Channel 4’s £1m Diversity in Advertising Award 2019 to highlight LGBT+ representation in advertising

The award, which offers £1 million worth of commercial airtime to the winning creative idea, is challenging brands and creative agencies to develop a campaign which puts people from the LGBT+ community at the heart of their advertising without being tokenistic.

The focus of this year’s competition comes after Channel 4’s sales house, 4Sales, commissioned the world’s biggest study in to diversity representation in TV ads, analysing 1,000 television adverts over a two-month period, to discover how minority groups are actually being portrayed.  The research discovered that LGBT+ people hardly appear in adverts and can be stereotyped or portrayed negatively.

Matt Salmon, Channel 4’s Head of Agency and Client Sales, said: “Our study, and the focus groups we conducted alongside it, showed that despite the lip service paid to diversity, there’s still a long way to go before we have authentic representation in television ads.

“Channel 4 is determined to drive change in this area and we particularly want to challenge advertisers to up their game in the representation of people from the LGBT+ community.”

The research also found:

• People from the LGBT+ community feature in just 3% of the adverts in the survey, despite making up at least 6% of the UK population
• A quantitative survey of 2,000 adults found that the wider population hugely overestimates the percentage of adverts that include members of the LGBT+ community (22%) versus the reality (3%)
• Among the focus groups, many LBGT+ people felt adverts relied on same sex couples with little thought being given to bisexuals, gender fluid and transgender people
• And many of the LGBT+ focus group felt advertisers fell foul of resorting to common stereotypes portraying lesbians as ‘butch’, gay men as ‘camp’ or showing gay characters in a party scene
• Sixty per cent of the 2,000 adults surveyed felt the LGBT+ community, when it did appear in adverts, was represented in a negative way, often in supporting, tokenistic roles. People also said that same-sex relationships were given very brief exposure in adverts and rarely as part of a family unit.