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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.
Part of me is concerned that by even replying to you I'm going to be feeding the troll, but other users have already touched upon this, and I feel Like someone needs to just come out and say it.
"Representation" as you are framing it here is frankly stupid. Advertisers by contrast are not stupid. Grifters and Parasites maybe, but not stupid. And they are often quite candid about their methods. It's no secret that if you want to attract the attention of straight white guys you don't use images of straight white guys. You use images of hot chicks, fast cars, sweeping vistas, and the fucking moon landings. Afterall, that is what we all want isn't it?
Sure, I feel a vague annoyance when the BBC goes and portrays medieval London as just as "diverse" as modern London but then I feel annoyed when King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (who allegedly lived in the 7th or 8th century) are portrayed as wearing over-polished 16th century jousting armor and kind of resent the fact that the filmmakers changed the antagonist ship in Master and Commander from American to French. Thing is that I also recognize that I'm the outlier for caring about this shit. Everyone else's attitude could be summed up by saying; London is London, Knights in shining armor are Knights in shining armor, and who cares who exactly is eating grapeshot so long as Britania rules the waves?
I think the question that you, the person posting under the pseudonym @I_like_big_mottes, ought to be asking is "why do you care so much?" Why is your (and apparently so many other's) sense of self and feelings of validation so wrapped up in being represented on screen. That strikes me as the far more interesting question.
Britania rules the waves? Where?
This paragraph made me imagine a version of 1984 written by Hlynka.
In 1984, the Hlynka version of Winston decides that who cares if the party falsifies history, and ignores it. He doesn't love Big Brother but doesn't care to oppose him. More than merely ignoring it, he even spends time opposing those who suspiciously care too much. It seems suspicious when Oceania rules the waves and there is in fact the threat of Eastasia that people waste time about some falsification of history here and there.
Seems to me that Winston might try to hide it, but he likes Big Brother after all. Maybe this is the version of 1984 that Hillary Clinton read: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/14/hillary-clinton-lesson-1984-trust-leaders-press/
You mean when, and the answer is "for about 300 years from the late 17th century through to early-mid 20th" and for this reason they also rule the waves in pop culture. The Pirates of the Caribbean don't live in fear of the Spanish, French, or USA, they live in fear of the British Empire and more specifically the Royal Navy.
Au contraire, the HlynkaCG version of 1984 is basically just Office Space. Rather than being horrified by the proles' lack of concern for political/corporate matters Winston/Peter embraces it, abandons any pretense of being a good-little party member/employee, finds himself a cuddly wife, and lives a vastly happier life for it.
Edit: formatting
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Nope. You talk about one specific set of ads. But there are many more contexts than that. You do advertise luxury cars with hot chicks. But not cheap used family vans. Not mortgage brokers and realtor services. If you want to sell somebody a dream of laying hot chicks - you use hot chicks. If you want to sell somebody a dream of a happy family in a comfortable van and a cheap, but surprisingly decent looking McMansion - hot chicks won't help you there. Happy family pictures would however.
I can answer that (no, I am not under that pseudonym, I am completely different person) - because I am told everywhere all the time that I should. Every company has an equity statement, keeps racial statistics, and brags about representation. Did you try to apply for a job lately? Literally every single company would ask you for racial data (they say it wouldn't be used in hiring process, but I wonder why ask then?). Every sizable company constantly brags about these things, and pays people to deal with them and then promote their actions in public. I'd be super-happy to go to my happy pre-woke world where I could just ignore it, where I did, but it's kinda hard when you are surrounded by messages that claim that's extremely important 24/7. You start noticing things.
It's not. But I still notice things. It's a blessing and a curse.
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Not the user but I can surmise that perhaps they fell under the very spell that that media is trying to sell: "Representation matters". That is the message that a certain number of these companies are paying to air, in apparently considerably bigger numbers than in 1990 or 1950.
It could be argued that the poster has in a sense gotten their own mind warped up, transmogrified, 'diversified', n-wordified, so to speak. Indeed, one could believe that white people ought to only care for high-culture such as fine literature, the sciences, academic discussion and such, not whatever garbage comes out of advertisement-streaming devices.
Therefore if one such white person were to incidentally encounter one such advertisement by pure mistake, they would not in anyway be influenced, as such allegedly trite display of propaganda would only alter the psyche of an allegedly lower type of viewer.
No white person of considerable value would ever get their sense of self and feeling of validation wrapped up in what appears on a screen. I would additionally surmise that such a fine user of the screen-mediated themotter.org as @HlynkaCG would never behave in such a manner.
In conclusion, it appears to me that when Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines starts broadcasting that white people have to go and where the machetes are, only a fool ought to notice.
First off this is a gross comparison. Second I'm not saying you out not to notice who your enemies are. I'm saying that you ought not to care. A subtle but profound difference.
This all reminds me of the movie Pleasantville.
What I most distinctively remember from it is that the kids are taught in public schools about the evils of STDs and teen pregnancy. It appears to me that condom-related sex ed was a major psy-op for the average middle-class teenager. Indeed, STDs are mostly transmitted by drug users and MSM, not the average encounter for the types of people most likely to conform to what the teachers say.
It really is propaganda, where characters of a 1950s' sitcom gain colors as they gradually go through a sped-up sexual revolution and some other modernization (not racial integration unfortunately)
We're already fully bathed in this type of propaganda, like fish in the sea, we don't even imagine that things could be different.
Noticing is usually a first step toward action. You can't notice if you don't care, and you can't take action if you don't notice. What your hypothetical enemies want you to do is not care; they want you to only get upset if you actually see more white people than usual.
This is true about GRID (also known as AIDS), but not true about other STDs. Syphilis and herpes spread quite quickly among users of heterosexual casual sex. This is because HIV has relatively low likelihood of transmission in penile-vaginal intercourse, in contrast to e.g. syphilis, which spread like wildfire around the world in 16th century in a matter of a couple of decades after the initial contact was made, despite much lower population mixing coefficient at the time.
This probably changed, but those STDs were not the target of sex ed propaganda in the 2000s. That movie is so over-the-top that I thought it was reverse-propaganda, and maybe it was, like Elysium.
Well the social order was much different then with more sex work, sailors and soldiers... It seems that syphilis went down thanks to antibiotics, not condoms or sex ed propaganda.
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By his argument, they don't have to be stupid, just ideologically comitted, which I think can easily argued. In related news: that Bud Light marketing chick has entered the chat.
When they create a norm that tells me to be super sensitive about that kind of representation regarding other people, and then openly flaunt that norm regarding me, that will look like an insult, and I don't like being insulted.
Touche' re: Bud Light marketing chick, but I also find it notable how fast and hard InBev started to backpedal once they realized it might effect their bottom line. See penultimate commercial from my break down stream.
For one InBev that kinda sorta noticed there are Nike, Target, Disney and many others that keep being relentlessly woke.
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