In Friday’s exciting finale, the nation witnessed reality TV history, the first shared Traitor victory and the first female Traitor winner. It's been a nail-biting season, however the Traitors has become more than must-watch TV. It’s a pressure test that has eclipsed feelings of loyalty and deception, revealing how quickly people fall back on biases when the stakes are high and information is limited.

If you want to understand unconscious bias in Britain today, the show is a near-perfect psychological experiment. Contestants are asked to make rapid judgements about trustworthiness, often with little evidence to go on. And time and again, familiar patterns emerge. People of colour are suspected early. Neurodivergent contestants are read as irrational or emotionally distant. Accents, class markers and background are also quietly judged, with difference itself becoming a ‘red flag’.

This isn’t about blaming individuals, after all, most people on The Traitors are doing exactly what humans do under pressure. We rely on instinct, pattern recognition and past experience. The problem is that those instincts are shaped by a way-of-thinking that has wired people to associate certain behaviours, accents or appearances with risk.

Admittedly, it’s striking how closely this mirrors decision-making in media and advertising. In pitch rooms, planning sessions and casting discussions, we often operate under similar conditions: tight deadlines, incomplete data and commercial pressure. When that happens, we reach for what feels “safe” and we default to familiar audience profiles. We trust our gut and we tell ourselves we’re being authentic. But too often, what we’re really doing is reinforcing bias.

On The Traitors, a contestant can be banished for “just a feeling” or because their manner “didn’t sit right”. In advertising, whole communities are overlooked or misrepresented because they don’t fit established templates of how an audience is supposed to behave. The environment is different, but the mechanisms are the same.

DE&I representation without structural change doesn’t dismantle bias, it only disguises it. Unless ingrained systems and beliefs are challenged, unconscious bias will continue to drive decisions behind the scenes. The wider conversation therefore needs to move from intention to accountability.

I’ve seen this play out repeatedly in my career. I’ve been in rooms where decisions were made confidently yet they were completely disconnected from the realities of the audiences those campaigns were meant to reach. On the contrary, I’ve also seen work that resonated precisely because lived experience was treated as insight, not an anecdote.

Many brands genuinely want to do better. They invest in representation, talk openly about values and make public commitments to inclusion. But intention alone doesn’t prevent bias from shaping outcomes. Accountability starts much earlier, with who is in the room when decisions are made, how audiences are defined, and whether assumptions are challenged before work ever reaches a screen. By following these steps you realise how inclusive advertising is a competitive advantage rather than a nice-to-have.

In a recent pitch, the brief for agencies was to reach ethnic minority audiences. The brand had spoken to multiple agencies and heard variations of the same approach, i.e. broad segments, blanket messaging, safe assumptions. What ended up moving the needle, wasn’t a bigger media plan or a smarter slide deck, but a deeper understanding of nuance. That is how different communities consume media, what trust looks like to them, and why one-size-fits-all thinking fails.

When bias goes unchallenged, brands don’t just reinforce harmful narratives, they also waste spend, misread culture and miss growth. There is no benefit to defaulting to what feels comfortable rather than what is accurate. We need more businesses that invest in genuine understanding and ultimately build stronger connections and longer-term trust.

The latest season of The Traitors ended with winners and losers, as it always does. The bigger question is whether we’re willing to learn from what it exposes. Because if we’re uncomfortable watching bias play out on screen, we should be even more uncomfortable seeing the same dynamics quietly shape the work we put into the world.

How can we recognise the conditions under which bias flourishes and design better systems to counter it? Well that requires slowing down key decisions, diversifying influence rather than just visibility, and holding each other accountable for outcomes, not just intentions.

Only then as an industry, can we deliver better work, stronger trust and reap the rewards of true competitive advantages. After all, the real risk isn’t being called out… it’s continuing to miss the audiences we claim to be trying to reach.