2025 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Black & Abroad is a black owned business offering luxury travel experiences for young, upwardly mobile members of the Black community. Having built a trusted community, Black & Abroad had access to an abundance of data, most notably thousands of photographs from previous Black & Abroad trips.

The brand was looking for ways to strengthen its leadership position as an innovative, purpose-driven brand and drive loyalty. With 30% of travel industry bookings coming from repeat business, they wanted an opportunity to re-engage with past guests to drive new bookings.

From painters in the 1800s who imposed characteristics of whiteness onto their darker-skinned subjects, to Kodak’s “Shirley Card”, used in the mid-1900s to calibrate film to lighter-skinned complexions — the technologies they use to tell stories tend to reflect larger social biases.

The most prominent technological bias of their times is happening in AI, not by design but by default. The datasets used to train AI are skewed towards a dominant view of the world, not least in their racial bias.

While many brands are increasingly trying to reflect diverse experiences, for Black & Abroad, the accurate depiction of Black culture isn’t just a nice-to-have. It is critical to brand credibility and business survival.

In the “See it, Be it” bias, they talk about representation of diverse audiences, but still focus on what is, rather than what could be.

“See You There” began as a 1:1 campaign using AI to imagine past guests at upcoming destinations — but it became a global solution developed with Shutterstock for addressing the bias in generative AI models.

This was a multifaceted project with personalized digital experiences for Black & Abroad customers, in which they used generative AI to show past guests at future destinations. As well as a brand partnership with Shutterstock that turned their insights into a brief for their contributors and helped create a more diverse photography dataset to train AI. In addition to a targeted media campaign highlighting the racial bias problems in both Generative AI and the travel industry codes.

They discovered evidence of racial bias woven into the ways AI models are built and trained — and in what they can produce. Since fewer photos of Black travellers exist online, there is less data for models to be trained on, resulting in biased outputs.

A brand partnership with Shutterstock that turned their insights into a brief for their contributors, helping to create a more diverse photography dataset to train AI.

To maximise the impact, they launched the Generative AI Bias Reporting System — an interactive, web-based utility allowing everyone to log reports of bias in generative AI models. Creating a new dataset of documented AI bias allows anyone, anywhere, to identify the patterns of bias and refine the models.

The agency targeted existing Black & Abroad customers, with accurate portrayals of them in future Black & Abroad destinations, inviting them to a bespoke site to explore their next travel options.

The brand partnered with one of the largest stock photo platforms, Shutterstock, to produce a brief fueled by the agency’s insights, calling on their network of photographers to capture imagery that addressed major gaps in representation (destinations, scenarios, communities).

This project brought brand strategists together with media, creative, and data strategists to create an impactful and effective programme that has both utility and beauty, and is grounded in effective
marketing sciences.

The campaign reached more than 3,000,000 Shutterstock contributors with the collaborative content brief. It resulted in 1,508 and counting new professional photos of Black travellers added to Shutterstock — all of which are now being used to train generative AI models. In addition, $15,000 in grant money was raised to fund Black-centric travel photography. With 81,293,895 impressions, it became the most seen campaign in Black & Abroad’s history, and more than 3,500 examples of generative AI bias were reported.

“See You There” achieved an 81% email open rate for emails using generative imagery of past customers. It delivered a 218% clickthrough rate versus the digital media benchmark (AdTheorent), a 77.68% view rate on the top-performing creative shown on Meta platforms, and a 53% higher video completion rate compared to the YouTube benchmark (Zefr).

Credits

Client: Black & Abroad
Eric Martin Co-founder, CCO
Kent Johnson Co-founder, CSO
Agency: 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
Pedro Izzo Designer
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
AJ Jones Chief Strategy Officer
Jordan Doucette Chief Creative Officer
Media: Initiative Canada
Sammy Rifai Chief Strategy Officer
Chris Gairdner VP, Head of Creative Partnerships
Christian Kern Group Strategy Director
Ramzi Thabit Project Manager
Hawie Kenea Senior Communications Designer
Bethany Coke Senior Communications Designer
Samantha Rosenberg Manager, Creative Partnerships
Tyler Dmytrow Vice President, Head of Social, Kinesso
Olivier Leblond Senior Vice President, Client Strategy and Growth, Kinesso
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
Audio: Grayson Music Group
Nicholas Shaw Senior Producer
Mark Domitric Voice/Session Director
Vlad Nikolic Engineer