An AI Fix to Advertising Bias? Industry Giants Commit to IBM's Tech

CANNES, France -- A coalition of industry giants, including WPP, Delta Airlines, the 4A's, Kellogg and Mindshare, have joined forces with IBM to combat bias in digital marketing. Since the programmatic revolution of more than a decade ago, brands have used algorithms to determine which demographics to target and how to segment audiences in their campaigns. But they are far from perfect. These algorithms have created a world where women are served ads for household goods while men are targeted by automakers. The bias is often an unintentional consequence of human assumptions, but the real danger has been technology’s ability to capture and scale that bias, alienating the audiences advertisers seek to connect with in the first place. Delta Air Lines, WPP, Mindshare, 4A’s, IAB and the Ad Council are among those committed to using up IBM's Advertising Toolkit for AI Fairness 360, an open-source solution powered by Watson. "While the risk of bias in advertising is well known, by making this commitment, these organizations are among the first in the industry to take action,” said Bob Lord, IBM senior vice-president of The Weather Company and Alliances, at a press event during Cannes Lions. Here's how it works: during media targeting, the toolkit deploys 75 "fairness" metrics and 13 state-of-the-art algorithms to help uncover bias in discrete data sets. IBM claimed organizations that use the toolkit may gain a better understanding of the presence and impact of bias on their ad campaigns. The company is asking other advertising giants to make use of the software and pledge to break the bias in datasets. “Together, we are agreeing to educate ourselves and our companies and ask other industry leaders to join us in helping to mitigate bias in advertising," Lord added. IBM has already tested the tool internally. Elsewhere, WPP-owned media agency Mindshare and the Ad Council have taken part in the research phase too. The business case for removing bias "We have to eliminate this bias, because it's no good for society," asserted WPP boss Mark Read. "There's also a business case, if you're biased you're missing out on [commercial opportunities] and we don't want to miss out on anything." Mindshare, which works with IBM as a client, trialed the anti-bias product with an unnamed consumer packaged goods (CPG) business, which was skewing online ads to women because female buyers were more common. Mindshare determined "fairness" could be improved six-fold on a measure of disparate impact by including more male viewers, with the margin of error on predictions related to buyers widening by under two percentage points. Delta’s managing director of brand marketing Emmakate Young, pointed out how the ad industry has long been focused on inclusive representation in their creative, saying this effort would allow marketers "to go a step further" to bring more inclusive representation to campaign delivery. As they look to solve the bias equation, the companies said they would work with IBM to set benchmarks and measure how they closed the gap within one year. "We're not sure where the bias in our [datasets] currently sits," explained Young, "that's what we're hoping [this tool] will help us figure out." For Ogilvy's global president, Devika Bulchandani, the thing to watch will be whether this tool offers the ability to scale the industry's progress on the matter. "As an industry we have a responsibility to undo what we've created so we can address the societal implications [of bias] and realize the business implications," she said. With increasing consumer demand on how data is used, more regulation on the way and the global digital ad spend expected to top $491 billion this year, marketers are under pressure now more than ever to balance effectiveness with transparency. To Combat Bias in Advertising, IBM Is Enlisting AI’s Help You can follow Adweek's coverage from Cannes Lions here.