Heetch, the Uber competitor “born in la banlieue, for la banlieue” (the suburbs area around Paris), made its brand mission to help this region’s inhabitants fight stereotypes (poverty, violence, drugs…).

In 2023, an unexpected threat supporting clichés appeared: AI. We noticed that on Midjourney, adding “la banlieue” to any prompt turns the image generated into a real nightmare. So, we had to act to fix this bias. The only way to fix Midjourney was to provide them a corrective database of real pictures of la Banlieue, to be added to their dataset. We created one made of thousands of real pictures of la banlieue and sent it online, but Midjourney didn’t notice, and never answered our messages.

That led to our objective: how to get Midjourney’s attention, even though they are based in California, and probably never heard of la banlieue, its inhabitants, and Heetch?

After we identified the banlieue bias on Midjourney, we knew that highlighting and fixing it would help us grab a lot of attention. But how to fix an AI managed by people who probably didn’t even know what la banlieue is or who we are?

The only way to fix Midjourney was to provide their (only!) 11 employees a corrective database of real pictures of la Banlieue. We created and sent it online, but Midjourney didn’t notice. So, we made it personal, by turning our database into 50 000 postcards ready to be sent, available everywhere in la banlieue, so that its 12,5 million inhabitants could directly convince all 11 Midjourney employees. Introducing Greetings from la banlieue: the protest that made 12,5 million banlieue inhabitants convince Midjourney employees to fix the banlieue bias… by sending them postcards.

Our strategy came while we tried to get Midjourney’s employees’ attention online. After posting our corrective database on Discord, contacting them through social media and trying to reach them through their contact email, without a single response, we went on their website that confirmed what we found on LinkedIn: Midjourney only had (at the time of the campaign, November 2023) 11 employees. So instead of reaching the company, we went for the individuals.

We obviously couldn’t send people from la banlieue to talk to Midjourney employees to ask them to correct their bias. But we could send… postcards. So, we prepared thousands of them, 50 000 to be precise, and put them everywhere in la banlieue, so that real banlieue inhabitants could send their best arguments. Our strategy: mobilize 12.5 million inhabitants to influence and convince 11 Midjourney employees.

The first step was to transform the corrective database of thousands of pictures into more than 50 different postcards designs, each based on a negative prompt with “la banlieue” that needed to be corrected.

We then printed 50 000 of these cards (on both recycled and recyclable paper) and made them available for free, pre-filled with the 11 Midjourney employees' names and the company’s address, with a link to our database on the back. The cards were distributed through free partnerships with local shops, bars, restaurants, laundromats, community hubs, sports grounds, as well as in Heetch cars.

We announced our initiative by presenting our starting point (the identified bias) and our solution (the postcards) in a video posted online and sent to journalists. Our cards were signed and collected 3 weeks later, before we sent them to Midjourney HQ in California, waiting for an answer.

Our protest went viral in France, generating more than 120 articles, and was talked about on national TV organically.

The initial video gathered more than 300 000 organic views in 24 hours, leading people to post content on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter for a cumulated earned media value of 4,5 million euros, without media investment.

Over 50 000 postcards were sent to all 11 Midjourney employees, convincing them to add our corrective database to their dataset, a world’s first for data provided by a third party. From Midjourney V6, the banlieue bias has been fixed in 9 out of 10 prompts using “la banlieue”.

This announcement offered us a second round of PR articles, as journalists couldn’t believe what people from la banlieue managed to achieve thanks to Heetch. Overall, brand preference increased by 22% thanks to the campaign (Source YouGov, Jan. 2024).