If unconscious biases are leading the industry to drive less inclusive and diverse marketing campaigns, the first step is to make it a conscious one, supporting advertisers and agencies with data and science towards a plural representation of people in advertising.

Ads for Equality uses campaign data and science to empower any brand to take action today and create advertising that is more diverse and inclusive, building on a better world but also proving real impact on business results. A democratic and data-driven approach that generated brand to industry level knowledge, reaching thousands of marketers.

Situation

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.

Brief

What if, for every important decision making in a campaign development marketers had tools, insights, experiments to make the best decision (business and community wise) driving diverse and inclusive advertising?

Objectives

Drive actionability by developing a data-driven approach to support decision-making towards diverse and inclusive communication.

Approach

Make available to the industry tools to 1. help diagnose brand-level representation biases 2. avoid damaging stereotypes, 3. measure business impact of diverse representation and 4. provide learnings and insights to help the industry advance towards a plural representation of people in ads today.

Data meets diversity to transform business. 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. 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.

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.

A brand's journey towards diverse and inclusive advertising may be surrounded by uncertainty and opinions. The best way to manage this transition is using data and scientific experiments that support a continuous cycle of Test and Learn:

HYPOTHESIS> TEST> LEARN> IMPLEMENT

This journey starts with a diagnostic of presence and portrayal of the characters featured in a brand's marketing communication, analyzing gender, ethnicity and body type representation. With that, the brand can consider new forms of representation, which can be followed by uncertainties such as: “We have always used protagonists with the same features and we have never had problems – won’t my brand be at risk by transitioning to a more diverse advertising?”

EXPERIMENT DESIGN

With this design, we run two identical campaigns, switching only the protagonists of each ad. By measuring both ads, we can attribute any difference in results to the change in the mix of protagonists.

We proved with data that better representation of people in advertising generates better campaigns and brings better business results.

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.

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