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I won't try and speak for the designer but I can imagine different don'ts for staging a situation fakely on the one hand and casting in a way that looks inauthentic on the other. I can't stress enough how makework these things are. The more categories of 'don't', the better, from the agency's point of view. I also know how these things come together, it could easily be a junior designer doing a quick web surf for images that they think look intuitively wrong for the brand, and then they try and think of various categories for why they look wrong so it looks structured and scalable and keeps clients convinced that this is not smoke and mirrors made by failed artists, but real rigorous MBA type stuff. How can we produce a lot of rules and stuff to sell the client is the guiding principle (can you tell I've had bad experiences with brand guidelines?).
I'm very aware that ads tend to try hard to 'represent' for a few reasons, and so if there are two people one will probably be non-white. The decisions are taken per piece of communication, and there are not large casts in all ads, so this has lately led to some kinds of minority over-representation (I don't know what the situation would be if all ads had a cast of thousands, enabling them to more accurately represent the actual demographic mix!).
A photo of a good looking, carefully dressed white nuclear family can easily come across as cheesy for a few reasons, especially that that is how the much mocked ads of the past looked. Agencies want to be seen as modern.
All this is fairly dumb but I think the causation is mostly due to dumb industry dynamics, with ideology part of the mix but not the whole story.
But again, the authors didn't write that the photo of the British family was cheesy or staged, they said they weren't real Londoners. In a guide where they also said (multiple times) that real Londoners were diverse. There's really no ambiguity about what they thought here.
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