Pepsico: Walkers – Creating Inclusive Advertising

Opportunity

PepsiCo is committed to fostering a diverse environment and creating a collaborative, equitable and inclusive space where everyone has a voice. With its Walkers snacks brand being purchased and enjoyed in 9 in 10 households in the UK, there was a clear opportunity to more inclusively represent the society it serves as part of this commitment.

Advertising has the power to shape how people see the representation of themselves and of others. This is why creating a safe space for open and honest critique of creative content was essential for Walkers, to better understand the role it can play in celebrating and championing diversity.

Initiative

Through collaboration with their creative agencies and external D&I council, Walkers used resources from the BRiM framework to create a refined creative process designed to foster diversity. This included a refreshed director’s brief template, mandatory unconscious bias training for all marketing colleagues, pre-testing to check for stereotyping, alongside a quarterly review of diversity representation across its content.

Internally, Walkers encouraged its marketing community to learn how to better represent society by unlearning unconscious bias – with active discussions around racial and gender stereotypes. The new director’s brief clearly states that representation is critical across leading and secondary roles, with content required to celebrate all forms of diversity.

Impact

Walkers is tracking and measuring the increase of diverse representation in its adverts. In its 2021 campaigns, 36% of leading roles and 38% of secondary roles were played by non-white talent. The aim is to continue to broaden this representation across every brand touchpoint through an inclusive end to end creative process – from the initial research and strategy stage through to casting, production and media placement.