She begins by lamenting the effects of the referendum debate and her husband's passionate interest in it on her household, then considers the arguments in favour of independence.
Some viewers, including Scottish Liberal Democrats official Sandra Grieve, claimed that the ad had persuaded them to vote for independence when they had previously been doubtful.
Loud footsteps are heard as a woman (played by Sarah Waddell[5]) wearing an orange top and carrying a yellow ceramic mug walks in from the right background and comes into focus.
When he began asking her about it at breakfast, she told him to eat his cereal (at which the camera cuts briefly to his empty bowl and spoon) because it was too early in the day for political discussions.
[1] The woman then dismisses any idea that their children would have anything to contribute to the discussion, as another insert depicting their crayons on the table is shown, since they are usually too preoccupied with their phones to pay attention.
After a brief pause in which a closeup shows her rubbing her hands together and the camera pans over the children's colouring books, she announces that she has made up her mind and will be voting against independence.
[1] On 23 August Better Together, the main group opposing independence, played the video during its political broadcasts on the BBC and STV and then uploaded the advert to its YouTube channel and its website.
Critics were calling it sexist and patronising; the hashtags #PatronisingBTLady and #PatronisingNoLady soon started trending on Twitter[6] as memes were created parodying the advert.
Some suggested the woman was a stereotypical housewife of the past who left most political decisions to her husband, others that she was under-informed about the issues yet apparently too lazy to research them on her own.
"[10] Sandra Grieve, former convener for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, said "the subliminal message of 'staying together for the kids' made me feel a bit sick!
[6] Another Lib Dem, Margaret Smith, former MSP for Edinburgh West, while not saying the video had changed her resolve to vote no, called it "absolutely appalling.
"It was as patronising as the Nats described, and fed directly into the nationalist narrative", one female Better Together activist told Joe Pike, author of the 2015 history Project Fear: How an Unlikely Alliance Left a Kingdom United but a Country Divided.
[5] Better Together defended the advert, noting that the woman's words had been transcribed from conversations the organization's canvassers had had with women whose doors they had knocked on all over the country.
[11] Almost a week after the video was broadcast, after being viewed nearly 200,000 times, Mariola Tarrega, a doctoral student at Queen Margaret University, considered the possibility that it might not have been as disastrous for Better Together as the media by then believed.
[13] "It's annoying it became a story", one person identified as a "senior campaign figure told Pike, "because it's a hugely effective piece of political communication.
"If you do your own research and you get really clear messages back from it", he told a Labour conference in Manchester after the vote, "have the courage to stick to it regardless of what the commentators are saying, because they have an increasingly small reach in terms of setting the agenda".
[13] Originally, Better Together had planned to follow up "The woman who made up her mind" with "The Island", a video that cost £50,000 to produce,[5] in which a narrator touts the benefits of the Union to Scotland over the years, over footage of a young girl alone in the Scottish landscape intercut with closeups of wires, cables, pipes and tree branches being cut, and ultimately large faultlines opening in the landscapes, ending with a shot of Scotland drifting away from Great Britain into the Atlantic.
Maggie Darling, wife of BT head Alistair, called it Nightmare on Sauchiehall Street, referring to the address of the organisation's headquarters, and told her husband it would be a "disaster" if it ran.
[17] Silvia Suteu, a law professor at University College London, saw the advert as exemplifying the difference between how the two sides handled feminist issues within the context of the referendum.
This was reflected in the advert, in which the woman's concerns about limited future oil revenues and the uncertainty about keeping the pound, "characterized the entire No campaign in general and not just its appeals to women voters".