Unilever is launching a campaign aimed at boosting the number of people with disabilities in its advertising production crews. 

The “Believe in Talent” initiative will place at least one person with a disability in any of the company’s productions that cost at least 100,000 euros (about $107,000). The company also created an “Inclusive Production Toolkit” in collaboration with Inclusively Made, a disability advocacy organization, to advise agencies and production companies on how to support those with disabilities—both behind and in front of the camera. 

Unilever has been piloting the “Believe in Talent” initiative for the past 18 months, said Aline Santos, the company’s chief brand officer and chief equity, diversity & inclusion officer. In that time, Unilever has incorporated creative talent with disabilities into campaigns for Hellmann’s, Australian deodorant brand Rexona and skincare brand Ponds, among others. 

For Rexona’s “Not Done Yet” campaign in 2022, which featured former Paralympian and wheelchair tennis player Dylan Alcott, the brand partnered with filmmaking company Bus Stop Films to bring a creator with a disability behind the camera and assist with campaign production. And for a July 2022 photoshoot for Ponds, the brand invited one of its interns, who is deaf, to participate in various elements of the campaign, including post-production editing.

“Advertising is a gigantic industry, but an industry that was not really fit [to accommodate] people with disabilities,” Santos told Ad Age. “We wanted to give confidence to this industry that they can indeed work with people with disabilities—and they are going to be even more successful [by doing] that.”

Unilever’s push to support creatives with disabilities is part of the company’s overarching “Act 2 Unstereotype” initiative. Unilever launched the initiative in 2021 to promote the inclusion of people from marginalized communities throughout its marketing, both as part of the company’s advertising production teams and as on-screen talent, and to challenge harmful stereotypes about members of these communities. 

Unilever decided to focus some of those efforts on people with disabilities after conducting a survey of 50 content creators with disabilities, which revealed that though 62% of those creators are interested in working in advertising, or being part of production teams for TV, radio or film, 73% of them felt excluded from the industry. 

But 44% of those creators told Unilever that increased on- and off-screen representation of people with disabilities would help encourage them to work in the production space. And through the “Believe in Talent” initiative, Unilever is seeking to bridge that gap and bring these social media creators with disabilities to the company’s advertising productions, Santos said.

“When I look on my social media—and I'm following so many people from the disability community—[these creators] are so amazing, and they have phenomenal content and skills producing that content,” she said. “And creators are an essential element of what we do in marketing today. If you’re building brands in the era of platforms, there is no way you can do it without influencers or creators.” 

In both the U.S. and the U.K., the number of people with disabilities working in production is far less than the portion of the population they represent. According to a 2021 report from the Creative Diversity Network, which Unilever cites in its Inclusive Production Toolkit, just 6% of production crew members across the U.K. are people with disabilities, despite making up 18% of the country’s total population. 

And in the U.S., where people with disabilities comprise about 26% of the population, one in three of them feel underrepresented in the media, and over half feel misrepresented, per a 2022 Nielsen study. 

“It is so important that everybody recognizes themselves in the stories that we absorb on TV, in advertisements and online,” said Henry Smith, co-founder and CEO of Taste Creative, an Australian film producer that partners with creators with disabilities, in Unilever’s Inclusive Production Toolkit. “When people with disabilit[ies] regularly do not see people that look and sound like them, they are subconsciously told that they do not fit and do not matter.”

And beyond simply including creators with disabilities on Unilever’s production teams, the company is also focusing on improving the accessibility of its production spaces for these creators by adding ramps and rearranging sets to be maneuverable for wheelchair users and hiring sign language interpreters for creators who are deaf or hard of hearing, Santos said. 

Since launching the “Believe in Talent” campaign, Unilever’s agency partner WPP has also adopted the company’s commitment to include at least one person with a disability in its advertising productions with Unilever, she said. And this representation behind the camera plays an integral role in ensuring people with disabilities are accurately and respectfully portrayed on-screen, she said. 

“Disability is often seen through the lens of tragedy and ‘inspiration porn’—showcasing people with disability doing well or achieving success ‘despite’ their disability to extract sympathy,” Unilever’s Inclusive Production Toolkit states. “Rather than focus on their disability, treat it as an incidental aspect of their lives. This can only be achieved through co-creation and collaboration with people with disabilities and getting involved in this community.”