Selling delusions for profit?
Somewhere there’s an America that’s full of neighborhoods whereblack and white kids play softball together, where biracial familiese-mail photos online and where Asians and blacks dance in the samenightclub.
And that America is on your television.
In the idyllic world of TV commercials, Americans increasinglyare living together side by side, regardless of race. The diverseimages reflect a trend that has been quietly growing in the advertisingindustry for years: Racially mixed scenarios – families, friendships,neighborhoods and party scenes – are often used as a hip backdrop tosell products.
The ads suggest America’s ethnic communities are meshingseamlessly, bonded by a love of yogurt, lipstick and athletic gear.
Last year, Verizon used a fictional interracial family – white andHispanic – in seven commercials pushing their communications productsin an effort, according to a company spokesman, to “portray somethingthat was contemporary and realistic.”
Such commercials allow advertisers to convey an inclusive corporateimage and reach a broad ethnic range of consumers. Many applaud them asan optimistic barometer of racial progress.
But critics say such ads gloss over persistent and complicatedracial realities. Though the proportion of ethnic minorities in Americais growing, experts say, more than superficial interaction betweengroups is relatively unusual. Most Americans live and mingle withpeople from their own racial background.
Advertising, meanwhile, is creating a “carefully manufacturedracial utopia, a narrative of colorblindness” says Charles Gallagher, asociologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Only about 7 percent of marriages are interracial, according toCensus data. About 80 percent of whites live in neighborhoods in whichmore than 95 percent of their neighbors are white, and data show mostAmericans have few close friends of another race, Gallagher said.
“The lens through which people learn about other races isabsolutely through TV, not through human interaction and contact,” hesaid. “Here, we’re getting a lens of racial interaction that is farafield from reality.” Ads make it seem that race doesn’t matter, whenreal life would tell you something different, he added.
Multiracial images have long been used by advertisers, but thecurrent version exploded onto billboards and magazine ads in the late1980s, when United Colors of Bennetton ads began picturing interracialclose-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 blackwoman breastfeeding a white baby.
Since then – and particularly since data from Census 2000underscored the nation’s increasing ethnic complexity – ads that meldracial groups in less controversial ways have slowly become the norm.Interracial settings now are used as a matter-of-fact backdrop to sellwine and bath soap. In a typical ad, a white family or couple will bein the foreground talking or laughing while, in the background, blackfriends and a few Asian children may linger.
“For so long, speaking to consumers of color has been absentfrom the landscape,” said Dana Wade, president of Spike DDB, a New Yorkad agency that uses multiracial images in most of its advertising.”It’s important to correct that.”
Said Ellen Neuborne, editor of Marketing to the EmergingMajorities , an advertising industry newsletter: “This is a very smartway to approach the idea of diversity marketing.”
Commercials for Yoplait feature a multiracial group ofgirlfriends sitting around laughing and comparing the yogurt to variouswonderful activities: “This is day-at-the-spa good. This isa-weekend-with-no-boys good.”
In another, a new Olympus mp3 player/camera is promoted by awhite preteen and Asian senior citizens dancing in a gyratingpop-locking style popular with 1980s rappers. The main character is ahip, young actor of mixed Asian and Latino heritage.
Experts say such depictions are largely provoked by theadvertising industry’s penchant for offering flawless images to sellproducts.
“Often, advertising doesn’t reflect reality – everyone isbeautiful and pretty and thin, so a lot of advertising is veryunrealistic,” said Sonya Grier, a marketing professor at StanfordUniversity. “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 ninecommercials that included every major racial group, some in mixedsettings, some not. In one of its most popular, promoting designateddrivers, the black comedian Cedric the Entertainer pretended to turn asteering wheel in a nightclub, unwittingly sparking a multiracial crowdto do copycat dance moves. Every shot in the commercial pictured atleast two ethnic groups – some had four.
The ad’s racial diversity “was very much discussed” during theplanning stages, said Bob Lachky, vice president for brand marketing atAnheuser-Busch. “That’s very much the club situation in any progressiveclub in America. … The look was very, very representative of ourcustomer base.”
Lachky added that such diversity would not work in any adsetting: A commercial featuring pop star Justin Timberlake knocking ona fan’s door, he said, had an all-white cast. “It didn’t lend itself tomulticultural images, necessarily, because it was at someone’s home,”Lachky said.
Verizon might beg to differ. Last year, the company ran aseries of ad featuring three families, one black, one Latino and onewith a Latina mom and a white dad. The last family, named the Elliotts,was geared to appeal to mass market consumers, said John Bonomo, acompany spokesman. Ethnicity was never mentioned.
That was also the case in a recent Lays potato chip commercialfeaturing two black kids and two white kids, neighbors, commiseratingover a lost softball and eating potato chips.
Such depictions hardly reflect most real-life neighborhoods,said Jerome Williams, a professor of advertising and African-Americanstudies at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Despite the progress we’ve made on civil rights and otherthings,” he said, “if you look at the United States in terms of wherewe live and who our friends are and where we go to church, we live indifferent worlds.”
Assocated Press, February 22, 2005