Breaking AI bias: Predictive analytics platform aims to eliminate racism in marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often touted as the future of advertising and marketing, promising to revolutionize the way companies engage with and engage with customers. The numbers don’t lie, with reports projecting a colossal increase in global market revenue for AI in marketing, quadrupling from $27.4 billion in 2023 to $107.4 billion in 2028.

It’s no secret that many companies are already capitalizing on AI to improve their marketing strategies. Using AI-assisted dynamic decision making, marketers can adjust their programmatic media buying and determine test-market winners. AI can also predict and identify potentially profitable audiences for marketing purposes.

And that is just the beginning. AI is now assuming the role of content creator. Marketers are finally loosening the reins and enabling AI-generated content for media placements, beyond search advertising. To create custom images and copy for creative proofing, companies are feeding the AI ​​input from multiple sources, including past performance, marketing insights, analyst insights, and specialized insights.

However, as we transition into this new era of AI marketing, we must also recognize the potential pitfalls. AI tools are not foolproof and may contain inherent biases and perpetuate racism.

Addressing bias and racism in AI

One example of this was the recent controversy surrounding the association between Levi’s and the Lalaland.ai fashion studio. AI-powered digital fashion studio creates hyper-realistic fashion models with the goal of increasing diversity in the industry. However, the announcement was met with fierce criticism, especially from models of color already facing a lack of representation. Many questioned the decision to create artificial models instead of hiring real models, calling it “lazy”, “problematic”, and most importantly “racist”.

“The future of marketing will be about data sets and not gut reactions or hunches,” Larry Adams, founder and CEO of the diversity-focused AI platform provider. X_Stereotypehe told VentureBeat. “In the past, we used human intelligence, mainly from white men, to create advertising. The current approach uses data sets drawn from various sources to create marketing campaigns that extend to many more media channels. And yet those data sources are still based on past performance, created and evaluated through the lens of white men.

“Artificial intelligence,” he continued, “is only as good as its inputs. Considering that most of the data out there is skewed due to its one-sided point of view, the lack of diversity and gender experiences creates a gap in the knowledge base that AI relies on to make its decisions, which that affects the result.

with more and more reports leaving that the AI ​​can be racistof marketing strategies such as racist AI rappers to social media, fake face recognition In design to the blatant placement of Facebook ads discriminationthere is a need in the checks and balances industry, for a solution with human-based insights from unbiased data sets.

That is precisely what X_Stereotype aspires to deliver: an AI-powered platform that analyzes content through a diversity and inclusion lens, enabling marketers to identify racial bias and risk factors present in content on the web. earliest stage of development.

From tragedy to transformation

As a marketing expert, Adams has always been invested in driving effective advertising through data, culture and information. But it was the murder of George Floyd in 2020 that prompted his latest venture, X_Stereotype. As a black professional in corporate America, Adams had long felt the challenges of navigating the industry while dealing with the unique experience of being black in America. But it wasn’t until Floyd’s murder that the broader marketing community began to take notice and ask questions, leading to a conversation about inclusivity and authenticity.

Adams also served as a senior advisor on Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign, where he was responsible for content strategy, marketing automation development, and data strategy. She quickly realized that the campaign was not effectively reaching black voters. Despite her efforts to understand and reach multicultural audiences, stereotypes about connecting with a black audience were still prevalent and the necessary data and messaging was not available.

To address this, Adams teamed up with entrepreneur Phil Alexander, who had been working on a research grant that involved understanding how different human attributes affect workplace relationships. Together, they commissioned a comprehensive study with neuroscientists, psychologists, and other specialists to quantify their findings and create algorithms that calculate 40 new psychometrics.

This research ultimately led to the creation of X_Stereotype, an engine designed to drive effective advertising while creating a less racist and more inclusive world, fueled by an honest, insider’s perspective of today’s diverse experience.

Through X_Stereotype, Adams is taking his life’s work to the next level by combining data, culture, and insight to drive more effective advertising that truly resonates with diverse audiences.

“The solution to bias in AI systems is to create new data sets that represent a multitude of aspects of our various audience sets,” he said. “In the case of X_Stereotype, we have generated 4 million (and growing every day) new data signals that represent the complexity of today’s multicultural society. X_Stereotype structures our data to facilitate integration with other data sets to help AI make better decisions and create more representative results.”

AI-powered predictive analytics

X_Stereotype is an AI-powered platform that uses predictive analytics to measure content performance across different races and cultures. The platform offers 40 comprehensive metrics for content, including emotional impact, bias, inclusion, and purchase intent.

Using real focus groups and natural language processing, the platform converts human responses into emotion and sentiment scores, allowing its AI to learn from itself and improve itself.

By recognizing bias in content, X_Stereotype aims to predict audience reaction to an asset, generating a dashboard of information that identifies potential racial bias and risk factors.

A single focus group to refine your AI model creates approximately 300,000 data points. Collectively, X_Stereotype’s market research efforts generated more than 4 million data points. X_Stereotype also collected a wide range of consumer demographics, including age, gender, household income, and marital status.

Companies like FanDuel, Chipotle, J&J, Bob Evans, and P&G have used the X_Stereotype platform to harness the predictive power of AI as they pursue their business goals. The platform has been used in many settings, from early concepts to commercials appearing at the Super Bowl. The platform aims to double the effectiveness of ads while reducing costs by providing clear and actionable information early in the process.

A notable case is that of beto evanswhere X_Stereotype’s ideas were appreciated and provided a sense of reassurance knowing that all of their concepts were being reviewed.

With more than two years of experience working with AI vendors and extensive language models (LLMs), the company plans to introduce more generative AI to the platform in the near future.

“X_Stereotype is on a mission to remove bias from marketing,” Adams said. “The driving force behind our mission is our own experiences, plus our love of marketing, and opening the door to greater representation by creating a marketing culture that values ​​our contribution and sees that it is good for society and business results.”