Recent research by Channel 4 showed that black people, despite making up 4% of the British population, are present in 50% of advertisements. Why is this?
To even ask the question is to play with fire. But let’s get our hands warm.
Essentially, I compare it to foreign dictators’ rallies, where no one can be seen to be the first person to stop clapping: brands can’t become the one to not feature black people.
Advertisers believe they can do this nowadays, whereas they couldn’t 25 or 30 years ago. Then they probably would have lost customers if they’d put lots of black people in adverts; now, not so much. The liberal-Left take on this will be: that’s a good thing – people are not as prejudiced as in the past. There’s truth in that, but I would add: it’s in part because they’re not allowed to be as prejudiced (i.e. exercise their judgement which comes from a deep, instinctive, helpful evolutionary source) as they once were. It’s become forbidden, often with the force of the law behind it; thus people self-censor.
I watch a fair bit of old TV and films. When the ad breaks arrive, it’s like being transported to another universe. Whereas the vast majority of the people I see on my old TV shows are white, it’s nearly a minority in the ads that annoyingly pop up in the middle of them.
There are so many black people on adverts you half-wonder whether the majority of the black population are employed as actors in adverts. That’s why they’re not in your office or your art gallery or your cinema or your pub – because they’re busy shooting ads!
When I was in Marrakech recently, I noticed that of the adverts I saw, the majority of people in them were actually lighter skinned than most of the people I saw there in real life. I think this is because in countries like that, the West is seen as something to aspire to, and advertising is all about – or should be all about – aspiration. When I was in Poland a few years back, it seemed that pretty much all people in ads were white; it was a similar thing in Montenegro. Yes, these are far whiter countries than modern Britain, but I suspect the difference is also because of the people working in the advertising industry. In Britain, those in ad agencies are largely Left-leaning graduates who have been educated in the ways of ‘social justice’ and thinking of their country’s history negatively: thus the casting of their adverts becomes part of their mission to do good as they see it.
I reckon there’s more to it than this, though. I’m not an expert on the exact process for how adverts are cast, but I can guess the following. There are many ad agencies; there are many companies using advertisers – decisions will be made discretely i.e. there is not some central body deciding that the nation must have, say, 10% black people, 70% white people, 20% Asian people in their commercials. Each decision, or at least a portion of casting decisions, will be made separately. The result of this will be that each separate casting decision will have its own race quota. When nearly every casting director does this, the result is what you see now: massive over-representation of Blacks, because the numbers have accumulated.
Advertisers are, in a sense, playing it safe by having multi-ethnic ads – they have done a cost-benefit analysis. Far better not to be yelled at by angry ideologues in The Guardian than disgruntle or puzzle people living in rural Dorset or the Highlands of Scotland where no one is black; a calculation has been made.
There are other reasons: much higher-end advertising is from global brands, who are even more conscious of having a smorgasbord of races; black people, through their prominence in pop music and sports like football, are seen as the norm in an entertainment or public context in a way that, say, Muslims and the Chinese are not; most ad agencies are in London, which is (astonishingly) minority white, so some of the employees possibly think everywhere is like that.
Leo McKinstry’s Mail article on the subject here is worth a look if you haven’t read it.
Of course it’s not just on television that visuals are slanted in this direction. Walk around your average town centre and there’s a strong tinge of Africa in many shop posters. Use, say, your banking app and illustrated figures will be at least half brown. On job recruitment posters for pretty much any company and it can turn into a game of ‘spot the white male’.
It all feels like a sort of protection racket. Better do this, advertising types, or we’ll punch your lights out, a shadowy, hidden Mafia seems to be threatening from the wings. It also turns into a game for the people seeing the ads: pretend not to notice, pretend it isn’t a little strange (though I imagine some people, particularly younger ones, don’t notice). As I’ve written before, we live in the Let’s Pretend era.
Why even say all this, some will be asking? Why does this bother you? Surely the only reason you’re bothered by this is that you’re a big, terrible racist? Which is how they win. It’s a trolling exercise. If you raise – not even an objection, just an observation – you’re shot down. And so most remain silent, although a few more are speaking up about it now. I’m suppose I’m speaking up because I despise fakery of any kind, and I loathe being fed false narratives. The comedian Roy Chubby Brown actually made a joke about the lack of Whites in adverts in 2023 in his Manchester show, only to be castigated by wet Telegraph theatre critic Dominic Cavendish (yes, hilariously, that did happen: The Telegraph sent a highbrow-Henry to watch one of Britain’s bluest comedians, and his resulting review was exactly as pained as you’d expect).
Anyway, I doubt any of this will change much because of the sort of people who work in the industry. Many would rather feel virtuous than maximise their clients’ sales. They have a misplaced sense of white guilt. It’s like sensitivity readers in publishing: they’re not going anywhere soon. So get used to it, I’m afraid. Perhaps just laugh at the ridiculousness. Alternatively, consider moving to Poland or Montenegro.
Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack.
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It’s absurd over representation, as you say, but very impractical with fashion models. I buy most of my clothes online or from catalogues and the models are invariably black (or they are part of a Benetton style colour palette sometimes with no blondes) and therefore impossibly tall, skinny, flat chested and obviously dark hair and dark eyes. Catwalk models essentially. It used to be (back in the last century!) that photographic models were normal height and shape and mainly white – an aspirational version of their target market. As a petite, curvy, blue-eyed blonde, I have to use a lot of discernment to judge whether a style that looks beautiful on an Amazonian, will work for me. I noticed that one brand, Me and Em, was a particularly egregious example of this and lo and behold, discovered at the last election that they donated to the Labour Party.
Thank
Ooops….logged in during writing the response to you Bettina, sorry about that. I was going to write a comment on exactly the same problem. I buy all my clothes online and find it extremely difficult to judge whether an item will look good on my very pale British skin, when all the models are black. Dark skin of any type can take vibrant colours, which, on us, just doesn’t work. They are, as in other circumstances, losing customers, because if I can’t see it on “me”, I won’t buy it.
Yes, as a 76 year old white male (apologies to all) looking for an ordinary pair of jeans it’s quite an eye-opener to realise who the majority of the target market apparently are.
I have never seen a beautiful black woman, Striking ? Yes. Attractive ? Some , with a lot of white blood, up to a point. But beautiful, no.
How can a black woman with her coke-like hair, coarse negroid features, awkward proportions and sheer blackness, compare with the delicacy, refinement, and peaches and cream complexion of an ideal English beauty? It’s no contest in every way. And this is not just a subjective assessment either, The psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa got into trouble with the Wokerati when he argued that black women were objectively less beautiful than others.
It is a fact that civilisations the world over – East Asians, such as the Geishas, those Tibetan dancers, Indians, Incas, Japanese, Ancient Egyptians and Greeks etc including Africans, have preferred lighter skins and have had potions and strategies to achieve them. It’s got nothing to do with European influence,
Well, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the saying goes, I would disagree with you about that. There are, indeed, beautiful black women – I’m thinking of both inside and outside beauty.
White women versus black women, no contest…!!
The increasing use of blacks and other non-indigenous peoples in advertising is, pure and simple, the old political correctness/wokeness at work. A black and a white person appear for an audition and it’s a dead cert who will be employed. The mantra of having to see people “who look like me” is the rationale. It’s all silly in a way but part of a wider agenda to change the culture of the UK. Like everything else these days, though, there’s nothing any member of the hoi polloi can do about it. It’s that feeling of helplessness again.