ARF Cultural Effectiveness: Contending with Algorithmic Bias

On March 16, 2022, the ARF Cultural Effectiveness Council hosted a discussion to outline the challenge of algorithmic bias in advertising data, quantitative research and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Speakers from Cassandra, Ipsos, Publicis Media, Twitter, University of Southern California and Wunderman Thompson shed light on why this issue arises, what its effects can be and how to contend with it.

We also discussed new diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and the tactics millennials and Gen Z are using to combat bias in real time. Attendees gained insights into how algorithmic bias can affect research results and media selections and learned how to identify and understand key types of algorithmic bias in our industry.

Models, programs and algorithms used in our field can unintentionally favor majority populations and ignore, or even discriminate, against minority segments due to the unconscious bias of the engineers who build them, the data they are trained on or the algorithms’ treatment of human attributes as singular rather than intersectional.