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Stereotypes and racial tropes often make their way into ad creative regardless of intent.
Around five years ago, Thyme Hill, SVP and CMO of sausage and sides manufacturer Bob Evans Farms, met with an agency that was presenting the talent selection for a light humor TV spot centered around a Black woman security guard character.
Each of the three actresses were being directed to scowl and look annoyed. After the presentation, Hill spoke up.
“I remember saying, ‘Is there anything we can do to not fall into this trap of the angry Black woman persona when we select talent for advertising?’” Hill said. “It wasn’t deliberate, but I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been in the room.”
It’s hard to feel certain that the right decisions are being made, she said, if there’s no system and structure in place that relies on data rather than gut feel and luck.
“It’s a challenge that we struggled with,” Hill said. “We have to think about how our products play on the shelf, but we also have to think about how our brand shows up in the world.”
On the journey
Shortly after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Post Holdings, which owns Bob Evans Farms, created a global DEI council to foster behavioral and structural inclusion across its many different businesses.
The group, which Hill co-chairs, is made up of executives from across Post’s portfolio, including Bob Evans Farms, Weetabix and Post Consumer Brands (parent company to Pebbles, Grape-Nuts, Raisin Bran, Honey Bunches of Oats and numerous other cereal brands).
An early order of business was to put out an RFP to identify partners that could help create strategies to address everything from implementing more inclusive hiring practices to setting up supply-chain diversity.
But finding technology to help with rooting out unconscious bias from ad creative proved more challenging than anticipated, Hill said.
“DEI has become a buzzword for a lot of folks,” she said. “They’ll have a page on their website about how ‘Diversity is very important to us,’ but then when you dig in with questions – ‘Do you have the tools?’ ‘What does your management team look like?’ ‘Are you on this journey yourself?’ – we don’t get the answers we need.”
Antiracist AI
Hill mentioned her frustrations to Robert Vitale, CEO of Post Holdings, who is also the executive sponsor of Post’s global DEI council. Shortly thereafter, Vitale told her about a new startup called X_Stereotype that uses natural language AI to identify and avoid bias in marketing.
One of its main features is the ability for marketers to upload content – ad copy, scripts, creative briefs, concepts, storyboards – and have it analyzed for racial bias and other related risk factors before an ad is produced. X_Stereotype scores content by looking at variables like language, sentiment, likability, authenticity and purchase intent across different multicultural audiences.
Being able to get an early read on how an idea will land is appealing, Hill said.
Showing a spot to a focus group is fine, but by that point a lot of time and money have already been spent, and the results are qualitative. Meanwhile, post-campaign measurement can only provide insights after the fact.
“This is about making pivot changes and edits based on data before you even go into production,” Hill said. “It’s very validating.”
Unintentional bias is still bias
X_Stereotype was incubated within LVA, a multicultural data-focused agency founded in January 2020 by Larry Adams, the former SVP of digital strategy, product experience and head of design for WarnerMedia’s DTC products, including HBO Max.
Adams worked with a team of neuroscientists, psychologists and sociologists to create quantifiable signals tied to racial perceptions, such as emotion and feelings of inclusion.
“Although these are things that people interpret differently depending on their race and life experiences, they are measurable and you can use them in software,” Adams said.
X_Stereotype trains its algorithms on demographic data and on thousands of its own studies and surveys with the goal of uncovering even the most subtle forms of bias.
Most people wouldn’t consider themselves to be racist, yet they cognitively process images and information in an unconsciously biased way, and so they end up inadvertently perpetuating that bias even though they think they’re doing the right thing.
“That’s why, for example, you have to look way beyond something like keywords to really understand a piece of content,” he said. “Bias isn’t always about the specific words people use, but rather the ideas and the context that they generate.”
According to Adams, his system can predict with 80% accuracy how different groups will perceive a piece of content across gender lines, age and ethnicity. X_Stereotype also frequently updates its models using human input, because cultural norms and sentiment aren’t static things.
For that same reason, the suggestions that an AI spits out shouldn’t be the only insight that a brand uses to make a decision. Bias can also easily creep into an AI. What comes out of an AI-based system is a signal, not a direct order, Adams said.
“The platform is designed so you can type in your idea or your brief and get a gut check,” he said. “It’s a way to ask unashamed questions about your creative ideas in a free-flowing way.”
Living and learning
Bob Evans Farms has been using X_Stereotype’s technology since last year to help evaluate different elements of its existing and planned ad creative, including casting.
It’s able to run more tests for less money than it would cost to conduct formal market research.
“Research can be cost-prohibitive, because every time you want to learn something new, you have to start all over again,” Hill said. “But using a platform, you get to learn and iterate in closer to real time.”
For starters, Hill and her team loaded a cross-section of its marketing endeavors into the system to get a baseline understanding of how people perceive the Bob Evans brand through the lens of diversity and inclusion.
The brand got good marks for its military-focused work, including “Our Farm Salutes,” an initiative to support service members, vets and their families.
But X_Stereotype flagged certain aspects of a forthcoming campaign, where Bob Evans was working on an ad featuring a Black family. X_Stereotype indicated that the actors were too racially ambiguous to showcase diversity.
Based on those findings, Bob Evans ultimately decided to hit pause on that particular campaign and rethink its approach.
“It was interesting for us to hear because it wasn’t deliberate in the casting,” Hill said. “And without this feedback and data to back it up, we’d have just released the ad and thought we were doing a good job.”
