Diversity and inclusion are at the top of the discussion in the business and advertising world. But brands are still hesitant to change long held approaches to creative based on traditional approaches, and scared moving to a more diverse representation of people in advertising may hurt their campaign performance. The result is that in 2021, 78% of women and 80% of black people interviewed in Latin America still believe brands are not inclusive enough.

As a partner to brands and businesses around the world to connect with people in the most significant and impactful ways that truly impact the business and generate campaign results, our brief was to find out how diversity could be a key factor in bringing success to our partner brands and companies.

Data meets diversity to craft advertising that is more diverse and inclusive but also generates better business results.

We saw there was a gap between who was being represented in ads and the population characteristics, leading to less relevant communication and therefore, limiting business potential. By using data and science, making it possible to prove the causal impact of diverse representation in business results, we have inspired business transformation in a variety of advertisers across Latin America.

n order to test the impact of diverse representation, we offered marketers a free tool (Last 5 Ads) for a self assessment on how diverse their communication was. This tool translates unconscious bias into conscious ones, comparing the brand's representation of gender, ethnicity and body type to the population average, giving recommendation of who should be the main character in their next campaign for a balanced - population-like - representation of people.

This was a kick off inspiring them to test new forms of representation, in which we used experimental design to compare performance between diverse and business as usual representation. After running several studies and proving that diversity generates better business results, we translated this information into training, reports, and scientific paper to inspire the industry on this movement.

Analyzing gender representation on thousands of ads at business vertical level, we see most brands still rely on gender stereotypes by associating specific gender to specific categories: women are over represented in family and personal care while men are more present in categories representing purchase power, financial independence, entertainment, reinforcing a symbolic message of gender roles while generating a lower sense of identification from consumers with the brand.

Approach

We saw there was a gap between what people express interest in and what brands are offering them with their advertising, based on long held biases on gender and race. We decided to help close this gap to bring a more valuable experience to people and better campaign performance results, while supporting content and messages that truly represent people.

We started by testing how representation impacts campaign performance results. Once we proved diverse representation has a positive impact on campaign performance, we developed content and tools to scale this game-changing knowledge to all brands and marketers.

Target audience

We first targeted top brands that were planning campaigns with reach enough to perform this double Brand Lift studies. Some of the brands that tested diversity on their ads and published their positive results:

ABInBev

Jeep

Chevrolet

Neutrogena

Dove

Honda

Jhonson’s

La Roche Posay

Intimus

As we got new knowledge we developed content and tools with these learnings to scale the impact to all brands, agencies and advertising professionals in Latin America.

80% of brands testing diverse representation had at least 1.5 incremental Ad Recall lift vs non diverse representation and often outperform traditional representation in metrics such as preference, purchase intent and message recall.

Proving with data that better representation of people in advertising generates better campaigns and brings better business results, we were able to scale this knowledge to +700.000 advertising professionals, generating +4.400 reports and tools downloaded.

We were able to scale the learnings into an intersectional approach and developed campaigns testing gender, ethnicity and body types representation.

1 scientific whitpaper published

+16 campaigns co-created with positive results on diverse cell

9 reports and studies

15 Trainings delivered

+700.000 advertising professionals reached*

+4400 reports and tools downloaded*

+229.300 Campaign clicks*

+1.230.000 Video views*

*Meta internal data