CreativeX and Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media Empower Brands to Measure and Manage Their Commitment to Diversity Through Advertising
Partnership provides brands with a global view of how people are shown in different environments across all their advertising and consultancy from the leading experts in representation in media
NEW YORK, NY – January 13, 2021 – CreativeX, a software company that powers creative decision-making globally for top consumer brands, announced today it has partnered with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, the only research-based organization working collaboratively within the global entertainment and media industries to create gender balance, foster inclusion and reduce negative stereotyping in family entertainment and media.
In advertising, there is an opportunity for brands to think about representation as including a broad range of people groups in a broad range of environments. However, until now, they have lacked technology to measure their creative at scale and to contextualize that data to start a conversation for meaningful change. This partnership aims to pioneer an industry-wide change by proactively encouraging and supporting brands in their creative decisions for producing more inclusive and representative ad content.
On the partnership, Geena Davis, Founder and Chair of the Institute said, “Our mission has always been to drive systemic change in order to create a more equitable, diverse and inclusive entertainment and media landscape on screen. We’re very excited to partner with industry leader CreativeX to harness our collective expertise, providing the global advertising community scalable and turnkey solutions to identify, measure and address the diversity, equity and inclusion in their ads.”
CreativeX will support the institute’s mission to spotlight content, creators, and diversity efforts that are shaping the new media landscape. This will be enabled by CreativeX’s proprietary Representation technology. For every brand that uses CreativeX’s Representation product, CreativeX will donate to support the institute’s ongoing research, education, and outreach.
“Brands are paying more and more attention to their creative content, and they have a responsibility to go beyond performance optimization,” said Anastasia Leng, founder and CEO of CreativeX. “There’s a need for more authentic and representative storytelling, and our partnership with the Geena Davis Institute will bridge the gap between the intent many brands have to improve in this area with the ability to finally do so in a measurable and scalable way. By bringing expertise and technology together, we hope that many more people will start to see themselves represented on-screen.”
Recent data from this partnership reveals that the advertising industry needs to accelerate progress as marketers continue to cast characters in global ads that perpetuate negative stereotypes of people based on skin color, gender, and age.
Here’s what the data says:
Although improvements have been made to lift the representation of different groups within media, there is still more work to be done.
A recent analysis from CreativeX of over 3,500 image and video ads deployed in the US in 2021 by some of the world’s best known CPG, beauty, and alcohol brands. CreativeX measured the frequency of visual cues that appeared in each creative, including age, gender, skin tone and setting and found:
- Male characters featured more frequently in professional environments: Although 55% of ads featured female characters (the average for CPG ads) male characters were 1.5X more likely to be shown in professional settings than female characters.
- Characters with light to medium skin tones twice as often in professional environments: Characters with darker skin tones featured half as frequently in professional settings as characters with lighter skin tones (18% compared to 8%).
- Characters (over 60s) hardly featured: Despite people who are 60+ controlling up to 70% of America’s disposable income, just 1% of ads featured people over 60, and less than 2% were featured in physical settings. And while 77% of ads with people featured adults (ages 26-59), they skewed younger than older.
About CreativeX
CreativeX empowers digital marketing and consumer insights teams to scale great creative decision making with a single source of truth for tracking the creative investment, efficiency, and effectiveness of images and videos globally. Some of the world’s best-known brands including Unilever, Heineken, Pepsi, Mars, Mondelēz, Nestlé, and Bayer rely on CreativeX to automatically analyze and benchmark content against established best practices for creative quality, brand consistency, compliance, and representation. Founded in 2015, the company is headquartered in New York City with offices in London and Portland, Oregon. Learn more at creativex.com.
About the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media
Founded in 2004 by Academy Award Winning Actor Geena Davis, the Institute is the only research-based organization working collaboratively within the entertainment industry to create gender balance, foster inclusion and reduce negative stereotyping in family entertainment media. For more information visit: seejane.org.
