2024 Winner
Best of Show
GoldBest in Data
GoldBest Data Insight
GoldBest in Emerging Technology
GoldBest in Travel and Tourism
SilverBest in CSR
Black & Abroad
"See You There"
Initiative
"See You There"
Initiative
Black & Abroad offers luxury travel experiences for underserved and under-represented customer base: young, upwardly mobile members of the Black community. With 30% of revenue coming from repeat business, they wanted an uplifting tech-forward solution to help them re-engage with past guests to drive new bookings.
The campaign’s objectives were to lift in engagement among previous Black & Abroad customers, strengthen leadership position as an innovative, purpose-driven brand and drive high open rates
in email.
Since 2015, Black & Abroad has always looked for tech-forward ways to inspire and empower travel. “See You There”began as a 1:1 campaign using AI to imagine past guests at upcoming destinations – and drive repeat bookings – but it quickly became a global solution for addressing bias in generative
AI models.
While generating images of our guests, the agency uncovered evidence of racial bias woven into the ways AI models are built, trained and in what they can produce. They published an in-depth analysis of the issues fueling bias in AI, and then rebuilt the campaign around developing the tools needed to help address it.
The multi-faceted campaign personalized digital experiences for Black & Abroad customers, in which they used generative AI to show past guests at future destinations. The mass media campaign highlighted the racial bias problems they encountered along the way.
A brand partnership with Shutterstock turned the campaign’s insights into a brief for their contributors and helped create a more diverse photography dataset to train AI.
Introducing the Generative AI Bias Reporting System – the innovative data-driven solution to address bias in generative AI.
Customers who had been on a previous Black & Abroad trips, and for whom they had enough photographic data, received an opt-in email, which led them to a personalized digital experience with generative AI images of them at 5 of the brand’s upcoming destinations – and a call to action to book.
After encountering challenges with generating the images of the brand’s guests the agency traced the biases they uncovered back to a lack of representation in travel photography on the platforms these AI models use for training. So Black & Abroad partnered with Shutterstock to produce a brief for their photographers fueled by the agency’s insights and highlight destinations, scenarios, communities lacking representation.
The Generative AI Bias Reporting System is the brand’s data solution to bias in generative text, image and video. On the Black & Abroad site the brand invites users to enter instances of bias, and help in creating structured data at scale, for use by anyone, anywhere in the refinement and development of gen AI models.
11,000 images of past guests were sorted and ingested into a secure cleanroom environment to test, train and refine the brand’s AI models. The agency documented problematic image outputs alongside patterns in the prompts driving them, publishing a report of their findings on seeyouthere.ai.
The tests were able to uncover specific instances of bias in Gen AI such as an 85% failure rate in depicting our subjects as Black at some of the most popular attractions like Machu Picchu in Peru. African destinations proved particularly challenging for the models they evaluated. Without strong prompt reinforcement, models seem to pull from photojournalism/news imagery and extreme poverty was overrepresented.
The data insights were used in partnership with one of the world’s largest stock photo platforms, Shutterstock, to produce a brief highlighting underrepresented travel scenarios which was shared with millions of photographers on the platform. The brand then established a grant to fund and
encourage participation.
“See You There” drove meaningful change, achieving 81,293,895 impressions, making it the most viewed initiative in Black & Abroad’s history. Over 2.1 million Shutterstock contributors were reached through the collaborative content brief, with a target of creating 1,000 new travel photos showcasing Black-centric experiences.
The campaign also raised $15,000 in grant funding to support Black-centric travel photography and successfully reported 3,462 biases, emphasizing its commitment to fostering inclusivity in
travel representation.
“See You There” excelled at driving engagement and filling the funnel, achieving an impressive 81% email open rate for emails featuring generative imagery of past customers. Digital media efforts saw a 218% clickthrough rate compared to the benchmark (AdTheorent), while the top-performing creative on Meta platforms garnered a 77.68% view rate. Additionally, video content achieved a 53% higher completion rate than YouTube’s benchmark (ZEFR), showcasing the effectiveness of the campaign’s creative strategy.
The campaign’s objectives were to lift in engagement among previous Black & Abroad customers, strengthen leadership position as an innovative, purpose-driven brand and drive high open rates
in email.
Since 2015, Black & Abroad has always looked for tech-forward ways to inspire and empower travel. “See You There”began as a 1:1 campaign using AI to imagine past guests at upcoming destinations – and drive repeat bookings – but it quickly became a global solution for addressing bias in generative
AI models.
While generating images of our guests, the agency uncovered evidence of racial bias woven into the ways AI models are built, trained and in what they can produce. They published an in-depth analysis of the issues fueling bias in AI, and then rebuilt the campaign around developing the tools needed to help address it.
The multi-faceted campaign personalized digital experiences for Black & Abroad customers, in which they used generative AI to show past guests at future destinations. The mass media campaign highlighted the racial bias problems they encountered along the way.
