In this interview with Lego Ventures, Thea tells us about what inspired her to start Unconventional Ventures

Ceretai is very proud to be one of the portfolio companies of Unconventional Ventures – a VC focused on women, LGBTQ, and POC-founded tech startups in the Nordics.

Read the interview here.

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The programme runs from September, 2020 until February, 2021 and supports startups with mentoring and connections to the media industry in order to soft land on new European markets.

“We are very happy and proud to be selected as one of only 19 European startups to participate in this programme. We will receive a lot of support in our European expansion and we look forward to the acceleration this will bring us,” says CEO Matilda Kong.

Read more about the MediaMotorEurope programme and selected startups here.

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The global digital event will start in the US on June 18th at 16.00 CET, and will run across the globe for 24 hours before wrapping up in Asia on June 19th.

Ceretai will be pitching in front of thousands of investors from around the world – presenting their vision and their software-as-a-service Diversity Dashboard that offers media houses an innovative way to monitor diversity and inclusion in media and entertainment content.

This important event will mark the opening of the company’s new investment round, which will close in Q3. 

CEO and co-founder of Ceretai Matilda Kong will be joining the event from Stockholm. She is excited, but also wants to nudge the participating investors to take action. 

“This really is an important opportunity for Ceretai and all other excellent founders out there – but it’s only if the investors are willing to go beyond applauding female founders, and to actually change the status quo, that this will be a success for all participants. I’m looking forward to seeing the investors invest!”

To attend the event, which is open to everyone, you can register on the following link.

Ceretai is currently working on improving the Diversity Dashboard with new diversity measures for different genders and age groups, covering both statistical representation and qualitative analysis of how people are portrayed. They are also building up a database which will be filled with diversity and equality statistics of popular movies and TV shows, to enable audiences to choose content based on their values. 

About Ceretai

Ceretai offers automated diversity and equality analysis of media and entertainment content. They have collaborated with international brands such as BBC, Forbes, Cannes Film Festival, Norddeutsche Rundfunk (Germany), and Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (The Netherlands). The company has financial support from Vinnova, the Swedish Innovation Agency, and from InnoRampUp, an innovation program from the City of Hamburg.

Through the use of machine learning algorithms, Ceretai extracts diversity data directly from the media files fast and with high accuracy. This reduces the effect of unconscious biases carried by humans, and saves companies a lot of time that is spent on manual counting today. It also allows for a deeper understanding of the produced content, and for corporates to take responsibility for sustainable and diverse content that matches the audiences’ demand on value-based media and entertainment.

Further information about Ceretai and their offers can be found at www.ceretai.com.

About WiSE24

WiSE24 is organised by the leading Silicon Valley-based startup and leadership accelerator for female entrepreneurs, Women’s Startup Lab. Supported by top influencers in the tech industry, they have gathered an active global community of over 20,000 women entrepreneurs, investors, industry experts and supporters since 2013.

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“It’s remarkable that even these short ads confirm the inequality we have seen in almost all our previous analyses – that even if women are seen on screen, it’s the men who get to have a voice.” – Matilda Kong, CEO.  

Read the full blog post here (German).

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Read more about the project, its goals, expected results and plan for implementation.

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The Oscar’s last month once again reminded us about the fact that only one woman (Kathryn Bigelow) has ever won an Oscar for best director in the Academy Awards’ 92-year history, and that this year there was only one single black actor nominated for an award. But Swedish startup Ceretai, who define themselves as a “diversity tech startup”, think it’s time for a new perspective on the film industry; namely the perspective of the audience – focussing on what is actually shown to us and which immense effect this industry has on our beliefs and behaviours.

“In the bigger perspective, the lack of diversity in media and popular culture hinders the development towards a more equal society”, explains Matilda Kong, CEO and co-founder of Ceretai. “In the Western world we consume around 10 hours of media per day, of course it is going to affect us!”

