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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.
You would hardly be the first or last person to make that observation on the discrepancy between pure demographics and advertising, be it here on the Motte or elsewhere. That's not the same thing as this being false, it's obviously true for anyone who has eyes, but it's been debated ad-nauseum here.
Thankfully my diligent use of ad-block prevents such visual and auditory pollution from entering my sensoria, most of the time. That's ads themselves, regardless of content. May the day come soon when AR filters get rid of them from my perception of non-digital reality.
It's not just ads though, but also stock images, staged photographs for college admission pamphlets, product pictures on Amazon, etc. (you can always quickly identify cheap Chinese imports on Amazon: they're the only ones with product pictures showing white people using the product).
I'm sure you can probably find white people in ads for euthanasia in Canada, at least.
It's increasingly difficult to find any refuge from the daily barrage of reminders that your society is signaling it hates you and is excited for you and your kind to die off.
Huh. The first few stock images that come to mind are a mixed bag. Harold, old white guy. “Why can’t I hold all these limes,” young black guy. “Distracted boyfriend,” three white people, one of whom is male. Maybe those are just dated?
Googling “stock photo” and looking at the first page of results gives a bunch of white people, mostly solo. The first black guy is playing a saxophone—does that count as stereotyping? There are a few Middle Eastern men, a couple Indians, and a single dog.
So I’m not really seeing it.
If you had to search for it, perhaps it's because you're not paying attention when you come across it organically.
Let's try this. I'll go one-by-one to websites from Fortune 500 companies in descending order and see how white or nonwhite the photos of people on their home page are. Sound pretty objective? Alright, let's play.
You get the idea.
The effect is so strong that at some point pictures of single young white urban men in advertising have become gay-coded. Usually if I see such an ad on my commute it's trying to sell me PrEP.
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