Mixed race couples on tv ads **Mod Warning in Post #556**

Put like that the over representation of Black and Mixed seems startling. But put another way, it is less so. Blacks make up 3.3% of the population, and they are represented in 5.65% of all advertising measured. Mixed is 2.2%, 3.86%. Hardly anything like every second ad. But it is from 2014 and things would probably be different now.

It is a commercial decision both ways. They think they can sell more of a product by doing that, you can boycott the products if you find the advertising offensive. It is not something that bothers me in the slightest.

That is a splendid idea. Like I said earlier, it would create opportunities for ethnic minorities to establish a foothold in the notoriously incestuous world of Irish media.

I’m sure Sorcha Pollak will be only too happy to do the honorable thing and step aside.

So just to be clear, having a job in a newspaper translates to "gib me free stuff". Does this apply to all jobs, or all journalists, or just the ones who write stuff that raise your personal hackles.

I'm not sure if you get how journalism works. It is a profession or trade, based around writing skills. People talk to journalists, and journalists write articles. Maybe we should do away with all journalists and get people to write their own stories? I think that's called 'Facebook' for those who want it.

I don't recall too many street protests or vandalising statutes or looting of shops involved in the cancelling rebranding of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima or any other relatives, so that's a slight overreach there. Uncle Ben LITERALLY was a rebranding. The product was rebranded. It is still available, under a different brand. It was rebranded, not cancelled, regardless of how many times you want to play the victim card. They made commercial decisions to rebrand, as corporates do all the time.

You seem mightily offended (or wearily irritated perhaps) about the reasons for the rebranding - the decision to listen to their customer base and move with the times. Should they just have listened to their middle-aged white customers instead?

It's pandering to the woke agenda.

It's partly based on fear, feel they must "look good".

Apparently the woke agenda today is privately owned companies putting mixed race couples in their advertisements.

What has the world come to.

No, it's pandering to their actual customers. Ageing racists and bigots are a much smaller demographic and often not likely to even buy anything off these companies, so their opinion on this is irrelevant.

I've studied marketing, digital marketing and market research and demand for this type of inclusive advertising frequently comes from their own customers (companies and brands know this through polling, surveys, focus groups etc).

How would you tell if there are or aren't travellers in ads?

I couldn't care less. I don't look at ads.

It's not "racially" motivated. It's REVENUE motivated. Companies want to appeal to as broad a demographic as possible so they can hock their wares to more people.

It's pretty much the same schtick that's been going on since Bernays convinced women that smoking was a sign of "independence" and "freedom" and encouraged ad companies to include women in their adverts so they could sell more of their crap to them.

Maybe there's more Asians and Indians on the way? And the people losing their shit about a few blacks on their tele can have a further meltdown.

Again though, how would one know if there aren't already Polish or Uranian folk in adverts? Not everyone in an advert has a speaking role. In fact, the vast majority of people in adverts don't have speaking roles. You can't tell if someone is Polish, Ukrainian, or a traveller if they just show up on an ad and don't open their mouth.

Cool story an' all, but if you don't watch the ads then that's your contribution to the topic?

Yep. You certainly do fail to see it.

Look, Ireland's demographics are changing, whether you like it or not. So ad companies will want to target those demographics in an effort to expand their market and accrue more revenue from possible sales. Whether this will work or not is still up in the air as there's no data to show that it has or hasn't worked.

But that's what ad companies have been doing since marketing began.

Again, look up Bernays in the early part of the 20th century and you'll get a good idea of where the modern ad campaign originated from and why certain people are gathered within certain ads for products.

Irish companies ALREADY sell the majority of their goods to white Irish people. They want to expand beyond that.

This isn't hard to understand.

Your proposition before was that having highly disproportionate amount of black people in ads means selling more products to black people. But now you are saying the converse isn't true (that having less white people means selling less to white people). Which is it?

Fuck me. Really?

Go away. It's too late for this fucking nonsense.

That’s the every day reality, even in the most multicultural parts of Dublin. Having said that, advertising and the media in general has never been reflective of reality.

A particular poster has a somewhat unhealthy fixation on race and ethnicity, particularly as it pertains to anybody who is non-white in this country. It’s borderline creepy at this stage.

Are we pretending Golliwogs are not racist?

Based on your logic, car adverts in Ireland should show people stuck on the M50 for hours, snapping at their missus and threatening the kids with violence.

don't forget using their phones while driving