How Diageo is knocking unconscious gender biases out of its advertising

• Diageo has been working with UN Women on its initiative, Unstereotype Alliance, that is working on tackling unhelpful and harmful gender stereotypes in advertising.
• The brand has come up with a framework that is trying to ensure unconscious gender stereotypes don't creep into its advertising.
• Its the brand's attempt at ensuring that women are given not only equal representation, but prominence, minus stereotypes in the ads.

Advertising is a powerful tool and brands have the power to change age-old narratives by coming up with thought-provoking communications that have the power to challenge norms. For a long time, Alcobev brands across the globe have relegated women to the sidelines. Their communications would be about men and the stories would be told from the man’s perspective.

However, Diageo has made a start in getting rid of these biases. The brand has come up with a framework that can help its raise awareness around its communications that passively, or actively, put gender stereotypes in ads. The framework laid down some clear do’s and don’ts that could help the brand become more progressive, overall. Speaking on the sidelines of the recently concluded Ad:tech conference held in Mumbai, Julie Bramham, Chief Marketing Officer, Diageo India said that the brand joined hands with the Unstereotype Alliance, an initiative by UN Women, to ‘tackle unhelpful and harmful gender stereotypes in advertising.’

Speaking about the framework that aims to tackle representation (Who is being portrayed?), perspective (Whose point of view?) and characterization (Is it a ‘real’ person?), Bramham said, “We created the framework to knock out any unconscious bias that exists within our marketing teams or any of our agencies. By following the framework, we’re trying to make sure that these unconscious biases don’t creep in any of the creative work we do.” The aim of the framework is to make sure that men and women are equally represented and that women being featured have a depth of character, showing their strong personalities.

Watch Julie Bramham talk about Diageo’s attempts at fighting gender stereotyping here: