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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.
I think the question is whether this is kind of a Schelling point that corporations all converge on 'naturally' because of ambient incentives, like how they all use some variation of Corporate Memphis art in their publications, or if there's some thumb(s) on the scale in a more direct way, even if it is behind the scenes.
It is safe enough to conclude that this isn't the result of some purely random selection effects or a specifically meritorious process.
Honestly I see an argument for both of the options (and the truth is probably a combination of both). On the one hand you probably have some suits running numbers and noticing that commercials featuring a black male lead to .3% better sales down the line. But there's also probably some internal DEI office at the corporation which coordinates with some well-funded NGO to ensure that their ads are sufficiently multicultural in order to avoid a bad publicity blitz or something.
And between these pressures it becomes much simpler to cast nonwhite races and since there's no backlash it becomes standard practice.
An experiment would be to try watching broadcast TV in, say Mexico, or Japan, or an Arabic country and seeing if there's a similar noticeable phenomenon. (While I admit to not having tried this experiment, I will bet large sums that most of those commercials feature the ethnicity that is most common within that country).
ESG investing is that thumb. Trillions of dollars in funds are earmarked for ESG (environmental, social and governance), the better a company's score on ESG metrics, the more investment they get from these funds. These metrics mostly measure how much a company aligns with the mainstream green, globalist, liberal thought-complex (to avoid mentioning The Cathedral). The thought-complex wants to see less white men in ads, so companies will obey, to the extent they can avoid damaging their sales too much, to qualify for this investment money.
Awkward constructions like this are why I still appreciate and use the term Cathedral even though I don't actually like Moldbug's writing.
It is useful to have a term to describe this phenomenon everyone who's paying attention sees, but escapes having simple way to name or describe it. You can't just say it's one party, because it's clearly in control of multiple parties, sometimes all the major ones, in multiple countries. It's not just one single ideology because it will adopt incoherent positions to further itself. It's not a conspiracy because it's participants are for the most part unaware they're in it, and its direction is the emergent result of the process that build it rather than human will. I would call it a manifestation of the centralizing forces that build up in complex human organisations, but that's just how I explain it.
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