Dive Brief:
- The Association of National Advertisers has a gender equality initiative called #SeeHer and it is providing advertisers with tools and data to help make better gender equality decisions in campaigns, per Ad Age.
- The industry organization is making its ad-scoring system to test ad copy for gender equality available to any copy-testing service which could turn the tool into a standard module marketers could use to evaluate ad creative, and it also tested the top 200 most-watched TV shows for gender equality via its Alliance for Family Entertainment.
- "The reason we're testing both advertising and media is that context matters," Shelley Zalis, a co-developer of #SeeHer, founder and CEO of the Girls' Lounge and former CEO of research firm OTX, told Ad Age.
Dive Insight:
Diversity overall has been a hot topic in the ad industry over the last year or so, with gender equality specifically a major subtext in the larger topic. Last month Pete Favat, chairman of the 2017 International Andy Awards, and Gina Grillo, president and CEO of the Advertising Club of New York, asked other industry award shows to ban work that reflects gender bias. The news arrived the same week it was reported Cannes Lions agreed to tell its jurors to not recognize work that objectifies or perpetuates negative or harmful gender inequalities.
The ANA is hoping to help advertisers looking to expressly make gender equality part of their campaigns by providing data around ad copy as well as TV shows related to gender equality characteristics so marketers can make sure they are aligning both the ads’ message as well as the media context in which those ads appear.
So far the Gender Equality Measure scoring system has been used on 17,000 ads giving it what Stephen Quinn, the former Wal-Mart chief marketing officer who chairs the Alliance for Family Entertainment, described as a “robust database.”
