socially observational video content across digital platforms.
Thinkmodo mounted four concealed cameras on actor Anthony Marks — positioned at his crotch, biceps, buttocks, and eyeglasses — before sending him onto New York City streets. The cameras recorded unscripted reactions from women during real encounters. Michael Krivicka then edited the multi-angle footage into a montage format for digital distribution.
No awards for "What Girls Look At" are documented at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC, according to Clapboard.com. Despite the absence of formal recognition, the campaign generated significant editorial coverage including a feature in Adweek in September 2011 and reached more than 5.6 million views.
Clapboard scores "What Girls Look At" at 74 out of 100. The rating reflects the campaign's strong conceptual efficiency and its ability to convert a single social insight into a widely distributed digital asset, balanced against the absence of verified brand outcome data and the limited scale of a single-asset execution in the United States entertainment market.
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