This deepfake soccer ad has gone viral for challenging how people think about women’s sports

An ad that uses both AI and graphic artists to make a point about gender equality in sports has gone viral, getting tens of millions of views by fooling people with its sophisticated use of technology and breathtaking sports imagery.

The French ad agency Marcel made the ad for the French telecommunications giant Orange in honor of the Women’s World Cup, which starts today. The ad shows exciting soccer scenes with what looks like men playing the game.

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One player felt forced to go along with it because “no one wants to jeopardize the opportunity to play at a World Cup.”

“Only the Bleus can make us feel so strongly,” text says halfway through the ad, referring to the French men’s national soccer team. “But it wasn’t them that you just saw.”

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The ad then shows that the clips in the first part weren’t of the men’s national team, but the women’s national team, with the faces of men overlaid on the women’s players faces.

“At Orange, we support the Bleus,” the ad reads at the end, then changing the word “Bleus” to its feminine form, “Bleues,” referring to the women’s national soccer team.

Marcel creative director Youri Guerassimov told EuroSport that the agency saw an opportunity considering how popular short videos showing goals and other exciting moments from soccer games are online.

“Today, no one doubts women’s technical and athletic ability when they take the time to actually watch them play,” he said. “But there’s still an assumption that many people make: ‘Women’s soccer is less technical, it’s less physical.’ People are rather dishonest when it comes to the true abilities of women on social media or in discussions among friends.”

“We were inspired by videos that get a lot of views online with the best goals, the best blocks, the best actions,” he continued. “Millions of people watch those. So we said that it’d be an awesome Trojan horse for us. We are going to try to make a video to get people to understand through a visual demonstration that women’s soccer is just like men’s soccer.”

Guerassimov said that it took eight graphic artists 500 hours to put together the video and that it was a lot of detailed work. He stressed that AI was only one tool used and that most of the work behind the ad was human.

“Once it was published on social media, people believed that some sort of machine did all the work,” he said. “Of course it didn’t. The AI part was there, sure, but the human work was considerable. We had eight graphic artists working day and night with almost 500 hours in post-production.”

“They had to find the angles that corresponded between the male and female athletes, classify them, and assemble them. Then there was the retouching work to modify their bodies. The computer can’t transform a young woman with long hair like [French women’s soccer player Delphine] Cascarino to the head of [French men’s soccer player Kylian] Mbappé by magic. So we had to cut out the head, the ponytails, rework the bodies to make them look more masculine.”

The work paid off, getting 20 million views in just two posts on Twitter and TikTok, as well as another 4.8 million on YouTube.

Marcel spokesperson Quentin Delobelle said, “I confess that I’m a bit overwhelmed by what happened.”

“I told myself that we were going to be criticized for the fact that we had to use men in order to get people to notice women,” he said. “And to that, I admit I have to agree. But the results are worth it. The video is a trap, the viewer is supposed to be tricked. But if we had only included the women players, honestly, I don’t think the ad would have had the success that it has had, which is exactly what we are calling out. The sleight-of-hand helps build buzz for their technical prowess.”

He added that the women’s soccer team players enjoyed the ad and that “some of them were tricked as well, they didn’t necessarily remember a certain acrobatic recovery or other moments.”