Brands Need a Data-Driven Approach to Inclusive Advertising

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Within six months of starting my company, I had to tackle one of the first milestones of a founder’s journey: fundraising. It’s a grueling process, one I wasn’t particularly good at, but as a perpetual optimizer I wanted (and needed) to improve. I started a spreadsheet that chronicled every investor meeting and looked for patterns, documenting everything in as binary a way as possible. Were we introduced through a social connection or a professional one? Professional intros were more likely to lead to follow-on conversations. Did they ask about total addressable market? If they did, they didn’t believe in our product. Did they end the meeting asking how they could help? That meant they weren’t interested. As part of my ferocious documentation, I also started tracking how I looked at each meeting: Glasses or contacts? Hair up or down? Trousers or dress? The minutia was perhaps insignificant, but the data did demonstrate a pattern: The more stereotypically masculine I looked and acted, the better I seemed to do. I’ve never been an investor, but I’m told pattern recognition plays a huge role—and back when I was first fundraising, the characteristics most often associated with successful founders and CEOs were mostly those of men. And that sucked. Turning my startup into a successful company started to take on broader meaning for me: My story could become a dot that formed a line that made a pattern, one that showed that good founders and CEOs come in a variety of permutations. As the company grew, I found that the technology we were building could address this problem in a more meaningful and scalable way—namely, by using our creative analytics tools to measure the presence of bias and stereotypes in marketing and advertising content. Diverse and inclusive advertising isn’t a substitute for diverse and inclusive workplaces. But it still matters a great deal. According to Kantar, over 60% of people don’t feel represented by ads and nearly three-fourths believe that ads don’t reflect the world around them. There’s ample evidence that demonstrates that properly representative advertising carries real cultural impact and affects how we see ourselves and one another. According to UM, a strategic media and buying agency, 31% of women in the U.K. say that advertising makes them feel like they’re not good enough. Body Positivity Saves Lives. Brands Should Act Accordingly At a time when the world is behind on so many aspects of diversity and inclusion, improving representation in advertising is a nearly immediate action item—one that can catalyze and demonstrate change on a micro scale that leads to a macro impact. It’s neither the silver bullet nor the holy grail, but it’s a meaningful opportunity for brands to grasp. So how can we as marketers lead the charge on progress? Know your baseline Most of us are afraid to look inside our own closet for fear of what we might find. Having analyzed thousands of ads for representation, it’s true that most brands have a lot of work to do. But unless we know our baseline, where and how we’re falling short, we won’t be able to meaningfully improve. The famous corporate consultant Peter Drucker famously said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”—if we don’t know where we’re starting from, we won’t know how to plan our journey to get to where we need to go. Representation is a spectrum If representation in advertising matters, then getting representation right matters. It’s not enough for diverse groups to simply appear—they must be recognizable to the people they represent. And this is where a lot of well-intentioned advertising falls short. Our analysis of nearly 3,000 U.S. ads from some of the world’s largest brands in 2020 and 2021 demonstrated that as casting became more diverse, stereotypes increased as well. So don’t just measure who you cast, but also the settings and environments you’re showcasing people in and how those differ by gender, race, age group and more. The bonus? Once brands start going down this road, they’ll quickly note that more representative advertising commits them to building more representative organizations. Share your journey and help educate others The whole industry is navigating this change together, yet we’re not really talking about it. Marketers tell me regularly that even having these conversations internally at their companies is challenging because they’re afraid of misstepping and saying the wrong thing. We as a company will start publicly chronicling the D&I conversations we’re having internally and what we’re learning from them, including what we’re getting wrong. We want to be an ally but recognize it takes education and we will undoubtedly falter. Marketers are truly one of the few types of professionals who can use their skills to change our perception of the world in a systemic and long-lasting way. Let’s represent what we can do! How Discover Is Creating Meaningful Change in Diversity and Inclusion

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Brands Need a Data-Driven Approach to Inclusive Advertising

Anastasia Leng of CreativeX on committing to true representation

Anastasia Leng

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Anastasia Leng