The Wall Street statue of the Fearless Girl won a permit to spend 11 months in front of the iconic Charging Bull statue. The roughly four-foot statue has become a social media sensation.
The statue quickly became a sensation. Queues of tourists crowded around her to snap selfies, mimicking her Wonder Woman stance, hands on hips and chin held high. By one estimate, she drew more than 500,000 social media mentions in just one day. She was originally meant to stay at the Bowling Green plaza for only a week, but thousands signed a petition to make her a permanent public work of art, and by the end of March, the city of New York had agreed to let her stay for a year.
But Fearless Girl had a commercial side too. The statue was part of a marketing push by State Street Global Advisors (stt), the $2.56 trillion asset-management arm of financial giant State Street Corp. A plaque at her feet included a plug for SHE, a State Street exchange-traded fund that invests only in companies committed to gender diversity. Her arrival also coincided with State Street putting thousands of other companies on notice. The company announced that, as an institutional investor, it would vote against corporate boards that don’t make strides in adding women to their ranks…Fortune.com
Jeremy Nguyen
www.twitter.com/jeremywins