Diversity in advertising not reflected in real life

Somewhere there's an America that's full of neighborhoods where black
and white kids play softball together, where biracial families e-mail
photos online and where Asians and blacks dance in the same nightclub.

And that America is on your television.

In the idyllic world of TV commercials, Americans increasingly are
living together side by side, regardless of race. The diverse images
reflect a trend that has been quietly growing in the advertising
industry for years: Racially mixed scenarios - families, friendships,
neighborhoods and party scenes - are often used as a hip backdrop to
sell products.

The ads suggest America's ethnic communities are meshing seamlessly,
bonded by a love of yogurt, lipstick and athletic gear. Last year,
Verizon used a fictional interracial family - white and Hispanic - in
seven commercials pushing their communications products in an effort,
according to a company spokesman, to "portray something that was
contemporary and realistic."

Such commercials allow advertisers to convey an inclusive corporate
image and reach a broad ethnic range of consumers. Many applaud them
as an optimistic barometer of racial progress.

But critics say such ads gloss over persistent and complicated racial
realities. Though the proportion of ethnic minorities in America is
growing, experts say, more than superficial interaction between groups
is relatively unusual. Most Americans live and mingle with people from
their own racial background.

Advertising, meanwhile, is creating a "carefully manufactured racial
utopia, a narrative of colorblindness" says Charles Gallagher, a
sociologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Only about 7 percent of marriages are interracial, according to Census
data. About 80 percent of whites live in neighborhoods in which more
than 95 percent of their neighbors are white, and data show most
Americans have few close friends of another race, Gallagher said.

"The lens through which people learn about other races is absolutely
through TV, not through human interaction and contact," he said.
"Here, we're getting a lens of racial interaction that is far afield
from reality." Ads make it seem that race doesn't matter, when real
life would tell you something different, he added.

Multiracial images have long been used by advertisers, but the current
version exploded onto billboards and magazine ads in the late 1980s,
when United Colors of Bennetton ads began picturing interracial close-
ups such as a white woman and black woman hugging an Asian baby. Some
protested when, in 1989, the company ran a picture of a black woman
breastfeeding a white baby.

Since then - and particularly since data from Census 2000 underscored
the nation's increasing ethnic complexity - ads that meld racial
groups in less controversial ways have slowly become the norm.
Interracial settings now are used as a matter-of-fact backdrop to sell
wine and bath soap. In a typical ad, a white family or couple will be
in the foreground talking or laughing while, in the background, black
friends and a few Asian children may linger.

"For so long, speaking to consumers of color has been absent from the
landscape," said Dana Wade, president of Spike DDB, a New York ad
agency that uses multiracial images in most of its advertising. "It's
important to correct that."

Said Ellen Neuborne, editor of Marketing to the Emerging Majorities ,
an advertising industry newsletter: "This is a very smart way to
approach the idea of diversity marketing."

Commercials for Yoplait feature a multiracial group of girlfriends
sitting around laughing and comparing the yogurt to various wonderful
activities: "This is day-at-the-spa good. This is a-weekend-with-no-
boys good."

In another, a new Olympus mp3 player/camera is promoted by a white
preteen and Asian senior citizens dancing in a gyrating pop-locking
style popular with 1980s rappers. The main character is a hip, young
actor of mixed Asian and Latino heritage.

Experts say such depictions are largely provoked by the advertising
industry's penchant for offering flawless images to sell products.

"Often, advertising doesn't reflect reality - everyone is beautiful
and pretty and thin, so a lot of advertising is very unrealistic,"
said Sonya Grier, a marketing professor at Stanford University. "It's
always been something that reflects our aspirations, what we can be."

Today, she added, "multiculturalism is socially desirable."

During the Super Bowl, beer maker Anheuser-Busch Cos. ran nine
commercials that included every major racial group, some in mixed
settings, some not. In one of its most popular, promoting designated
drivers, the black comedian Cedric the Entertainer pretended to turn a
steering wheel in a nightclub, unwittingly sparking a multiracial
crowd to do copycat dance moves. Every shot in the commercial pictured
at least two ethnic groups - some had four.

The ad's racial diversity "was very much discussed" during the
planning stages, said Bob Lachky, vice president for brand marketing
at Anheuser-Busch. "That's very much the club situation in any
progressive club in America. ... The look was very, very
representative of our customer base."

Lachky added that such diversity would not work in any ad setting: A
commercial featuring pop star Justin Timberlake knocking on a fan's
door, he said, had an all-white cast. "It didn't lend itself to
multicultural images, necessarily, because it was at someone's home,"
Lachky said.

Verizon might beg to differ. Last year, the company ran a series of ad
featuring three families, one black, one Latino and one with a Latina
mom and a white dad. The last family, named the Elliotts, was geared
to appeal to mass market consumers, said John Bonomo, a company
spokesman. Ethnicity was never mentioned.

That was also the case in a recent Lays potato chip commercial
featuring two black kids and two white kids, neighbors, commiserating
over a lost softball and eating potato chips.

Such depictions hardly reflect most real-life neighborhoods, said
Jerome Williams, a professor of advertising and African-American
studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Despite the progress we've made on civil rights and other things," he
said, "if you look at the United States in terms of where we live and
who our friends are and where we go to church, we live in different
worlds."


http://www.aef.com/industry/news/data/2005/3085
www.bnp.org.uk