Smart image of a disabled woman wearing a prosthetic limb, taken from new images from the Business Disability Forum. [+] Media Resource Kit.
Business Disability Forum
Representing disability in marketing and advertising materials can often be a major headache for brand creatives.
When disability is depicted in advertising imagery, it needs to be clearly depicted without being so exaggerated that it exposes the brand or creative to accusations of exploitation, insensitivity or disrespectful ignorance.
Faced with this daunting conundrum, marketers have traditionally responded in one of two ways. The first is to opt for only cliché, one-dimensional imagery, such as people in wheelchairs, even though wheelchair users make up just 10% of the disability community. The second response, perhaps born out of both a fear of being wrong and the under-representation of disabled people in the creative industries themselves, is to avoid showing disability at all. In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that only 1% of US primetime TV ads in 2021 featured disability-related themes or visuals.
If you can’t see it, you forget it
One organisation with a keen focus on boosting disability confidence in brand creative is the UK-based Business Disability Forum, which has published guidelines for the responsible use of disability-related imagery as part of its “Changing Images of Disability” campaign.
Addressing everything from authentically featuring disabled models and volunteers in campaigns to highlighting less visible disabilities such as neurodiversity and mental health through thoughtful use of captions and alt text, the guidelines are accompanied by 480 free images for BDF members, created using disabled people as models and advisors.
These guidelines are further contextualized by recently published survey data from Ipsos. The survey, which sampled 6,500 adults aged 16-75 across the UK, found that 32% of respondents said they had not seen disability represented in content they had watched, viewed or read in the past six months. When disability was represented, 26% of respondents identified images of wheelchair and electric scooter users as the most common means of portraying disability, with conditions such as facial differences, skin conditions, musculoskeletal issues, energy-limiting conditions and dexterity issues conspicuously absent. Meanwhile, only 23% of disabled respondents surveyed felt that images of disabled people used in content they had watched, viewed or read reflected their own experience of disability.
The costs to the marketing industry of continuing these mistakes could not be greater: According to a 2020 report from the World Federation of Advertisers, the addressable market for products and services for people with disabilities is approximately $13 trillion, bigger than China’s. What’s more, a 2019 Getty Images and Verizon Media survey suggested that the general public is more favorably disposed toward brands that feature people with disabilities in their advertising.
Speaking about the BDF campaign, which has been supported by prominent members of the community, including Paralympian Kadeena Cox OBE, trainer, consultant and journalist Simon Minty and actress Selly Burnell, Sinead Burke, CEO of accessibility consultancy Tilting the Lens and advocate for inclusion in the fashion industry, said: “For too long, images of disabled people have been disingenuous and have not reflected the community or disability pride. Stock imagery can repeat exclusionary narratives and turn disabled people into objects rather than agents and protagonists. Visibility alone is not an indicator of systemic change, but this campaign and our library of images for businesses and media are an important milestone.”
Lara Davis, communications director at the Business Disability Forum, added: “Our view of the world is influenced by the images we see in the media and advertising. Too often disabled people are absent from content or represented in unrealistic ways, reinforcing unhelpful stereotypes and leaving disabled people feeling overlooked and misunderstood.”
“Through our ‘Change the Image of Disability’ campaign, we are showcasing the diversity of real-life disabled people and helping to raise awareness of disability, particularly invisible disabilities, which have a huge impact on people’s everyday lives but are often hard to visualise and invisible. We hope that the images and guidance we have created will inspire everyone to think differently and help businesses and the media to take a more authentic and inclusive view of disability.”
Smart image of a short female disability taken from the Business Disability Forum New Media… [+] Resource kit.
Business Disability Forum
Collective Responsibility
The timing of BDF’s campaign is certainly auspicious: last month in the US, a grassroots movement among creative agencies aimed at accelerating disability inclusion in advertising began to take shape.
Spearheaded by Misfit Media, a boutique agency of disability creatives dedicated to educating brands and the industry at large on disability inclusion, Misfit 100 recently committed to a goal of doubling disability representation in advertising by 2025. The first step in this effort is to bring together 100 creative teams and agencies by July of this year who will commit to making concrete efforts towards this goal. The next six months will see an intensive disability education program focusing on topics such as the history of disability, different models of disability such as the social model vs. the medical model, and disability-inclusive language and bias.
After that, it will be time to get creative with the ultimate goal of all participating agencies having a disability-inclusive ad in Times Square on International Day of Persons with Disabilities on December 3, 2025. The organization will also curate all this content into a searchable reference database as a means to inspire future efforts towards better disability representation across the industry.
Misfit Media founder and CEO Kelsey Lindell acknowledged that if the campaign achieves its goal, it would only increase representation of people with disabilities in advertising to 2 percent, but argued that it’s a great start.
“I’d like to go from 1% to 2%,” Lindell said. “I know 2% still isn’t nearly enough, but when was the last time the industry doubled something in two years? It was probably a long time ago, so I see this as a very positive and healthy challenge.”
Lindell, who has worked with companies like Nike, NBCUniversal and VLMY&R, firmly believes that ad creatives want to accurately represent people with disabilities but often lack the tools or confidence to make it happen.
“We’ve always thought of ourselves as an agency for agencies,” she explains.
“We firmly believe that creative people never want to do harm. It’s one of the guiding principles of our company that they want to do good. Creative professionals are some of the most kind-hearted, generous, amazing people I’ve ever met. They just don’t know what they don’t know, and we want to help them.”
If it’s the fear of getting it wrong that is holding some brands and agencies back from disability representation, surely confidence-building and education are the keys to opening the door. For a people who find it hard to turn their attention away from anything but the bottom line, all the better if that education also includes highlighting China-sized holes in targeting plans and revenue calculations.