Last weekend, an elected member of parliament (Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin) went on Talk TV and said, “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of people who are basically anything other than white people.”
Let that sink in. We have reached a point in the political discourse where an elected MP says that seeing black people, Asian people, “anything other than white people” on TV makes her mad.
This, of course, led to all the usual suspects coming out to defend her, claiming that’s not what she meant, that while “the way she worded it was wrong and was ugly”, Farage didn’t believe it was racist, etc.
Her defenders pointed to recent media coverage of the Channel 4 Mirror on the Industry report, which showed (amongst many other things!) that 51 per cent of adverts feature black people and they only make up 4 per cent of the population.
Which sounds like a reasonable argument that black people are ‘over-represented’ in advertising, but rests on a basic misunderstanding of the data and a wilful misreading of what the research actually says.
So let’s have a look at the report, the history of diversity in advertising, and answer some of those points being raised.
Press reporting
Here is the Daily Mail’s: “TV adverts over-represent black people and ignore over 70’s, study finds”
Ironically, the photo they used, presumably because it featured a black person, highlights one of the glaring issues with the statistic.
When people hear “51 per cent of adverts feature black people”, they equate that to “51 per cent of people in adverts are black”, which is not the same thing at all. As beautifully highlighted in the advert in the link above.
The Curry’s advert features nine white people, two black people and one Asian person, meaning while it is one of the 51 per cent of adverts featuring a black person, they only make up 16 per cent of the people in the advert.
The article begins:
Advertisers are over-representing black people in TV commercials while pensioners and the disabled are being forgotten, research has found.
Which brings us to the second irony of using that photo. It is a still from the 2024 Channel 4 Diversity in Advertising Award-winning Curry’s advert, which focuses on the in-store experience of three customers with accessibility needs (one is deaf, one is blind, and one has an assistance dog).
So they’ve used a great example of disabled people actually getting good representation to highlight their messaging of ‘over-representation’ of black people…
The Times did something similar with Adverts over-represent black people while ignoring over-70s
They used a still from the 2021 Diversity in Advertising Award-winning advert for age representation (a TENA ad about the menopause) to try and make the point about racial diversity being high while other minorities – such as older people – were rarely featured.
Both newspapers ran with the ‘over-representation’ of black people, and used a photo of an advert containing a black or mixed-race person, to highlight it. Yet the adverts those stills came from were actually adverts praised for their representation of other groups!
The rest of the article broadly covered the findings of the Channel 4 report, which I’ll summarise for you.
The Channel 4 report
The report itself is accessible and well worth a skim if you’re interested. It finds:
- 2/3 think Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are important to them
- 2/5 are personally affected by issues relating to DEI
- Only 12 per cent actively reject DEI, while 52 per cent actively champion or support it
- 77 per cent agree that DEI is important in advertising, an increase from 72 per cent in 2023
It then goes on to cover a whole host of minority groups and look at their representation within the TV advertising industry. It covers disability, LGBTQIA+, body size, age, class, pregnancy, gender, and obviously covers skin tone, black people, and other ethnic minorities.
It is a 49-page report, and the information about the representation of black people was on page 19. That was it. There was so much more to that report, and yet that’s what the headlines took away and the only stat anyone quotes.
The report highlighted that while the representation of black people in TV ads has improved, they were far less likely to have a lead role, they were on screen less than the average character, the darker their skin tone, the less likely they were to feature, and they were much less likely to be featured as part of a family.
It went on to explain that much of the increased representation of ethnic minorities in adverts is down to the big increase in ‘montage’ style adverts, where you get a fleeting shot of lots of different types of people with no through-story. Highlighting that quantity does not necessarily equal quality.
The papers were right that the report did find under-representation of most other groups – the elderly, pregnant people, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+, working classes, etc – and more could be done for better representation of these groups.
Other reports
In 2016, Lloyds Banking Group published a report called Reflecting Modern Britain, which looked at representation across print adverts.
They looked at the history of advertising and how it reflects changes in society. In the 1960s, women were always portrayed as the housewife, mother and in the shadow of her husband, whereas in the 1970s, women started to be hyper-sexualised. Benetton was groundbreaking with their use of ethnic minorities in their adverts in the 1980s, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that the first gay man was portrayed in an advert. Disabled people were very rarely portrayed, and generally only ever in adverts about their disability.
