Getting to an idea worth fighting for rarely begins from an obvious starting point. Inspired by former Wieden+Kennedy Creative Director Jason Bagley, this series uses provocative questions to mine the Big Ideas That Work Engines for repeatable creative tactics that can help answer them.
This time, we’re asking:
How could we make the bias reveal itself?
Here are six campaigns that probably weren’t thought of by asking this question and a few others, but they could have been...
- Change One Variable
- Run a Blind Bias Test
- Swap Who Receives the Treatment
- Make the Assumption Official
- Make the Biased System Playable
- Materialise the Hidden Filter
1. Change One Variable
Hold everything else constant and let the changed judgement expose the bias.
Not a Gun — Courageous Conversation Global Foundation · Goodby Silverstein & Partners · 2020
A phone. A wallet. A chocolate bar. None is dangerous. Yet objects like these have repeatedly been described as weapons after unarmed Black people were shot by police. Not a Gun isolated the uncomfortable variable by placing the same harmless objects in black and white hands. Nothing about the object changes. Only the person holding it does. The creative idea therefore behaves less like an accusation and more like a controlled experiment: if the interpretation changes, what exactly are we reacting to?
2. Run a Blind Bias Test
Hide the identity cue until people have already revealed how they judge it.
The Social Swap — Heineken · Edelman · 2023
Football pundits Jill Scott and Gary Neville secretly swapped social media accounts for five days while continuing to post their own genuine opinions. Audiences therefore reacted to Jill's thoughts believing they came from Gary — and vice versa. Only afterwards was the switch revealed. Instead of asking football fans whether sexism exists, Heineken created a blind test in which their reactions became the data. The experiment reportedly found Jill's account received five times more sexist comments during the swap.
Love Has No Labels (Ad Council, R/GA, 2015) used an X-ray screen to strip people back to anonymous skeletons before revealing the couples, families and friends behind them. By delaying cues such as race, sexuality, religion, age or disability until after the audience had already accepted the human relationship, the campaign made the label — and any judgement attached to it — arrive second. The reveal turned implicit bias into something viewers could catch themselves applying.
