Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Diversity In Online Advertising: A Case Study Of 69 Brands On Social Media, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Lack of diversity in advertising is a long-standing problem. Despite growing cultural awareness and missed business opportunities, many minorities remain under- or inappropriately represented in advertising. Previous research has studied how people react to culturally embedded ads, but such work focused mostly on print media or television using lab experiments. In this work, we look at diversity in content posted by 69 U.S. brands on two social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook. Using face detection technology, we infer the gender, race, and age of both the faces in the ads and of the users engaging with ads. Using this dataset, …