The archive · PR & Stunts · Marketing decision · 2025
People Like Us answers Shakespeare's 'What's in a name?' with the 60% hiring penalty
Yasmin Ali subverts Shakespeare's line to fight UK name bias, backed by Oxford's finding that a non-British name cuts hire chances by 60%.
People Like Us
What it had to solve
In modern Britain, Oxford University research says that if a name does not sound 'British', its holder is 60% less likely to be hired. Shakespeare's question had gone largely unquestioned for 400 years, and the People Like Us campaign wanted to turn that phrase against the bias it papers over.
How it works
Four hundred years ago Shakespeare asked 'What's in a name?' and the question has gone largely unquestioned ever since. In modern Britain the answer is uncomfortable: according to Oxford University research, a name that does not sound 'British' makes its holder 60% less likely to be hired.
The People Like Us campaign took that mismatch as its creative engine. British-Bangladeshi spoken-word artist Yasmin Ali subverts the centuries-old phrase, turning Shakespeare's poetic musing into an argument about what a name costs in hiring — a weapon for equality rather than a shrug.
The work's force comes from the collision: the culture's most famous line about names meets the statistic about what names actually do. The artist's own name is the proof, and the verse the audience already knows does the setup.
Why it lands
- Shakespeare's line is the culture's own text, so subverting it makes name bias feel like a betrayal of something everyone already believes.
- The Oxford statistic turns a poetic question into a measurable injustice, giving the poem a factual spine.
- A British-Bangladeshi artist performs the rebuttal, so the speaker is the person the bias actually penalises.
- The title line itself is the takeaway, which lets the idea travel as a phrase.
What it did
The campaign gave an entrenched bias a line of culture to argue against — the 400-year-old phrase now carries the 60% statistic — and the work is preserved in the D&AD awards archive.
What you can take
To attack an entrenched bias, borrow the culture's own beloved line and let the people it hurts answer it: familiar words do the setup, so the rebuttal lands as a discovery instead of a lecture.
Since then
The D&AD archive page credits People Like Us as client and Worth Your While as entrant and advertising agency, with Yasmin Ali as the artist. The film gives the campaign a repeatable cultural hook: every future fight over names and bias can answer the same Shakespearean question.
Sources
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