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For a few reasons, I’ve found myself consuming more ad-supported video lately, both traditional broadcast-style television and ad-supported streaming. I work in an advertising-adjacent industry, so I try to look at the commercials with a more critical eye. And there’s one advertising trend that I can’t seem to escape:
White men don’t exist.
This is not to say that white men are somewhat underrepresented, that despite being 31% of the US population, they’re only 15% of those being cast in ads, or something along those lines. This is to say that there are literally no white men in TV commercials. You can watch ad-supported TV for hours and not see a single one. For a while I noticed that white men were allowed to be shown, but only if there was a non-white, non-male onscreen with them. But more recently the trend has been to simply not show them at all.
I’d love for someone to try and replicate this - watch TV for 2-3 hours and count how many seconds of ad time a white male is onscreen, and if he’s shown by himself or not.
There are a few exceptions to this rule, of course: white male celebrities can be onscreen by themselves; no one has a problem with Tom Brady or Jon Travolta. And in that same vein, an ad for a particular movie or TV show will obviously show clips from the show or movie, where the rules for ads don’t apply.
This leads me to one of two conclusions:
Representation doesn’t really matter. “Representation Matters” is something we hear quite often, but the revealed preference of advertisers for not casting white men in their ads shows they know it to be untrue. While they’re happy to parrot “Representation Matters,” they have all the actual data at their fingertips. White men buy trucks and big macs and technology, so if representation actually mattered, advertisers would include them in their ads.
Representation does matter, but those making the decisions are so ideologically committed that they’re willing to hurt their own bottom line in order to “do the right thing.” They’re so committed to their ideals that they’re willing to depress their own effectiveness by more than 30%. And they do so with no guarantee that their rival agency is going to follow the same set of rules, potentially putting them out of business.
Applying this realization to the broader culture war, I’ve often been skeptical of the idea of a distributed conspiracy. Large conspiracies like faking the moon landing would require so many people to be in on it as to be impossible to maintain. So concepts like “The Cathedral” or “The Deep State” have always elicited some amount of skepticism from me.
And yet, here we have a distributed conspiracy in action! Thousands of ad agencies, absent a clear directive or government regulation, have all landed on the exact rule, and one that would on its face appear to be very limiting.
Except it's not this straightforward, for two reasons. First, try proving that these decisions are actually hurting the bottom line. As the old quote attributed to various famous businessmen goes: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Advertising is anything but an exact science, and business outcomes are subject to many hard-to-disentangle factors. So how would one convince bosses or coworkers that this isn't the way to get more business?
Secondly, the interests and incentives of an institution are not the interests and incentives of the people within it. As I've seen it put elsewhere (particularly in discussions of the police, but also other fields), the first and highest job duty of any employee is not what it says on their job description, it's to make the boss happy. Of course, the usual way one does so is by performing the specific tasks for which one was hired, but those are ultimately just means to that end. If your boss insists on something being done a particular way, a particular way that's stupid and costs the business money, and instead you do it a different way that saves the business money, how do you suppose it will impact your continued employment if the boss finds out?
I've seen multiple people point out with respect to the whole Bud Light thing, that while going with Mulvaney may not have been a good choice for the business as a whole, it was probably the best choice for the advertising people who originally recommended that course with regards to their future employment opportunities elsewhere within the advertising industry, particularly as compared to the opposite strategy. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" and all that.
So nobody need actually go "I'm doing this no matter how much money it costs me!" They need only have uncertainty as to what will or won't cost the business more customers, combined with a solid understanding of what best suits their own personal, long-term job interests independent of a particular company's interests.
Advertising is a subject , which, like nutrition advice, no one really seems to know any anything, or nothing is definitive or set in stone. Why does McDonald's advertise so much when everyone is already aware it exists? But Facebook never does? I dunno. Companies advertise to create demand and awareness for the product. this seems obvious. but also to send a message, which can explain ads which lack any sort of call to action or product.
Yeah, that was my point #1. Since you can't prove which ads cause what, it makes the whole industry somewhat insulated from immediate "hard contact with reality" feedback, leading to field-wide dominance of "vibes" and the primary incentives being personal rather than institutional.
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