A brand partnership with Shutterstock turned the campaign’s insights into a brief for their contributors and helped create a more diverse photography dataset to train AI.
Introducing the Generative AI Bias Reporting System – the innovative data-driven solution to address bias in generative AI.
Customers who had been on a previous Black & Abroad trips, and for whom they had enough photographic data, received an opt-in email, which led them to a personalized digital experience with generative AI images of them at 5 of the brand’s upcoming destinations – and a call to action to book.
After encountering challenges with generating the images of the brand’s guests the agency traced the biases they uncovered back to a lack of representation in travel photography on the platforms these AI models use for training. So Black & Abroad partnered with Shutterstock to produce a brief for their photographers fueled by the agency’s insights and highlight destinations, scenarios, communities lacking representation.
The Generative AI Bias Reporting System is the brand’s data solution to bias in generative text, image and video. On the Black & Abroad site the brand invites users to enter instances of bias, and help in creating structured data at scale, for use by anyone, anywhere in the refinement and development of gen AI models.
11,000 images of past guests were sorted and ingested into a secure cleanroom environment to test, train and refine the brand’s AI models. The agency documented problematic image outputs alongside patterns in the prompts driving them, publishing a report of their findings on seeyouthere.ai.
The tests were able to uncover specific instances of bias in Gen AI such as an 85% failure rate in depicting our subjects as Black at some of the most popular attractions like Machu Picchu in Peru. African destinations proved particularly challenging for the models they evaluated. Without strong prompt reinforcement, models seem to pull from photojournalism/news imagery and extreme poverty was overrepresented.
The data insights were used in partnership with one of the world’s largest stock photo platforms, Shutterstock, to produce a brief highlighting underrepresented travel scenarios which was shared with millions of photographers on the platform. The brand then established a grant to fund and
encourage participation.
“See You There” drove meaningful change, achieving 81,293,895 impressions, making it the most viewed initiative in Black & Abroad’s history. Over 2.1 million Shutterstock contributors were reached through the collaborative content brief, with a target of creating 1,000 new travel photos showcasing Black-centric experiences.
The campaign also raised $15,000 in grant funding to support Black-centric travel photography and successfully reported 3,462 biases, emphasizing its commitment to fostering inclusivity in
travel representation.
“See You There” excelled at driving engagement and filling the funnel, achieving an impressive 81% email open rate for emails featuring generative imagery of past customers. Digital media efforts saw a 218% clickthrough rate compared to the benchmark (AdTheorent), while the top-performing creative on Meta platforms garnered a 77.68% view rate. Additionally, video content achieved a 53% higher completion rate than YouTube’s benchmark (ZEFR), showcasing the effectiveness of the campaign’s creative strategy.
Credits
Black & AbroadEric Martin - Chief Creative Officer & Co-Founder
Kent Johnson - Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder
Initiative
Sammy Rifai - Chief Strategy Officer
Chris Gairdner - VP, Head of Creative Partnerships
Christian Kern - Group Director, Strategy
Samantha Rosenberg - Director, Creative Partnerships
Hawie Kenea - Senior Communications Designer
Bethany Coke - Senior Communications Designer
Ramzi Thabit - Project Manager
Kinesso
Olivier Leblond - Senior Vice President, Client Strategy & Growth
Debrani Ghosh - VP, Performance Solutions Delivery
Vivek Menon - Senior Director, Data Strategy
Roksolana Plysyuk - Associate Director, Audience Strategy
Tyler Dmytrow - Vice President, Head of Social
McCann Canada
Ian Mackenzie - Chief Creative Officer
Pedro Izzo - Creative Director
Sydney Gittens - Art Director
Leo Ding- Copywriter
Thiago Santarem - Senior Product Designer
Colin Craig - Executive Creative Director
Elijah Di Gangi - Associate Creative Director
Arnaud Icard - Group Director, Product Development
Stef Fabich - SVP, Director of Production
Nikhil Bijlani- Project Manager
Gary Gimelfarb - Director of Production
Abdul Dau - Senior Analyst
Mitch Wong - Associate Strategy Director
Luis Pinto - Senior Manager, Platforms
David Imbrogno - Senior Email Developer
Anthony Pilger - Developer
Jason Kan - Motion Designer
Jean-Pierre Goulet - Photo Retoucher
Dan Dragicevic - Production Designer
Bradley Hodgkinson - Production Lead
Ryan Timms - President
Stefanie Kubanka - EVP, Managing Director
Elizabeth Sellors - Chief Operating Officer
Production: The Den Editorial
Tania Mesta - Editor
Gabe Sanchez - Colorist
Laura Macauley - Managing Director
Jennifer Mersis - Executive Producer
Kortney Rubottom - Sr. Producer
Case Production: School Editorial
Lauren Horn - Editor
Steve Villeseche - Producer
Yumi Suyama - Executive Producer