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It would have been a healthy and normal thing if advertisers had made this decision of their own volition. The real problem here stems from that all-too-pervasive word of today: ‘perceived’, which is central to current ‘hate crime’ legislation ( see last week’s column). There’s nothing wrong about modern adverts representing modern Britain in its diversity. Benetton was famous for it in the 1990s and today Kenco and BP flaunt their ethical and socially conscientious credentials, while current adverts for Maltesers feature disabled people. And after all, there’s nothing new about advertisers getting ‘with it’ in order to sell commodities. Tokenism is their prerogative, as is virtue signalling. Still, if advertisers feel such a move is commercially wise, if they want to appeal primarily to the big conurbations, and if they want to incorporate diversity into their ‘brand’, so be it. Here they have always been middle-aged or pensioners, long settled with their partners and well beyond the age of playing the mating game or needing to proclaim who they are.Īccording to The Times report, half the advertisers said ‘they were using fewer white people because they no longer represented “modern society”‘, which seems a somewhat peculiar, and certainly metrocentric, viewpoint. I happen to live in a town that has always had a large gay population, but it’s never had a gay ‘community’. Big cities and Brighton have their gay communities, gay residential areas and Gay Pride marches, but the rest of Britain only has gay individuals. It’s a similar story for the over-representation of gay people. For example, while there are hardly any white faces in current McDonald’s adverts, there are hardly any black faces in McDonald’s in Dover or Folkestone. The Britain as represented on television adverts these days scarcely resembles the east Kent in which I live. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of Britain has.
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If you live in London, Birmingham or Manchester, where the majority of ethnic-minority Britons live, or places with sizeable or majority ethnic-minority populations, such as Leicester, Bradford, Oldham or Burnley, you may not have noticed this. That ethnic minorities are over-represented in television adverts has become obvious over the past 12 months.