2025 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Black & Abroad uses luxury travel experiences for an underserved and underrepresented customer base: young, upwardly mobile members of the Black community. With 30% of revenue coming from repeat business, and the pandemic’s brutal impact on the travel industry finally faded, 2024 was the perfect opportunity to re-engage with past guests to drive new bookings.

The campaign garnered a lift in engagement among previous Black & Abroad customers, improved open rates in emails, a percentage increase in repeat bookings and strengthened leadership position as an innovative,
purpose-driven brand.

In a category that struggles with representations of Black audiences, if the agency could help Black & Abroad customers see themselves at aspirational destinations, they’re more likely to want to go to those destinations.

A project that began as a 1:1 digital experience for Black & Abroad customers and became a global data solution for bias in generative AI models.

A PROJECT IN THREE PARTS
The project was split in three parts. Firstly, they personalized digital experience for Black & Abroad customers, in which they used generative AI to show past guests at future destinations. They used a mass media campaign highlighting the racial bias problems the company encountered along the way. Campaign hub: https://seeyouthere.ai/. Finally they incorporated the Generative AI Bias Reporting System - the company’s data solution to the problem of bias in generative AI: https://biasreporting.ai/.

The agency began by collecting more than 11,000 digital images of guests from previous Black & Abroad trips who had all given permission for their photos to be used in Black & Abroad marketing materials.

The agency hand-sorted by customer, prioritizing facial clarity – to arrive at 5 to 10 images per customer, which they ingested into a secure cleanroom environment to test, train and refine the company’s AI models. They documented problematic images, then fine-tuned outputs for a long list of selects. Human
review determined finals.

Then they sent personalised emails to Black & Abroad customers which led them to a personalized digital experience with the generative AI images of them at five of the brand’s upcoming destinations – and a call-to-action to book.

Modelled after the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), our reporting system is a disciplined technical solution. It collects unstructured, observed instances of bias and converts them into structured data at scale.

The 11 bias themes – e.g., “attribution of stereotype” and “erasure” – come from Breitfeller, Ahn, Jurgens, Tvsetkov: “Finding Microaggressions in the Wild” (2019). The 12 bias categories – e.g., “race”, “gender” and “body size” – come from the Spirograph intersectionality diagram, Duckworth, 2020

Following the campaign, there were 3,462 Biases reported and 81,293,895 impressions – the most seen campaign in Black & Abroad's history.

Emails featuring generative imagery of past customers achieved an impressive 81% open rate, while digital media campaigns (AdTheorent) saw a 218% higher clickthrough rate compared to the benchmark. On Meta platforms, the top-performing creative achieved a 77.68% view rate, and video ads outperformed expectations with a 53% higher completion rate than YouTube’s benchmark (ZEFR).

Credits

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 O2icer

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

Client: Black & Abroad
Eric Martin Co-founder, CCO
Kent Johnson Co-founder, CSO