Our racially diverse present (and future) deserves better than tokenism
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Version 0 of 1. There is an urgent need for new ways of envisioning racial difference in every medium available to us – including in advertising. Most white Americans have a segregated social network – as recently as 2013, that was true for 75% of white people – so the representations of minorities in media (like advertising) may be white people’s main source of regular, daily exposure to minorities at all. So it’s important that the depictions of minorities to which white people are exposed are accurate, inclusive, and representative. Since 2006, the nation’s racial minority population has been over 100 million. Marketers call the soon-to-be majority-minority here “the new normal,” but it has created an extraordinary representational challenge: how does a predominantly white advertising world suddenly represent and appeal to non-white consumers? The answer is not a Spanish-speaking Chihuahua explaining “¡Yo quiero Taco Bell!” or a Confucius-like figure supervising white office drones while they microwave ramen noodles. Instead, they will increasingly feature conventionally attractive, non-white actors and models that speak standard English (when they speak at all), but are more commonly part of a predominantly white social scene – acting as literal background color. There is nothing wrong with that, in theory – except that it signals to the industry that it’s acceptable to represent the growing racial diversity in American through what advertising executives like to call “ethnic ambiguity”. Minorities featured in advertising, the sentiment goes, shouldn’t look too black or brown, or sound too unassimilated or uneducated; instead, “acceptable” diversity in advertising remains middle class, unassuming and nearly invisible by being as close to “white” as possible. The problem is that, when racial difference is represented in this way, we aren’t actually acknowledging diversity: we are homogenizing it. These diverse-but-not-too-diverse advertisements create a false promise of racially normalized society. Admittedly, thoughtfully representing diversity is not the goal of advertising –branding and sales are – nor is advertising the medium in which to solve our racial disparities. But, given the influence of advertising in our lives, isn’t it worth trying to do both? After all, even the most conservative figures estimate that the average person is exposed to over 600 ads per day, especially when live telecasts of sporting events like the don’t allow us to fast forward through them. Studies of mass communication indicate that, while mass media does not tell us what to think, it does shape our unconscious biases and how we prioritize what is important to us. They influence how we think about society and how we respond to diversity in our workplaces, college campuses, and everyday interactions. That’s why it’s important for advertisers to let go of the one-size-fits-all look of “ethnic ambiguity” and show racial and ethnic differences as they are lived by the real consumers of the movies, beer, soft drinks, fast food and insurance. For instance, a 2014 spot for Cheerios featuring a white mother, black father and their mixed race child appeals to consumers of both races (and perhaps to mixed race families beyond black and white). Unapologetically representing racial difference and featuring different varieties and accents of English would be a welcome start to bring the norms of advertising closer to the lived experience of all Americans. Better diversity will also help companies’ bottom lines – and my ethnographic research (conducted between 2009 and 2012 with more than 75 ad executives at over a dozen agencies) shows that the struggle to represent diversity for commercial profit is already on every advertising executive’s mind because advertising revenues are on the decline. For example, for a 30-second ad in the 2015 Super Bowl, NBC is charging $4.5mn, compared to FOX’s $4mn price tag last year. And while in past years ads networks have sold over 90% of their ad space by September, NBC only just approached this number in November, marking a slower pace of ad sales overall. Appeal to the existing racially- and ethnically-diverse audiences is good business – and, as those audiences grow, it’s going to be a necessary one for companies to survive. The snippets of the world we see on our small screens and in magazines may be far more stylized and carefree than the one we live in, but they do have a real bearing on how we think about society. And if if brands’ ambiguous representations of real diversity don’t ring true to the minorities they want to reach, they’ll find other advertisements – and other advertising agencies – that do. |