Ceretai have built a software that can run through any kind of video and uncover some uncomfortable truths about what we are watching. In this study they have complemented their automated machine learning analysis with looking at Bechdel Test scores**, comparing plot summaries on IMDb, and studying movies’ financial success – all with the aim of defining what is actually “the norm”, and if this norm is worth breaking.

“WIFT International are happy to support the work of Ceretai. The data they produce tells us the inconvenient truth which is necessary to create the change we want,” says Helene Granqvist, President of WIFT International.

The first result from the study gives a thorn in the side to the truths about profit maximisation:

• Even though movies are still heavily male dominated both behind and in front of the camera**, no financial benefit of having a male lead actor can be seen when studying the 100 movies with most cinema visits in Sweden 2012-2018. If anything, movies including a female lead outperform those with a male lead in this category of highly successful movies.

“Although this specific dataset is too small to deliver statistical significance, the overall results follow the general trend: lack of equality in the film industry that has no feasible explanation”, says Angnis Schmidt-May, Head of Insights and data scientist at Ceretai.

A result that was however significant, and also historically significant since it has never been done before, was found when analysing another set of 100 movies produced in Sweden between 1970 and 2018. It is something Ceretai call “the smile factor”:

• Women smile on average 2.2 times more than men in movies (referred to as the smile factor).
• There are movies that have a smile factor of up to 7, but only 8% of movies have a smile factor below 1, meaning that men smile more than women.
• A movie has the highest probability of financial success if its smile factor is slightly below the average of 2.2.

“What this last point actually tells us is very interesting; why do we as audiences prefer women to smile twice as much as men?” asks Matilda Kong. “It’s a hen-and-egg question – is it because we are taught to like this from the movies we see, or do we make movies that way because audiences like it? I think it’s both, and the smile factor says something about our unconscious biases as well as our movie-making. We all need to ask ourselves if we are okay with these different expectations on men and women.”

And this also ties to the most interesting result of the study – a never-before revealed correlation between breaking norms and gaining financial success. By looking at the content of these 100 movies and labeling them as normative or norm-breaking according to criteria that can be read in this blog post, Ceretai could determine that in the past five years, the financial success of movies that break norms has increased dramatically. Norm-breaking movies now make up more than half of the top performing movies in Sweden every year.

Schmidt-May: “Again, this is not statistically proven, but it indicates that we are witnessing a great upswing in popularity of movies that break norms and defy stereotypes – something that the film industry has long proclaimed that the audiences do not care about. Also, as a side note, it’s pretty funny that almost a third of the movies from 1970 onward that were labeled as ‘norm-breaking’ are adaptations of Astrid Lindgren books. Imagine what it would look like without her.”

In order to enlarge the dataset and determine the norm more accurately, Ceretai also used IMDb and Bechdel Test data. The complete findings can be seen on their web page, but what could be concluded was that even in movies with a majority of women gender equality is seriously lacking, and that passing the Bechdel test is no guarantee for non-stereotypical portrayal. For example, when analysing 8000 plot summaries on IMDb, the most common keyword used to describe movies where the four main roles are female is “mother”.

Matilda Kong summarises: “The most important finding is that the audiences are ready for a change. They are hungry for more movies questioning our normative world, the traditional narratives and stereotypical portrayal. Even though this is of course not the only factor determining the success of a movie, mapping out and understanding what we are watching is immensely important, and Ceretai is determined to keep spreading this awareness – to the film and TV industries as well as to the audiences”.

Sources:

*Bechdel Test

** Gender distribution in international movies shown in Sweden 2012-2018 (statistics from the Swedish Film Institute)

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Ceretai has been selected to receive the InnoRampUp grant of €150,000 from the city of Hamburg. The grant is handed out by IFB Innovationsstarter who supports technologically innovative startups.

“We are very proud to receive this grant from IFB Innovationsstarter. It proves to us that the interest for our technology and our business model is big in Germany, and that business experts believe in our product and our team.” says Matilda Kong, co-founder and CEO.

The grant will enable the development of the company’s Diversity Dashboard that will be offered on a subscription basis. With this software, Ceretai aims to change the media industry and what the processes look like for measuring and monitoring diversity in media content.

About InnoRampUp

InnoRampUp is a funding program implemented by IFB Innovationstarter as a subsidiary of the Hamburgische Investitions- und Förderbank. The program aims to strengthen the local startup scene and development of promising companies by supporting technologically innovative startups in Hamburg. Since the launch of the InnoRampUp program, over 80 projects have received funding. Prerequisites for startups to receive the grant are a business idea with a realistic chance for economical success, a convincing startup team and to meet the criteria for a small business (less than 50 people and annual turnover or total assets <€ 10 million).

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In Sweden the magazine was distributed as an appendix to “Veckans Affärer” and released as an online magazine here.

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ZURICH. On the 21st of August the first edition of the D:PULSE conference show took place in Zurich, Switzerland. The conference describes itself as a “boutique conference with sustainable impact”, and has its spirit and its genius from the two co-founders of the large annual DMEXCO conference in Cologne, Germany. However, D:PULSE is entering a different event path and is doing something new that other events aren’t – it is taking a completely new position when it comes to equality. For the first launch, D:PULSE teamed up with tech startup Ceretai to analyze the gender diversity of the one-day conference show.

“It’s really nice to see that a conference takes responsibility for self-monitoring their content”, says Matilda Kong, CEO and co-founder of Ceretai. “Everyone is talking about sustainability, and diversity and equality are definitely components in our communal sustainability efforts. Awareness of this is finally starting to spread and D:PULSE is setting a great example.”

The attitude of the marketing, tech and sustainability focused conference and its Executive Partner Christian Muche is that it goes without saying that equality and diversity should be on the sustainability agenda. “We have a responsibility as organizers and business network to not just take the easy road, but ask the uncomfortable questions about what we are actually portraying to conference visitors, to the entire industry, and to the rest of the world”, Muche says. In some way, that might indicate that the conference’s slogan “it’s about context, not content” is not entirely true – D:PULSE does, indeed, focus on its own content when it comes to gender diversity. “We have been very active in finding great female speakers to D:PULSE, and making sure we give them just as much space as men. This all happens behind the scenes and we are not setting nor shouting out any fake milestones – it just needs to be done.”

So what, then, did Ceretai’s analysis show? First of all, 45% of the appearances on the main stage were made by women – a good number for any conference. This included everyone on stage: moderators, panelists and keynote speakers. However, only five out of 18 sessions had female majority, compared to ten with male majority and three with equal amount men and women. And if you dig deeper into the data more valuable insights start to show: female speaking time during the day only amounted to 27.5%, and while women were overrepresented as moderators, they were greatly underrepresented as speakers and so-called Thought Leaders. 

“This just shows that we as organizers have to do better, in collaboration with the participating brands”, Muche says. ”Even though we think we are nearly equal, the data suggests otherwise. This was an aha moment for us, and I encourage other organizers to take some time for serious self-examination. Do we really know what it looks like or do we just think we do? I also encourage companies to follow our call and send more female leaders to the stages.”

So how would one go about to take Muche’s advice? One way is of course to make use of the technology available within the young but growing industry called diversity tech. This industry is focused on using technology to support us in making sustainable, unbiased and non-discriminating decisions, and to neutralize the unconscious biases that we carry. But how does it work? Matilda Kong explains: “We use machine learning algorithms to automatically identify men and women in video and audio files. This allows us to get real statistics instead of relying on our gut feeling, which is unfortunately often wrong. We can apply our technology on any video or audio file; a news show, a cinema movie, a recording of a meeting or a conference; and soon we will also be able to generate other diversity-related data such as how we portray different people, measured by which roles they have and who gets to talk about what.”

In summary, the D:PULSE conference series is demonstrating a true and sustainable effort to work with innovation and a will to pioneer the conference industry. According to Christian Muche, this is the first step towards setting the standard for diversity in conferences all over Europe and worldwide.

Get in touch:

Christian Muche, Executive Partner and co-founder, D:PULSE: [email protected]

Matilda Kong, CEO and co-founder, Ceretai: [email protected]

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