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Addressing Biases in Multicultural & Inclusive Identity Data
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BACKGROUND

In 2018, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA)’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing
(AIMM) began exploring inequities in the marketing and media data available to multicultural marketers. The
goal of the initiative was to ensure that the multicultural ecosystem is empowered to reach sound conclusions
for growth through segment marketing and investment decisions. By enhancing representation, projectability,
and reliability of multicultural data and analytics, multicultural marketers will be able to leverage collective data
assets to enhance marketing solutions.

There is a significant gap in data quality and affordability in this sector relative to the general market. Marketers
are particularly concerned about data supporting digital planning, targeting, and delivery; the underlying issue
of identity assignment surfaced very quickly in AIMM discussions. Correctly classifying consumers by their race/
ethnicity and cultural orientation is the key to advertising that’s relevant and resonates, and produces high ROI.
This issue is broader than online digital advertising. In the past two years, addressable targeting on the basis of
demographic or behavioral characteristics has become more prevalent in television, audio, and even
out-of-home. Identity is now a core advertising and media issue.

At the same time, there has been a surge in privacy legislation and restrictive tech policies that potentially
further limit the ability to target consumers with addressable media. But several new privacy-compliant
solutions like universal IDs are in development and designed to fill the void left by cookie degradation and the
elimination of mobile ad IDs. There will be privacy-first solutions and as a result, issues surrounding targeting
the right audiences and segments will continue. The central topic in this paper, ensuring accurate and reliable
multicultural identity data, will remain.

AIMM Data Roundtable Participants and Focus, 2018

AIMM began with a fact-finding mission. RFIs were issued to 30 companies that provide multicultural marketing
and media data to learn more about their data sources and multicultural identity assignment procedures. In turn,
AIMM interviewed ten of the major data providers about their data sources and multicultural identity assignment
procedures. It is important to note that some of these companies collect identity data directly from the public/
consumer; some rely on other providers’ data, public records, transactional data, and publishers’ data. etc.; and
others use a combination of the two.