COLOR BLIND
Here. There. Diversity is Everywhere.
If you were on social media last week, more than likely you saw the news that Volkswagen made a major faux pas by posting a controversial spot for their new Golf 8 on their official Instagram page. The ad featured a large white hand first pushing, then flicking away a black man who was approaching the vehicle. With the flick of a finger, the would-be driver is hurtled into a café named ‘Petit Colon’, whose name denotes colonialism. Adding insult to injury, letters that appear on the screen briefly spell out a racial slur in German.
The company, which has experience dealing with bad PR (they are the carmaker that admitted to cheating diesel admissions tests), was quick to apologize. In a statement from Jürgen Stackman, head of sales and marketing and Elke Heitmüller, the brand’s group head of diversity, Volkswagen said, “We understand the public outrage at this because we’re outraged, too.” The company, whose roots date back to the Nazi era when they used slave labor, including Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen to build their cars, went on to say, “The ad is an insult to every decent person.”
Volkswagen isn’t the first marketer that, in an effort to be more inclusive and diverse, actually set themselves back. Remember Pepsi’s disastrous 2017 Kendall Jenner spot that critics claimed co-opted and trivialized the Black Lives Matter movement? You know, the ad that prompted Martin Luther King’s daughter, Bernice, to Tweet “If only Daddy would have known about the power of Pepsi.” In the spot, after shoving her blonde wig into the hands of an African American assistant, Ms. Jenner, abandons a photo shoot to join a protest march, and winds up breaking through the crowd to make peace with the police by offering the cutest cop a Pepsi. The company’s initial response was to defend the spot, but as criticism grew, they publicly apologized, admitting that “Clearly we missed the mark.”
It wasn’t the first time that a Pepsi brand found itself in hot, race-driven water. In what has been called the most racist commercial ever, a 2013 ad for Mountain Dew made fun of racial stereotypes while making light of violence towards women. Directed by Tyler the Creator, the spot featured Felicia, a talking goat that becomes obsessed with the soft drink and winds up in a police lineup of all black men.
Commenting on these types of marketing missteps, Steve Stamstad, Senior Vice President Corporate Marketing and Communications at Scientific Games recently told me, “That’s what can happen when brands are trying to be so edgy that they get tasteless.”
As these embarrassing misses indicate, the successful representation of diverse characters in advertising is not as simple as merely checking a box. A 2019 study by Heat, a Deloitte-owned agency, showed that brands that successfully illustrate diversity through the incorporation of three-dimensional characters rather than cultural stereotypes are the ones experiencing a lift in public perception and stock price.
As summarized in Fast Company, the study, which looked at 50 brands from the top 200 media spenders across 8 industries, found that 94% of the brand ads had at least one occurrence of a woman in a primary role, 57% of which were in positions of power, but even then, half of those roles featured some stereotypical element such as empathetic mom, devoted wife or boy-crazy girl.
“And that’s probably not the kind of diversity you want to talk about so you have to be careful,” Mr. Stamstad adds. Prior to joining the Las Vegas-based firm, Stamstad held senior marketing positions at Disney, Electronic Arts and Expedia. “The types of companies I’ve worked for felt they had a responsibility to look at themselves and see the diversity in their own workforces, which then became a natural extension to the brand.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Efren Gonzalez, Executive Director of Ogilvy Los Angeles, who told me, “It starts with the diversity of the workforce. One of our clients is a medical school whose mantra is to have a diverse faculty and they want the students they attract to be just as diverse. By default, the advertising we’re creating for them is a mirror of who they are and who they want to bring into their school.”.
Categories such as retail, apparel, healthcare and food are perceived to show the most diversity in their advertising, but as reported in The Fashion Spot, upon evaluating 192 fashion print ads that ran in the Fall of 2018, only 34.5% of the 530 models featured were non-white. While low, that is an improvement over prior years. Of the top 10 models who were featured in Fall 2018 ad campaigns, 2 were non-white. Plus size models continue to see a steady decline, hitting a record low in 2018. Transgender and non-binary models like Ariel Nicholson Murtagh and Teddy Quinlivan represented only 1.1% of models featured in print ads. When it comes to more mature models, 40-something Amber Valletta tied for the most cast model alongside 24-year-old Rianne van Rompaey.
