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I was at a Burger King with a friend. On the wall was a large photo of a group of people enjoying burgers and fries, unrealistically staged with plates, forks, upright cartons of fries, etc. My friend then said "Look at that pointing to the group of mostly white people. They got the Asian, the black guy, ....oh look.....even got a Spanish lady in there....." There's no harm in this but I began to notice this in other advertising avenues. A few examples below:
- Every home alarm commercial depicts white males as the burglars when black males are overwhelmingly more likely to commit the crime.
- Males depicted in commercials as the "dumb" buffoon saying stupid things, being outsmarted by women and kids, proven wrong by wives and minorities, etc.
- Beer commercials almost never feature a group of guys of the same race. Whether it's tailgating, a superbowl party, etc. A black guy and sometimes an Asian is usually inserted.
- Black males strangely dressed wearing extremely conservative clothing in commercials (typically in a very suburban setting) None of my friends dress this way.
- When a commercial features 2 people and one picked the wrong product, it's never the black person.
- Drunk drivers are always white males
There are many other examples but these are a just a few. It appears that large companies today go out of their way to overly sanitize their advertising to eliminate any chance that someone out there will find something that is offensive or be "left out". Is advertising too PC or is this what is needed to appeal to the masses? Discuss
Your first and last bullet points reveal your agenda. Without citing any statistics to back it up, you imply that blacks should be depicted as burglars because of frequency, yet you are bothered by white males being depicted as drunk drivers, again, without citing statistics that suggest otherwise. So unless you cite some sources that say more blacks are burglars and drunk drivers, your post suggests a racial agenda, rather than truth in advertising.
I was at a Burger King with a friend. On the wall was a large photo of a group of people enjoying burgers and fries, unrealistically staged with plates, forks, upright cartons of fries, etc. My friend then said "Look at that pointing to the group of mostly white people. They got the Asian, the black guy, ....oh look.....even got a Spanish lady in there....." There's no harm in this but I began to notice this in other advertising avenues. A few examples below:
- Every home alarm commercial depicts white males as the burglars when black males are overwhelmingly more likely to commit the crime.
- Males depicted in commercials as the "dumb" buffoon saying stupid things, being outsmarted by women and kids, proven wrong by wives and minorities, etc.
- Beer commercials almost never feature a group of guys of the same race. Whether it's tailgating, a superbowl party, etc. A black guy and sometimes an Asian is usually inserted.
- Black males strangely dressed wearing extremely conservative clothing in commercials (typically in a very suburban setting) None of my friends dress this way.
- When a commercial features 2 people and one picked the wrong product, it's never the black person.
- Drunk drivers are always white males
There are many other examples but these are a just a few. It appears that large companies today go out of their way to overly sanitize their advertising to eliminate any chance that someone out there will find something that is offensive or be "left out". Is advertising too PC or is this what is needed to appeal to the masses? Discuss
Spanish lady? From Madrid? Or Valencia perhaps. No you probably just mean Hispanic or a latina?.
I guess that makes you English - because you speak English right?
Advertising is designed to create a sense of familiarity and an emotional attachment to a product, among potential customers. If you turned-off the sound and a product banner was not shown, how accurately would you be able to identify the product being advertised?
Advertisers are all about selling products and not offending any potential group of customers. One can often tell more about the target audience than the product - or who the advertisers are concerned about offending, because of the politically correct mixture of actors.
This is hardly a "great debate". Just another pedestrian and ill-informed rant about race again.
Tokenism in advertisement has been around for a very long time, especially since the 1960's. I can't for the life of me wonder why someone would dwell on it long enough to actually compose a post about it, but as has been noted, there appears to be some kind of agenda afoot, which a glance at the OP's posting history confirms.
If some people spent the hours, days, and years they spend obsessing about race doing something else instead, they might actually achieve something great in life. But such people seldom do. Instead they write angry posts on forums that suggest a conspiracy among advertisers to make whites (especially male whites) look stupid, dangerous, or buffoonish. Aside from achieving nothing, it really makes the poster look childish, obsessive, and out-of-touch with society.
Oh, and while this is utterly irrelevant in a thread supposedly about advertising, according to the FBI, a little over twice as many burglaries are committed by white people than by black people. So a burglar caught by a burglar alarm is more than twice as likely to be white than black.