The report found:
- Only 5.6 per cent of people in adverts were black
- 2.7 per cent were Asian
- 3.9 per cent were mixed race
- There was a lot of stereotyping – ie black people were only portrayed in certain positions such as teacher, musician or playing sports.
- Only 33 per cent of people in ads were women, and they were rarely shown in positions of power, but as mothers and homemakers or for seduction or beauty.
- Older people were rarely featured, and when they were, it was as a “white haired, technophobic, gardening, grandparent”
Lloyds did a follow-up report in 2018 – Ethnicity in advertising – which found that Black and ethnic minority representation had increased from 12 per cent to 25 per cent of the people portrayed.
They highlighted that while negative portrayals had fallen, ethnic minorities were still overwhelmingly in ‘supporting’ or cliched roles.
So why does it matter?
Advertisers
It’s important to remember that we are discussing advertising, and an advert’s job is to sell a product! And they will include whatever people, in whatever percentages, best sells their products.
And unsurprisingly, there have been studies into this subject.
In 2021, Meta published The difference diversity makes in online advertising, which found:
- 71 per cent expect brands to promote diversity
- 59 per cent prefer to buy from a brand that supports diversity and inclusion
- 54 per cent still did not feel culturally represented
- Online campaigns with more diverse representation tend to have higher ad recall
- People seem to better recall online advertising featuring characters similar to themselves.
So it makes sense for advertisers to try and portray as many different types of people, even if that doesn’t strictly mirror the makeup of the country as a whole.
A 2024 report by Unstereotype Alliance at UN Women found that brands with more inclusive advertising practices:
- sell more (3.46 per cent higher shorter-term sales and 16.26 per cent higher longer-term sales)
- have a 62 per cent higher likelihood of being a consumer’s first choice
- enjoy higher customer loyalty
- are valued more highly by consumers
- These commercial benefits of more inclusive advertising practices are found regardless of product category or geographic market.
And in another Lloyds Banking Group report, Reflecting Modern Britain, they found:
- 65 per cent said they would feel more favourable about a brand which reflected diversity in advertising
- 67 per cent said that advertisers should show more diverse aspects of society
Advertisers know that modern customers expect diversity in their advertising and prefer brands that embrace inclusion. They also know that brands with inclusive advertising practices sell more products. And that, after all, is the whole point of adverts!
The ‘logic’ of proportionality?
The claim is that only 4 per cent of the British population is black, so only 4 per cent of people in adverts should be black. But how would that work in practical terms?
Every advert should have at least 25 people in it, and only one should be black?
There should be 25 versions of each advert, one containing black characters?
Maybe advertisers should divvy up the advertising slots to ensure only 4 per cent of their characters are black across the board?
Hopefully, you can see I’m being facetious and that it is completely ludicrous, not to mention unworkable, to make the entire advertising industry exactly proportional to the population make-up.
Conclusion
Every person, every day, sees just a fraction of the adverts that are out there. If black people only featured in 4 per cent of the adverts, most people would never see any of them.
Consumers want and expect to see diversity.
Brands want to appeal to the widest audience possible.
So the best way to do this is to have characters of different races or demographics in the same advert. And to “over-represent” different minority groups.
What the Channel 4 report did highlight is how far they still have to go in representing other minority groups, such as those with disabilities, LGBTQIA+, and older people.
But let’s be honest, those same voices who claim there are “too many black people in adverts” tend to dismiss calls for better disability or age representation as ‘woke’ too.
It is really worrying how this sort of racist rhetoric is becoming normalised at the moment. And no amount of pointing to population statistics should be used to justify it.
On a media narrative note, keep an eye out for the photos a newspaper uses to highlight its stories. Is it a photo of a small boat when discussing general migration? Is it a mug shot photo for a black criminal vs a ‘family’ shot for a white criminal? What narrative are they pushing with the picture that they might not overtly say with their words?
This article was first published on Emma’s substack and is reproduced by kind permission of the author.
