Unconscious bias is not limited to hiring and casting

As an industry, we’re starting to pay more attention to our internal hiring practices, who we hire, and at best, we’re also starting to think more consciously about our casting process. These are definitely a good step forward.

As feminist activism backfires and outdated feminist campaigns turn out to do more harm than good, we need to think differently.

We also need to stop making noise and start impacting change – to step up and make practical, lasting change that promotes full equality, and not just by focusing on small segments of the population (which may appear symbolic, despite everyone’s best intentions as well).

The more we fight to change our process in a way that creates equality for all, the more likely we are to finally have an impact.

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So, as an industry, what is it beyond hiring and HR practices that have a real impact?

First, it’s important to recognize one thing: harmful stereotypes in marketing, media and advertising are now proven to cause domestic violence, bullying and mental health issues.

As a result of this extensive research, the UK made it illegal to portray harmful stereotypes and changed its self-regulatory system to administer its new Equality Act (2019).

By contrast, in Australia we have no sanctions in place and we have no way of binding ourselves to current human rights laws, leaving the harm to our community without answer.

In the marketing process, I’ve identified 11 key steps we can positively impact to eliminate and prevent unconscious biases and stereotypes that are known to cause harm.

1. Product design
2. Customer briefings
3. Strategy and research
4. Creative brief
5. creative design
6. Approvals
7. Production
8. Analytics and data
9. Media and Distribution
10. Legal frameworks
11. Consumer’s behavior

My belief is that the most important issue is the self-regulatory system. As with raising children, there is no point in trying to change behavior if there are no consequences, we have inconsistent compliance and undefined rules in place. Let’s dive deeper into this one…. It’s time for an overhaul of self-regulation!

The self-regulatory system revolves roughly around the Ad Standards Board (ASB), which is operated by the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) here in Australia, although there are bodies for many types of industry media and it is a deep and confusing landscape. There are a lot of things that work in this system, and some recent improvements to impact sexualization content are particularly positive when it comes to harmful stereotypes, but there are a lot of things that don’t work. .

• No oversight by an ombudsman or government entity to keep AANA transparent and as effective as it could be. Even the Minister of Communications refers to the self-regulatory system to solve his own problems – which is like giving the fox the task of guarding the henhouse.
• AANA is run by brands with a vested interest in maintaining self-regulation and minimizing penalties for code violations.
• No financial penalties or penalties other than being asked to take down the offending work are in place and relying on violators to comply. The average number of days for a complaint decision to be rendered reveals that re-offending brands have *36.5 days on average to leverage awareness, and sometimes it can take months. This figure was last revealed by the AANA in 2017 and is now removed from public view.
• Research studies (conducted by Deloitte) on the effectiveness of self-regulation are self-funded. Damning topics from the past seem to be mysteriously excluded from recent reports – such as the number of people who don’t know how and where to complain (19%), don’t think complaining will have an impact (17%) or a metric to measure the potential harm or business benefit that violators derive from litigation (average of 36.5 days), or the impact of multiple repeat offenders over time. We also don’t have a measure of the population and the specific impact of desensitization caused by biased media. Recent studies of ASB operations appear to be conducted selectively to justify the pursuit of self-regulation and the avoidance of government intervention, and the results appear to support this story rather than address consumer impact or missing codes. The last time some of these issues were publicly reported was in 2015 to fight accusations of inefficiency.
• The AANA and ASB use public input to determine when the population is ready for new codes, but they ask a limited group of educated and informed people and the risk is to further entrench bias and prejudice if you ask biased and prejudiced people what they think. If we asked minority or socially disadvantaged groups what they need, we would probably get a whole different story. This is further supported by the bias of the community complaining – tipping those who live in NSW, women, highly educated people, higher income brackets, who watch FreeTV and 40-54 years old; most typically.
• Because the AANA code does not include all conditions that cause harm, so they currently deem it as “Out of Jurisdiction”, which makes the complaint appear to have no merit, when in fact their code is potentially incomplete (certainly by UK standards and validated by the UK Law Institute). The latest published data shows that 1,181 complaints per year could not be dealt with effectively under the current code, in addition to 577 issues dismissed, with only 10-15% of complaints upheld. This shows us that the code is probably inadequate, even without British precedence to measure up to.

The Landscape of Self-Regulation: This overview of self-regulation versus harmful stereotypes reveals no oversight by government or an appointed ombudsman.

The big question to ask as an industry: is it okay to have a broken self-regulatory system? What can you personally do to bring about change?

If we can’t bring about universal change, we’ll end up with brands doing the right thing and taking matters into their own hands and even joining the Unstereotype Alliance, but we may just be creating a situation where repeat offenders will further away. commercial gains by breaking existing codes and pushing harder on issues that are not yet managed by self-regulation and we are creating an even bigger divide.
As the public continues to see harmful portrayals without any disciplinary action, we are still creating damage in their homes and even desensitizing society into thinking what they see in the media is acceptable and those who fight against that are too “PC” or too sensitive.

I know from my own experience of domestic violence, abuse and workplace discrimination that it can all be put in the same bucket – stereotypes made a group of people think they were superior to a other. In some cases, it made me suffer, abuse, attack, neglect, disadvantage and feel invisible. Everyone deserves the right to be treated equally and on merit, and we need systems to administer the right process to ensure that we make it fair for all and that it is sustainable, beyond the noise of a countryside.

Anne Miles, Marketing Consultant | Founder of Suits&Sneakers | defender of stereotypes

Sources:
Various sources of allegations and references to follow. A full paper submitted to the government compiling 3 years of research on this topic is available on request if you need to delve deeper into this topic.