Most brands don’t know how diverse campaigns impact their results, so we created “Ads for Equality”, a project to provoke and point to a new direction in the industry, not only building a better world, but also proving a real and positive impact on business results. It uses campaign data and science to empower brands to create advertising that is more diverse and inclusive. We used marketing science methodologies and tools to prove that campaigns that feature diverse protagonists perform better and scaled this new knowledge to all the industry through campaigns, training and events that reached thousands of marketers.

Situation

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.*

Brief

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 across Latin America.

Data meets diversity to transform the way we do advertising. We challenged top brands in Latin America to create a new ad on the next campaign featuring a diverse character and compare results to their existing approach to prove diversity brings better campaign and business results. The diverse and no diverse ads were identical, except for the main character.

We also launched a 2 month full-funnel integrated campaign to scale the message and inspire, educate and empower advertisers across all Latin America

After analyzing thousands of ads on our platforms across industries and countries, we discovered that most brands still use a “traditional approach” of the people they feature in their advertising. For example, ads still show women taking care of the home and family and men leading a life outside the home and experiencing the world, while black people are stereotyped. These findings did not always match our insights tools numbers that show what people like throughout our platforms.

We saw there was a gap between what people express interest in and what brands are offering them with their advertising, and the reasons were long held biases on gender and race/ethnicity. 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

We set up brand and performance lift studies to compare creatives that were exactly the same except for the main character. Across more than 16 different campaigns we consistently achieved positive results on the diverse cell, proving that diversity works way better than anyone thought. We repeated this with top clients: Jeep, Neutrogena, Skol, J&J

We published a whitepaper with our scientific results

We published public case studies on our Meta for Business site

We created the Last5 ads tool, that lets advertisers do a quick easy diagnosis on their latest campaigns and find representation opportunities

We released a full description guide of the marketing science methodology used for any brand to be able to test their own hypothesis

We created a full report of learnings and best practices, featuring a comprehensive list of the most common gender, race, body types and LGBT related stereotypes on Latin American advertising

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