Woke over-representation or a complex reflection of British culture?

Opinion

The Daily Mail’s ire turned on the advertising industry recently, claiming that black people are over-represented in British ads. What lies behind “the woke fantasies of ad-land?”

Sometimes the Daily Mail seems like the journalistic equivalent of a drunk in a bar lashing out at random in search of new enemies to punch.

This time round, the random blow has fallen on the advertising industry, and the shocking information that this notoriously “woke” industry has been responsible for putting out ads in which black people are represented in 50% of the top 500 ads across two fortnight-long periods.

This is despite the fact that black people account for only 4% of the population of England and Wales.

What’s more, this seems to be an accelerating trend because in 2019, only 37% of ads featured black people.

Why, asked the Mail, are so many adverts now more interested in diversity than in the reality of British life?

Politically correct ad agendas

As the article’s author Leo McKinstry argued, once upon a time commercials used to concentrate on selling products, and produced ads such as the “Papa and Nicole” series that turned the Renault Clio into a best seller, or “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” from the days when tobacco advertising was legal.

Now, all that is being replaced by advertising reflecting either a fear of criticism or, at worst, an impulse for social engineering.

“Dripping with moral earnestness, so much television advertising is now about following a politically correct agenda, not least when it comes to the choice of who should appear on screen,” the article claims.

How could such a thing have happened, and what lies behind “the woke fantasies of ad-land?”

As you would expect, the Daily Mail has, from its own perspective, its own politically correct answer.

Labour is now the party of the professional classes, such as advertising professionals, rather than workers, and apparently, according to one study, 68.5% of the advertising industry voted Labour or Green in the last election.

The Liberal Democrats were supported by 13.5% and just 4.8% backed the Conservatives.

If that is not reason enough to condemn an industry.

Distorted ideas from a data-driven industry

The other charge against the ad industry is that they all live in London, and because half the population of the capital is either black or Asian, advertising executives will “inevitably” have distorted ideas about the size of the non-white population of the UK.

This is a curious argument that an analytical and data-driven industry should be unaware of how many people of black and Asian origin there are in the UK. Can they be so casually wrong about some of the basic numbers that guide their campaigns?

On to another swing at the ad industry, which allegedly doesn’t understand how “utterly unrepresentative” London is of the country as a whole, “just like its adverts.”

This time, the line of attack against “the virtue-signalling” of ad industry leaders is to condemn them for the hypocrisy of not extending the same pious devotion to diversity to their employees who work behind the camera. Non-whites occupy just 11% of executive positions in the industry. 

The accusations are serious because, according to the Daily Mail, growing numbers of people are being airbrushed out of their own national story, resulting in resentment.

It leads to the conclusion, courtesy of an unnamed writer of a letter to the Daily Mail: “The ethnic mix is totally disproportionate to that of our actual population and so woke in content, that the message is lost.”

If that were true – that the message is being lost – that really would be a serious charge to level at the industry.

The Mirror of the Industry report

Readers of the Daily Mail article would likely find it difficult to determine that the apparent source of much of the material in its feature came from ‘Mirror of the Industry’, the sixth annual report produced by Channel 4 on how representative adverts are of the British population as a whole. 

The press release about the ‘Mirror of the Industry’ findings opens by saying that 77% of people agree that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are essential in advertising.

But there are severe anomalies. Pregnant women appear in just 0.1% of UK ads, while the over 70s are nearly as invisible – less than 2% – with LGBTQIA+ individuals appearing in only 2% of advertisements while representing 3.2% in society.

The disabled barely make it either. 

Tellingly, the report notes that despite perceived improvements on some minority groups, appearances were often tied to “limiting portrayals.”

According to Channel 4, more attention should be given to the power of storytelling through ad formats. The rise of montage-style ads requires a closer look.

While montage-style ads allow for the appearance of more people, individual characters tend to receive less screen time, and 87% of tokenistic portrayals occur in this style of ad.

This highlights, according to the study, the continuing challenge of maintaining authenticity and quality storytelling with the format “so that inclusion “doesn’t come across as a tick-box intentionally built into the exercise.”

Maybe we are getting closer to an explanation of why black people appear in 50% of ads, what it might mean, and why black and Asian groups still complain about being under-represented in advertising.

Another clue came in how the same research was reported by Marketing Week.

“Despite representation across UK ads remaining largely unchanged since 2019, inclusive campaigns are linked to improved brand perceptions and long-and short-term sales uplifts,” the marketing magazine concluded.

It seems that the hopelessly woke, endlessly virtue-signalling caricature of the advertising industry of the Daily Mail’s imagination may not be so daft after all. 

The Times’ report of the research was much more measured and explanatory.

The paper noted that the proportion of black portrayals had increased from 37% to 51% around the time of the Black Lives Matter campaign in 2020 and had remained stable since.

Moreover, Marcus Ryder, chief executive of The Film and ITV Charity, told the paper that if black people were over-indexing, it reflected the fact that popular culture is dominated by African Americans who are often seen as sexy or fashionable.

Ryder explained that the survey also revealed an element of “colourism” where lighter-skinned black people featured more frequently and darker-skinned actors were more likely to be male and working class.

According to Ryder, greater diversity among advertising bosses would result in more “authentic” representation of Britain in advertising.

So there’s a lot more going on under the bonnet than in the Daily Mail’s view of the advertising world – but by now it will have trundled its echo-chamber off down the road in search of more woke, virtue-signalling targets to attack. 

Quality representation in ads boosts loyalty and short-term sales

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.