2020 Winner
2020 Winners
Pexels
Free Stock Photos
Pexels is a free stock photography site with a curated library of over two million high-quality photos and videos. Since launching in 2014 they have always focused on diversity in their content across all cultures, ethnicities and genders. These previous efforts include a partnership with Nappy (high-res stock photos of black and brown people) to bring more representation for people of colour in their content.
Pexels understands the power a photo can have. It can make or break ideologies, challenge the status quo, and humanize experiences. Images fuel stories and create movements, and they feel it’s their responsibility as a global platform to act as a force for good; a force that helps power progress. They put a lot of effort into making sure their content remains balanced and diverse across the board. So much so that they constantly identify areas that could be more inclusive and issue specific briefs for photos to their creative community to help fill any of these gaps.
A lot of these efforts ultimately go unnoticed, which is the point. But stock photography is a competitive space and Pexels wanted to start to let their existing users and target audience know that they are a stock photo site that values inclusivity at its core.
Insights and Strategy
We noticed a big oversight, not only on Pexels, on all stock photo sites. They don’t return LGBTQ+ images in common search results like ‘couple’, ‘love’, ‘family’, and the list goes on. So while Pexels has thousands of photos reflecting all types of relationships and genders, they don’t show up in common search results. This means that at the point of searching, people have to make a conscious decision whether they want a photo of a heterosexual couple or a same-sex couple, and that doesn’t seem right.
We felt if we could fix this issue and let people know, it would serve as a concrete example of the level of detail and effort Pexels puts into keeping their content diverse and inclusive. This would let people know what makes Pexels different and position them as the world's first truly inclusive stock photo site.
Execution
Any algorithm that learns from the actions of people, will reflect and condense the biases those people have. And Pexels’ algorithm isn’t any different.
So to make this happen, we relied on humans to constantly teach and improve the way the algorithm prioritizes certain images in search results through a series of validation techniques. Using their existing LGBTQ+ images we essentially boosted these images that used to not even show up in any of these search results to now have much more prominence. And as these images become seen and downloaded more, the algorithm naturally continued to prioritize them among all other relevant results.
After weeks of adjustments and improvements we were able to teach the algorithm to be more inclusive across all relationship-based keywords and we were ready to share it with the world. So during pride month we updated the homepage to feature LGBTQ+ images and explain the new update.
Results and Impact
The update was a success, making headlines and receiving an estimated 7.5M earned media impressions across 17+ news networks and major publications in Canada and the US including Forbes, Entrepreneur and Vogue Business. As a result of the algorithm update, Pexels saw a 35% increase in LGBTQ+ photo views. And as more of these were seen organically they received over 3.5M additional LGBTQ+ photo downloads. With Pexels’ core userbase being creators, this increase in downloads will have a huge ripple effect and make an impact by showing through in journalism and marketing work.