Represent Me Ad of the Month: Tesco
As part of our WACL100 #RepresentMe initiative, we’re focusing on the responsibility we have as an industry to better represent all kinds of women and girls in the work that we create. That’s why each month, we’ll be highlighting a WACL Ad of the Month, and sharing some insight about how it came to be and what makes it such a positive example of representation that we can all learn from.
Our first Ad of the Month is this one from Tesco. Tesco Food Love Stories | Sue’s ‘Dive In’ Crispy Pork Noodles
Melda Simon, UK Chapter Lead for the UN Women convened Unstereotype Alliance says:
“Tesco is a valued member of the UK Chapter of the Unstereotype Alliance and it’s wonderful to see this feel-good ad get the positive recognition it deserves. One of the key principles of unstereotypical and inclusive communications is to portray characters with three-dimensional personalities that feel authentic – funny, caring, strong, thoughtful and respected. In this ad we see the women portrayed with real and compelling personality traits and this resonates with viewers.
Furthermore, older women are one of the groups most neglected by advertisers but in this spot, we see older people of all sizes and ethnicities defying senior stereotypes. We often encounter older women in advertising as parents or grandparents, but here we see a group of real sea swimmers having full agency in the ad, enjoying life and friendship. A beautiful depiction of ageing joyfully.
Eliminating stereotypes is not only the responsible thing to do to further diversity, equity and inclusion commitments, it’s also good business. Through the Unstereotype Metric (UM) – an open-sourced methodology to test ads for gender stereotypes – we know that the Tesco Food Love Stories ads that we’ve tested have scored in the top 30% for both positive female and male portrayals and that ads with a high UM score continue to predict greater ROI impact.”
Unstereotype Alliance members have access to the Unstereotype Metric as part of a suite of support tools including the proprietary ‘3Ps’ framework for creating progressive advertising content. For further information visit www.unstereotypealliance.org
The WACL #RepresentMe team chose this ad because the girls we spoke to in our first #RepresentMe workshop at Kensington Aldridge Academy told us: “All the different women with different body shapes and skin tones and everything, it’s obviously great for them to be represented but the fact that we’re looking at that ad and thinking ‘wow this is amazing, everyone’s being represented’ – that’s not really OK that it’s such an outstanding thing. It should just be normalised.” “The fact that we’re noticing it and celebrating it is disappointing because it means that most of the time ads are not like that.”
Together, we can ensure that ads that represent women this well will one day become the norm.
About the author
The Others & Me; Author of No More Menemies