As for drunk driving, it is more than seven times more likely the perpetrator will be a white person, not black.
This is hardly a "great debate". Just another pedestrian and ill-informed rant about race again.
Tokenism in advertisement has been around for a very long time, especially since the 1960's. I can't for the life of me wonder why someone would dwell on it long enough to actually compose a post about it, but as has been noted, there appears to be some kind of agenda afoot, which a glance at the OP's posting history confirms.
If some people spent the hours, days, and years they spend obsessing about race doing something else instead, they might actually achieve something great in life. But such people seldom do. Instead they write angry posts on forums that suggest a conspiracy among advertisers to make whites (especially male whites) look stupid, dangerous, or buffoonish. Aside from achieving nothing, it really makes the poster look childish, obsessive, and out-of-touch with society.
Oh, and while this is utterly irrelevant in a thread supposedly about advertising, according to the FBI, a little over twice as many burglaries are committed by white people than by black people. So a burglar caught by a burglar alarm is more than twice as likely to be white than black.
As for drunk driving, it is more than seven times more likely the perpetrator will be a white person, not black.
Diversity in ads doesn't bother me, but I will note that it is also this way, more and more, in television shows. One of my favorite shows is Grey's Anatomy, even though the proportion of episode storylines showing black-white couples and other-than-heterosexual main guest characters has been WAY out of proportion to the reality; and many, MANY kinds of non-mainstream sexuality are not only shown, but, imo, promoted -- and anyone who disagreed with the liberal viewpoint that the show presented was shown as stupid or ignorant. (And btw, I am not talking just talking about non-heterosexuals but about VERY promiscuous behavior, plus the fact that one of the doctors unintentionally became pregnant not just once, but TWICE. What career-oriented super-intelligent doctor wouldn't use birth control?!) Also, out of the nine main doctor characters in the first season, THREE of them were black, including the Chief of Surgery -- so 33.3% vs. the reality of 6.3%.* And for those who don't know, the show takes place in Seattle, which is now only 7.2% black. And over and over again, white women on the show have been shown to be stupid and/or shallow, although there have, admittedly, been many exceptions.
As I said, I truly do like and enjoy the show, but I really feel like the liberal viewpoint is being shoved down our throats. (And, btw, I am a moderate!)
*The reality is that of 2008 (three years after the show first aired), according to the following link, 75% of M.D.'s were white, 12.8% were Asian, 6.3% were Black, 5.5% were Hispanic, and 0.5% were American Indian/Native American. https://www.aamc.org/download/432976...igures2010.pdf
Last edited by katharsis; 06-21-2017 at 01:43 PM..
Diversity in ads doesn't bother me, but I will note that it is also this way, more and more, in television shows. One of my favorite shows is Grey's Anatomy, even though the proportion of episode storylines showing black-white couples and other-than-heterosexual main guest characters has been WAY out of proportion to the reality; and many, MANY kinds of non-mainstream sexuality are not only shown, but, imo, promoted -- and anyone who disagreed with the liberal viewpoint that the show presented was shown as stupid or ignorant. (And btw, I am not talking just talking about non-heterosexuals but about VERY promiscuous behavior, plus the fact that one of the doctors unintentionally became pregnant not just once, but TWICE. What career-oriented super-intelligent doctor wouldn't use birth control?!) Also, out of the nine main doctor characters in the first season, THREE of them were black, including the Chief of Surgery -- so 33.3% vs. the reality of 6.3%.* And for those who don't know, the show takes place in Seattle, which is now only 7.2% black. And over and over again, white women on the show have been shown to be stupid and/or shallow, although there have, admittedly, been many exceptions.
As I said, I truly do like and enjoy the show, but I really feel like the liberal viewpoint is being shoved down our throats. (And, btw, I am a moderate!)
*The reality is that of 2008 (three years after the show first aired), according to the following link, 75% of M.D.'s were white, 12.8% were Asian, 6.3% were Black, 5.5% were Hispanic, and 0.5% were American Indian/Native American. https://www.aamc.org/download/432976...igures2010.pdf
I think you are reading way too much into it. I'm surprised you can enjoy the show while giving something like this that much attention and attaching a political slant to it at that.
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