The year is 1971. The UK has just banned racial discrimination in public places. Coca-Cola seizes on the cultural moment by releasing its ‘Hilltop’ ad, featuring over 65 people of different races and nationalities. It receives over 100,000 letters of praise and, this, it feels, will shepherd a new and improved era for the advertising world.
52 years on, we are not where we hoped we would be. A , supported by over $100M in ad spend, found that the majority of ads still aren’t reflecting society as it looks today, especially when it comes to the portrayal of women.
The gap between intent and action is growing.
While brands are expressing intentions to build representative content, they are struggling to achieve representative advertising at scale. In fact, our ad analysis reveals the portrayals of women in professional and leadership settings declined by over half, from 16% in 2021, to just 7% in 2022. Conversely, the presence of women in domestic or family settings in adverts doubled, from 32% in 2021 to 66% in 2022.
This is both a storytelling and a distribution problem. Ads that feature women receive significantly less ad spend than those with men, and this is especially true for ads that showed women in progressive roles or women of colour. For example, the 7% of ads that featured women in professional settings were supported by just 4.7% of total ad spend. Meanwhile, ads featuring women with lighter skin tones* received 242% more ad spend than those featuring women with darker skin tones across both 2021 and 2022.
Research hasn’t convinced marketers that representative ads are good for business.
Studies continue to show that increased representation in ads is not only good for society, but it’s good for business, too. According to a Deloitte study, brands with more representative ads saw a 44% average stock increase over two years and 69% better business performance. People of colour are more likely to trust and buy into brands that show more diversity in their ads, as are a majority of younger consumers of all races and skin tones.
In fact, I have yet to see a research study that fails to demonstrate a positive link between more representative ads and better performance, either at the business level (stock price), brand level (brand perception), or ad level (better view-through, conversion, etc).
If the upside isn’t sufficiently motivating, let’s consider the downside. Research from the Female Tribes Initiative found that 66% of women will actively turn off media depicting gender stereotypes. Brands can ignore this and proceed with “business as usual” but they risk becoming irrelevant among consumers with increasingly more spending (and influencing) power.
A scalable and measurable way to increase representative advertising
If marketers are truly intentional about seeing change in this area, data holds the key to establishing an objective baseline for representation, with real measurable opportunities to understand how to move forward. Creative Data, which strips every image and video ad to its core elements and can help us understand, at scale and objectively, the casting and storytelling decisions we’re making.
When you aggregate these thousands of data points together, they paint the clearest (and most honest) picture of our advertising by revealing the casting decisions we make, broken out by age, gender, skin tone, as well as the settings and contexts in which different kinds of people are shown.
This offers an actionable compass to help us decide whether we want to stay put or move forward. We can stay where we are, and risk being overtaken by those who will actively move in the direction society is heading. Or we can forge ahead, armed with a creative data-powered flashlight that will help us pave the way to get to the destination that’s right for our brands and our consumers.
Anastasia Leng, CEO & Founder of CreativeX