Although diversity in advertising is in vogue, it’s not a new phenomenon. In fact, the first commercial to feature a gay couple was in 1994 when IKEA introduced their Kitchen Table spot. It took another 15 years before the first interracial couple appeared as part of Philadelphia Cream Cheese’s “Spread a Little Joy” campaign. As groundbreaking as that was, the mixed couple shown sharing bagels and cream cheese in bed weren’t wearing wedding rings. We didn’t see an interracial marriage in advertising until Cheerios broke the colorblind glass ceiling in 2013. Their spot, featuring a white mother, biracial daughter and black father produced so much backlash that the brand asked YouTube to disable the comments section. At the time, attorney, former prosecutor and television personality Star Jones described social media as “The new Ku Klux Klan white hood, which allows you to be anonymous and to say the kind of things you would never say to a person’s face.” Mr. Stamstad concurs, “Social platforms can amplify some very small voices to the national level, beyond what was ever possible in decades past.”
You might think that we’ve come a long way since a commercial showing a little girl covering her daddy’s chest with hearty healthy Cheerios would spark such an uproar, but think again. According to a 2019 study conducted by Adobe, while 61% of Americans think diversity in advertising is important, up to 120 million people in the US feel they do not see themselves portrayed in ads. African Americans, Latin/Hispanics, and Asians make up nearly 37% percent of the population, yet these groups believe they are the least represented in advertising.
Which begs the question, what is fair representation? Appearing on the Today show in 2013 to discuss the blowback to the groundbreaking Cheerios spot, Donnie Deutsch, Chairman Emeritus of Deutsch Inc., one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, said, “If in reality 1% of this country is interracial couples, that’s probably what the representation should be.” Fast forward to 2018 when the Census Bureau determined that 10.2% of married couple households were interracial. One would assume that that number is even higher today, and while there certainly appears to be a proliferation of interracial couples and biracial people in advertising, I have been unable to find a definitive number of their collective representations.
One organization that has been blazing a diversified trail since World War II is the Ad Council, whose mission is to raise awareness of issues that affect the public at large. While the breadth of their campaigns are too numerous to mention, the ones that focus on diversity have included ‘Women in War Jobs’, The United Negro College Fund’s ‘A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste’ and the ‘Love Has No Labels’ campaign, which has been viewed more than 370 million times and whose ‘Kiss Cam’ spot delighted audiences with its unexpected twist on unbiased love. That campaign’s award-winning ‘Skeleton’ spot was the first public service announcement to be honored with an Emmy for Outstanding Commercial. According to Heidi Arthur, the Ad Council’s Chief Campaign Development Officer, we can expect to see a major new campaign in late June that will shine a light on diversity issues born of the COVID19 pandemic.
The Ad Council isn’t the only organization making diversity news. Just this week, Procter & Gamble and GLAAD (The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) released the findings of a new study on LGBTQ Inclusion in Advertising and Media. The findings reveal that non-LGBTQ Americans who had been exposed to LGBTQ people in media were more likely to accept them and be supportive of LGBTQ issues.
Not only are respondents who have been exposed to LGBTQ people in the media more accepting of gays and lesbians than people who were not exposed (48% vs 35%), respondents look favorably upon companies who include LGBTQ people in their ads. 86% of them believe it reflects the company’s support of LGBTQ rights.
As Steve Stamstad noted, “Research shows that when an audience recognizes themselves, they’re more likely to respond and in a favorable way, with trust and loyalty.”
Looking to the future, in a 2019 Forbes interview, Moshe Mosbacher, CEO of Tube Science, the largest producer of ads on paid social media, speculated that there were two possible scenarios. The first is a world where skippable ads become the norm and as a result, the ads will be more content driven and diverse. The second is that marketing reverts to who can spend the most to reach the broadest audiences.
When asked if diversity is just a passing phase, Mr. Gonzalez predicts that it is here to stay. “With the majority of paid advertising targeted to Adults 18-49, we’re not going to see it go back to the way it was. That’s the world that demographic lives in. If anything, we’re going to see more of it.”
Amen.
