Analyzing bias in advertising

Thyme Hill, the chief marketing officer of Bob Evans (the Midwest maker of staples such as mashed potatoes and breakfast sausages) was telling me about a review meeting for a proposed commercial she once attended.

Being the only Black woman in the room, Hill was asked for her view on the casting choices for a security guard. Each one was a variation of an angry Black woman, so she sent them back. Heading off that cliché made Hill realize she couldn’t be in every room and some sort of structural solution was needed.

That’s the idea behind X_Stereotype, the AI company founded by former Warner Brothers executive Larry Adams, whose credits include the design of HBO Max.

Knowing that traditional AI trained off the Internet is likely to just pick up biases and perpetuate them, Adams’s team, which is made up entirely of people of color, built an AI assisted diversity sniffer to analyze written communications, like scripts. They used surveys and focus groups to create profiles to represent various demographic groups that are then fed into the AI model.

Their goal is to help companies find authentic ways to add diversity to their message, and avoid cliches and stereotypes, Adams said. And yes, there is a component of the angry White guy (and every other angry person) to ensure those views are considered, he said.

Adams’s tool is still very much an experiment. But he’s already working with Procter & Gamble, Chipotle Mexican Grill, 3M and FanDuel.

For her part, Hill told me about a time she used the tool to analyze the script for a potential commercial. The AI flagged in an instant that one of the proposed characters was likely to be seen as too racially ambiguous by both Black and White people, diluting its perceived diversity.

“As advertisers have tried to enter the (diversity advertising) space and maybe done so in a way that feels not authentic or contrived, I think there’s a general fatigue from consumers,” Hill said, “we’re making sure we don’t fall into that trap.” - Jeff Green

By the numbers

• 150,000
• The number of companies founded by UK women in 2022, double the amount set up in 2018.

Read the full report here