KTH Royal Institute of Technology's Giants campaign, created by Klirr in Sweden in 2015, challenged gender norms in engineering through a bold recruitment film.
ARCHIVEKTH Royal Institute of Technology Giants Reframes Who Belongs in Tech
KTH Royal Institute of Technology's Giants is a 2015 Swedish recruitment film created by agency Klirr that celebrates women in IT and asserts that the future of technology is too important to be left to men alone, targeting prospective female students for computer science, IT, and electrical engineering programmes.
Published in Sweden in February 2015, Giants arrived as a direct response to a structural imbalance KTH had identified within its own applicant pool. The university had launched the broader Giants initiative in 2014, according to Kth Se, with the explicit objective of increasing the number of women enrolling in computer engineering, IT, and electrical engineering programmes. The 2015 film served as the initiative's most visible public-facing expression, translating an institutional commitment into a piece of cinematic persuasion designed to reach young women across Sweden before university application deadlines.
The campaign's central proposition — "the future is too important to be left to men" — operates simultaneously as provocation and invitation. Rather than positioning engineering as a field women are permitted to enter, Giants frames their participation as a necessity. This distinction matters strategically. Klirr constructed a message that does not ask women to adapt to a male-coded discipline but instead repositions that discipline as incomplete without them. In Sweden, where public discourse around gender equality in professional life is well established, this framing carried cultural credibility rather than shock value. The campaign comprises a single film asset, making its creative execution the sole vehicle for the entire strategic argument. Clapboard rates Giants 69 out of 100.
ARCHIVEKTH Royal Institute of Technology identified a measurable gap between women's representation in Swedish society and their presence in technical degree programmes. Sweden has long maintained strong national policy commitments to gender equality, yet the technology and engineering sectors have consistently lagged behind that broader cultural progress. The Giants initiative, launched by KTH in 2014 according to kth.se, was designed to close that gap through sustained engagement rather than a single recruitment cycle.
The 2015 Giants film targeted a competitive recruitment environment. In Sweden, KTH competes with institutions including Chalmers University of Technology and Uppsala University for high-achieving students across STEM disciplines. Attracting women specifically to computer engineering and electrical engineering — fields where female enrolment across Scandinavian universities has historically been low — required a message that went beyond factual programme descriptions. Klirr's strategic insight was that functional communication about curricula would not move a cohort of prospective students who had likely already absorbed cultural signals suggesting those programmes were not built for them.
The campaign's timing in February 2015 aligned with Sweden's university application windows, according to adsoftheworld.com, ensuring the film reached its audience at a decision-making moment. The broader Giants programme demonstrated measurable reach over time: according to Intra Kth Se, the initiative reported 230 female participants by 2019, with 39 former participants having applied to KTH programmes — evidence that the multi-year strategy built genuine pipeline rather than fleeting awareness. The film's role was to generate the emotional conviction that longer-term mentorship and events could then sustain.
Giants succeeds as a piece of film craft before it succeeds as advertising. Creative Director Sean Barrett led the Klirr team, with Art Director Peter Malmdin and Copywriter Andreas Hörnsten shaping the campaign's visual and verbal language, according to adsoftheworld.com. Planner Maja Haraldsson defined the strategic framework that gave the creative its focus, while Film Director Linnea Bergman of production company Aspekt directed the footage itself — a choice that carries its own meaning given the campaign's subject matter.
Bergman's direction brings a register of quiet authority to the film rather than the declarative energy common in recruitment advertising. The decision to have a woman direct a film about women's place in technology is not incidental; it shapes the camera's relationship to its subjects and the overall tone of confident belonging rather than aspirational outsiderdom. This coherence between message and method is one of the reasons Giants reads as a genuine statement rather than an institutional gesture.
The campaign comprises a single film asset, which concentrates the entire creative argument into one uninterrupted experience. There is no supporting print, outdoor, or digital extension documented in publicly available records. This constraint sharpens the film's responsibility: it must establish context, build emotional identification, articulate the proposition, and motivate action within a single viewing. The title Giants itself does significant work — evoking the canonical phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" and recontextualising it around female pioneers in science and technology, giving the film an intellectual and historical dimension that elevates it above straightforward recruitment messaging.
No verified performance data for the Giants film specifically — such as view counts, click-through rates, or direct application uplifts attributable to the February 2015 campaign — is publicly available. What the public record does document is the trajectory of the broader Giants initiative of which this film was a part. According to intra.kth.se, by 2019 the Giants programme had engaged 230 female participants, and 39 former participants had applied to KTH Royal Institute of Technology programmes, indicating that the initiative built a genuine recruitment pipeline over a multi-year period in Sweden.
Structurally, Giants demonstrates several characteristics associated with effective institutional recruitment films. It leads with identity rather than information, addressing prospective students as people who already belong in technical fields rather than persuading them they might qualify. This approach reduces psychological distance, which research in educational marketing consistently identifies as a barrier to applications from underrepresented groups. The single-asset format, while limiting in reach terms, ensures message consistency and prevents dilution across channel variations.
The film's cultural alignment with Sweden's gender equality discourse gives it longevity beyond a single application cycle. Campaigns that speak to durable social values rather than temporary trends tend to generate continued organic sharing, and a film submitted to adsoftheworld.com more than ten years ago that remains accessible and referenced is evidence of at least modest archival durability. For an education campaign with a single media asset and no documented media spend, that persistence represents meaningful structural effectiveness.
Giants is a 2015 Swedish recruitment film created by Klirr for KTH Royal Institute of Technology. It celebrates women in IT and engineering with the proposition that the future is too important to be left to men, targeting prospective female applicants for computer science, IT, and electrical engineering programmes across Sweden.
Klirr Stockholm created the Giants film for KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The creative team included Creative Director Sean Barrett, Art Director Peter Malmdin, Copywriter Andreas Hörnsten, Planner Maja Haraldsson, and Film Director Linnea Bergman of production company Aspekt, according to adsoftheworld.com.
The Giants campaign aimed to increase applications from women to KTH Royal Institute of Technology's computer engineering, IT, and electrical engineering programmes. According to kth.se, KTH launched the broader Giants initiative in 2014 to provide women with inspiration and deeper knowledge about technical fields in Sweden.
The broader Giants initiative reported 230 female participants by 2019, with 39 former participants having applied to KTH programmes, according to intra.kth.se. No verified performance data specific to the February 2015 Giants film — such as view counts or direct application uplifts — is publicly available.
Clapboard rates the KTH Giants campaign 69 out of 100. The score reflects the film's strong strategic clarity and cultural alignment with Sweden's gender equality discourse, balanced against the limited reach of a single-asset campaign with no documented media spend or publicly verified performance metrics.
The title Giants evokes the phrase standing on the shoulders of giants, recontextualised around female pioneers in science and technology. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign frames women's participation in IT not as permission granted but as a historical and intellectual necessity, giving the film depth beyond standard recruitment messaging.
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