How Touche pas à ma pote Made Brussels Streets Visible for Women
Her Street View is an interactive public-interest campaign created by JWT Brussels for Belgian anti-street-harassment nonprofit Touche pas à ma pote, published in March 2017, that used Google Street View technology to let users navigate the streets of Brussels from a woman's perspective and encounter representations of real unwanted street behaviour.
Touche pas à ma pote began as an anti-street-harassment initiative in Belgium in 2012, according to reporting by LBBOnline, before evolving into an autonomous nonprofit working in partnership with the City of Brussels. By 2017 the organisation had built sufficient institutional credibility to anchor a technically ambitious integrated campaign around the problem it was founded to address, according to Little Black Book. The campaign's central mechanic was simple in concept and demanding in execution: an interactive website placed the user inside a first-person Google Street View environment mapped to actual Brussels locations, then surfaced documented incidents of street harassment along those routes, making the invisible geography of women's daily experience navigable and concrete for anyone willing to spend time inside it.
The geographic specificity of the work mattered. Belgium had passed a law in 2014 criminalising sexism in public spaces, introducing penalties and potential custodial sentences for sexist conduct, as noted by LBBOnline and reported by The Bulletin. Her Street View did not simply argue that street harassment existed in Belgium; it located that harassment on named streets in the capital, connecting legal fact to lived spatial reality. The campaign was classified as an integrated public-interest execution and comprised one primary media asset — the interactive digital experience itself — alongside the communications infrastructure needed to bring it to public attention across the Belgian market. Clapboard Score for Her Street View stands at 63 out of 100.
Touche pas à ma pote identified a specific cultural gap in Belgium's public conversation about street harassment. Belgium had enacted legislation in 2014 criminalising sexist behaviour in public spaces — a legal development reported by The Bulletin and cited by the Council of Europe — yet awareness of that law's practical implications, and empathy for the women it was designed to protect, remained uneven across the population, according to Resourcehub Bakermckenzie. The strategic premise of Her Street View was that abstract statistics about harassment would not close this empathy gap, but spatial experience might.
The decision to route that experience through Google Street View was not incidental. The platform was already the dominant way ordinary people navigated and mentally mapped urban environments, making it an ideal vehicle for reframing a familiar interface around an unfamiliar vantage point. Where campaigns by comparable organisations in adjacent European markets had relied on testimonial video or out-of-home activations, JWT Brussels chose a tool that demanded active participation from the user rather than passive reception, according to Indicators Be. This placed Her Street View in a different competitive register from conventional public-service broadcasting or poster campaigns, moving the work closer to documentary and social experiment formats that were gaining traction in the mid-2010s public-interest space.
The broader advertising environment in Belgium in 2017 was increasingly receptive to digitally native public-interest work, according to Fln Dk. Global digital and alternative media revenues were growing at a meaningful pace that year, according to PQ Media, reflecting a structural shift in how audiences engaged with content online. For a nonprofit with limited media budget, a platform-native interactive experience offered reach and dwell time that paid media placements could not efficiently replicate, making the strategic choice as much a resource decision as a creative one, according to Rm Coe Int.
Her Street View was directed by Xavier Bouillon, working within JWT Brussels on the creative execution. The campaign's production approach centred on the integration of documentary evidence — reported incidents of street harassment experienced by women in Brussels — with the navigable architecture of Google Street View, creating an experience that felt simultaneously factual and immersive.
The craft challenge was one of restraint as much as invention. The temptation in social-experiment formats is to dramatise or heighten the material; the creative team's reported approach, as described by LBBOnline, was instead to let the documented reality speak through the familiarity of the platform itself. A user moving through the virtual streets of Brussels would encounter harassment scenarios at the precise locations where they had been reported, grounding the experience in cartographic truth rather than illustrative fiction. This specificity — street corner, time of day, nature of incident — was the work's primary creative instrument.
The production also required careful decisions about representation. Rendering harassment experiences through an interactive map risked aestheticising them or reducing individual accounts to data points. The creative solution, according to LBBOnline's coverage of the campaign, was to preserve the texture of individual accounts within the navigational structure, ensuring the user's movement through the city felt like witness rather than tourism. The integrated format extended beyond the digital experience itself to encompass earned media, social distribution, and institutional communications with the City of Brussels, giving the single core asset the reach architecture of a full campaign. The result was a piece of work that sat credibly across documentary, public-service advertising, and interactive digital categories simultaneously.
Her Street View won the MIXX Awards Belgium 2017 Grand Prix, the competition's top prize, as reported by LBBOnline. The award was notable for a specific reason: the campaign was selected not only by the human jury but also by Pearl, described at the time as the world's first artificial intelligence advertising judge, making the double recognition an independently verified signal of the work's effectiveness across both conventional creative criteria and emerging algorithmic evaluation frameworks.
No independently published audience reach or engagement figures for Her Street View are publicly available beyond the awards recognition documented by LBBOnline. What the MIXX Awards Grand Prix does confirm is that the campaign was judged to have achieved its communicative objectives at a level that distinguished it from all other Belgian advertising work submitted in 2017, across categories and budgets. For a nonprofit organisation operating in the public-interest space, that form of independent institutional validation carries particular weight, functioning both as a measure of impact and as a proof of concept for the platform-native social-experiment format the campaign pioneered in the Belgian market. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects the campaign's genuine creative ambition and verified award performance, tempered by the absence of publicly documented audience metrics and the single-asset scope of the integrated execution.
Her Street View is a 2017 interactive public-interest campaign created by JWT Brussels for Touche pas à ma pote. It placed users inside a Google Street View environment mapped to Brussels, surfacing documented street harassment incidents at their real locations, allowing anyone to experience the city from a woman's perspective.
Her Street View was created by JWT Brussels for Touche pas à ma pote and published in Belgium in March 2017. Xavier Bouillon directed the campaign. Touche pas à ma pote is a Belgian anti-street-harassment nonprofit that began as an initiative in 2012 and later partnered with the City of Brussels.
Her Street View won the Grand Prix at the MIXX Awards Belgium 2017, the competition's top prize. Uniquely, the campaign was selected by both the human jury and Pearl, described as the world's first AI advertising judge, making it one of the most distinctively validated Belgian campaigns of that year, according to LBBOnline.
Her Street View embedded documented street harassment incidents into a navigable Google Street View interface mapped to actual Brussels locations. Users moved through the city digitally and encountered real reported incidents at the precise spots they occurred, translating abstract awareness of harassment into a concrete, location-specific first-person experience.
Belgium passed a law in 2014 criminalising sexism in public spaces, introducing financial penalties and potential custodial sentences, as reported by The Bulletin and cited by the Council of Europe. Her Street View connected this legal reality to lived geography, grounding its awareness objective in Belgium's specific legislative framework rather than general social argument.
Her Street View holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine creative ambition, its pioneering use of Google Street View as a social-experiment platform, and its verified Grand Prix recognition at MIXX Awards Belgium 2017, balanced against limited publicly available audience performance data.
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