KR Liu Is Advertising’s Biggest Accessibility Advocate

As Google’s head of brand accessibility, KR Liu is as influential a voice for the disabled community as you’ll find on the corporate carpet. Her injunction to marketers—the time has come to get serious about inclusion—won global attention last year with Google’s release of its Accessible Marketing Playbook, a seminal document that Liu had a big hand in creating. More than two years in the making, the playbook is a comprehensive how-to manual for marketers looking to reach historically marginalized groups, including plus-size consumers, the LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities. But Liu’s credibility also stems from a personal experience. It’s a story she will tell if you ask her, and it goes like this: In 2007, Liu was a decade into a Silicon Valley career, working in channel development for a small firm called Speck Products. Getting a foothold in tech had not been easy for a young woman—let alone one with a significant, albeit invisible, disability. Liu had lost most of her hearing at age 3. Fearing that her condition would stymie her career, Liu had kept it a secret from her colleagues. Until one day when her hearing aid quit working. The new device’s $3,500 price tag immediately put her in debt. But when the audiologist added that the hearing aid would take a week to arrive, Liu knew the jig was up: She would have to tell her CEO about her disability. Driving back to the office, Liu felt alone and frightened—yet also, strangely, relieved. “I actually hoped that moment would have happened—because it was getting to a point where, emotionally and mentally, it was weighing on me,” Liu told Adweek. “Also, there are two sides to me: the disability I was hiding, and the fact that I was a gay woman. And being a woman in tech—not easy.” As things turned out, however, the day that Liu hit bottom became a pivotal day in her career. Because her CEO—Irene Baran, herself a trailblazer in an industry dominated by tech bros—had seen Liu’s potential long before Liu did. Why Google Went ‘All In’ on Inclusive Marketing “What I impressed upon her was how very successful she was already, and she should not be questioning the value that she brought,” Baran told Adweek, the episode still vivid in her mind. “I think she just needed to be picked up off the floor.” Baran did more than that. She told Liu that her future lay beyond a single sales job—that she had a responsibility to tell her story, to advocate for her community and to push for greater disability inclusion in the corporate sector overall. A force for change In the nearly two decades since, Liu has done exactly that. She’s worked with multibillion-dollar behemoths like Verizon and shaped the conversation at SXSW. She’s served on the boards of the Consumer Technology Association and Deaf Kids Code. She’s lobbied for Sen. Elizabeth Warren to help pass the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017, which dropped the price of sound-amplifying devices and made them available without a prescription. Most recently, President Joe Biden appointed Liu to the United States Access Board, a federal agency with a mandate to improve accessibility in everything from public transit to information technology. But Liu’s most impactful work has arguably been at Google, where her influence has revealed itself in products (including the Look to Speak app), in marketing (the “Child of a Deaf Adult,” a spot that ran during last year’s Oscars) and even in the attitudes of corporate America itself. That last part has been the outgrowth of Google’s Accessible Marketing Playbook. Since CMO Lorraine Twohill made the document public last year, it’s become the protocol for brands just now awakening to a long-overlooked fact. People with disabilities make up 15% of the population but are visible in only 2% of advertising. They also represent more than $500 billion in buying power. Brands need to look internally and see where they're at in their accessibility journey … just as Google did. KR Liu As a $1.16 trillion colossus that controls more than 26% of the digital ad market and makes everything from apps to smartphones to digital-assistant devices, Google was already turning its attention toward developing inclusive technologies. “AI research, which enables new products for people with disabilities, is an important way we drive our mission forward,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience at Google I/O in 2019, some seven months before Liu took her current post. But observers credit Liu for helping to move the company’s disability-inclusion efforts along at the pace they have, and also for giving it an essential attribute: authenticity. “She’s a force,” said Jill Houghton, president and CEO of Disability:IN, a nonprofit that advocates for the disabled community in the corporate sector. “She’s a leader, right at Google, driving this change. And when we see leaders with disabilities, that really matters.” ‘It happened by mistake’ Liu’s rise to prominence is all the more striking because, as she admits, “it happened by mistake.” It was 1995 and the dot-com boom had just begun. Liu had always been interested in technology but had intended to play professional basketball—plans that ended when she broke her shooting hand. A month before high school graduation, Liu found herself in Tower Records’ book section, thumbing through a C++ language manual. Like a scene from the movies, a tech executive noticed her, gave her his business card and hired her a week later. Early on, Liu realized that she was much better at selling than she’d ever be at coding. And far from it being an impediment, Liu discovered that her disability actually gave her a competitive edge. “My disability—how I read lips and read people’s body language—made me fabulous at sales,” she said. “I could tell if the person was engaged. I even had bosses who’d have me sit in important meetings and just observe. At the end of the meeting, I would tell them, ‘The guy that was doing all the talking is not the decision-maker. This person sitting over here is.’ And I was always right.” (She was. “Her ability to read the unsaid in a situation was very high with customers,” Baran recalled. Liu could “sense when someone’s body language didn’t match the words they were saying.”) Looking within Experiences like these, which Liu has amassed over the course of multiple tech jobs, form the core of her approach. If a company aims to credibly market itself to people with disabilities, Liu counsels, people with disabilities must have a seat at the decision-making table. Liu demonstrated as much not long after Google made her head of brand accessibility in January 2020. Andraéa LaVant is a disability-focused communications consultant, and a woman of color who also uses a wheelchair. Her small firm, LaVant Consulting, found itself sitting at Google’s table, thanks to Liu. “She worked internally to make space for us,” LaVant said. “And since then, our partnership with Google has flourished.” Liu said that before a brand even thinks about disability-inclusive marketing, it must take stock of its own house first. “Brands need to look internally and see where they're at in their accessibility journey,” she said. “Do you have disabled employees working at your company? And are you relying heavily on a small group of disabled employees to help you navigate this journey? That's not fair either. Brands need to do the work internally, just as Google did.” The playbook for diversity-inclusive marketing The most vital product of that work is Google’s Inclusive Marketing Playbook. The document lays out the essentials, and it pulls no punches. (Example: “Avoid ‘inspiration porn,’ e.g., celebrating disabled people for achievements that would be considered ordinary if the person didn’t have a disability.”) Since its completion, the playbook has generated significant attention in the marketing community—not least because it’s a bona fide chunk of Google’s internal strategy that the company decided to share with anyone, competitors included. LaVant believes that the playbook has become “the standard that other companies are using.” When it comes to disability-inclusive marketing, she added, “this is how you do it.” Though the playbook arose from collaborations among many groups both internal and external (including LaVant Consulting and Disability:IN), Twohill, who took the wraps off the monograph last year at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, credits Liu for her influence on it. I used to never see a disabled person reflected in an authentic, positive way in advertising. And now look at what’s happening. KR Liu “We want to make sure that our work represents the multicultural and nuanced world we live in,” said Twohill. “And it’s not only about the work we put out, but who is behind the work. That’s why having talented people like KR at the table is so important. It is testament to KR that we have made progress here.” As one might expect of a company like Google, that progress can be measured. When Liu joined the company, less than 1% of its creative work included people with disabilities. Within a year, Liu had helped push that figure up to 6%. Influencing a shifting culture Liu’s influence on Google is visible in its advertising. After the company released its Look to Speak app—which uses eye-gaze technology to allow people with motor impairments to send and receive messages—Liu helped with the creation of “A Look Can Say a Lot,” a minutelong spot that featured Antoinette Fernandes, a woman with ALS, using the app. Pleased as she is with this spot and with the playbook, however, Liu takes particular pride in “Child of a Deaf Adult” (CODA for short), which aired during the Academy Awards in 2022. The 90-second ad featured Google senior designer Tony Lee, who has the sense of hearing, narrating a story about his parents, who don’t. As he explains: “I’ve always had one foot in the deaf world, and one in the hearing world.” 5 Brands Leading the Charge in Disability Inclusion When the pandemic made it impossible for Lee to communicate with his parents in person, Google’s Live Caption technology—which typed out the spoken parts of the videos he sent to them—bridged that divide. The Academy Awards TV spot, which also showed Lee teaching his infant son sign language, deeply affected viewers. (“Give them an Oscar for that commercial,” tweeted one.) For Liu, this piece of creative work was “the stuff I’ve been hoping to see all these years.” It wasn’t just a branding score for Google, but something Liu considers more important still—messaging with the reach and power to change minds. “Google is able to influence a shifting culture,” she said. “Others are starting to see disability as a core part of their identity, not something that they feel ashamed of or hide.” Just the beginning Is that culture changing? It appears to be—slowly. Liu was especially heartened to see CODA—not the Google ad, but the Apple-financed movie with a predominantly deaf and hard of hearing cast—take home the Best Picture Oscar last year. Equally encouraging was Justina Miles’ dynamic sign-language rendering of Rihanna’s medley during February’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. “I used to never see a disabled person reflected in an authentic, positive way in advertising,” Liu said. “And now look at what’s happening.” With historically overlooked groups garnering ever more visibility, the inclusion of people with disabilities in corporate life—and corporate marketing—would have happened sooner or later. But Google’s efforts have clearly helped accelerate the process. “We need more companies like Google,” Houghton said, “to cause people to make more change.” And Liu, LaVant believes, is a force driving the tech giant from within. “It takes a particular type of person in [a company] as large as Google to be the one that is advocating, aiming to do it in an innovative way that is considerate of multiple perspectives and experiences, and then implementing that,” LaVant said. Liu hopes that the disability inclusion work that Google and a handful of other brands have done will, over time, “create a whole new vertical … where you have marketers and brands, storytellers and strategists thinking about this space.” In a sense, she added, they don’t have a choice. “Everyone, at some point in their life, is going to experience disability. It’s just going to happen,” she said. “So we might as well be thinking about it now. I’m excited about the momentum. I think that will continue. But the brand has to keep doing the work.” This story is part of Adweek’s New Consumer digital package, which focuses on diversity in all the ways it manifests for consumers—including gender, race, age and ability—and how marketers need to reach people where they are and meet their unique needs.

New Consumer

KR Liu Used to Hide Her Disability. Now She’s Advertising’s Biggest Accessibility Advocate

How she’s helping Google—and the entire marketing industry—get serious about inclusion

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara