Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
9-2018
Abstract
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, we investigate the following: (1) What type of content brands put out -- Is there a lack of diversity?; (2) How does a brand's content diversity compare to its audience diversity -- Is any lack of diversity simply a reflection of the audience?; and (3) How does brand diversity relate to user engagement -- Do users of a particular demographic engage more if their demographics are represented in a post?
Keywords
advertising, brand, demographics, diversity, Facebook, gender, Instagram, race, social media, user engagement
Discipline
Databases and Information Systems | Social Media
Research Areas
Data Science and Engineering
Publication
Social Informatics: 10th International Conference, SocInfo 2018, St Petersburg, September 25-28: Proceedings
Volume
11185
First Page
38
Last Page
53
ISBN
9783030011291
Identifier
10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_3
Publisher
Springer
City or Country
Cham
Citation
AN, Jisun and WEBER, Ingmar.
Diversity in online advertising: A case study of 69 brands on social media. (2018). Social Informatics: 10th International Conference, SocInfo 2018, St Petersburg, September 25-28: Proceedings. 11185, 38-53.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6536
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_3