Amid Brands' Vows to Champion Diversity, Black Consumers Spot a Hole in America's Advertising
Showing diversity in ads can also influence purchasing considerations, according to Adobe Inc.’s 2019 Diversity in Advertising study, which found that almost one-third of consumers overall and 50 percent of LGBTQ+ and Black consumers said they are more likely to purchase from a brand if they see diversity in its ads.
Part of the reason ads have not equally represented Black consumers has to do with the traditional demographic marketing model that targets potential customers based on factors such as race, age and income, said Linda Ong, the chief culture officer at Civic Entertainment Group, a marketing services firm that works with clients including HBO, Airbnb Inc. and Facebook Inc.
Targeting by race can lead to stereotyping in ads, Ong said, because the process assumes the most important thing that Black people have in common is their ethnicity.
“There has been a lot of movement in the past couple of years to move toward more psychographic and different kinds of models,” such as targeting fans of the same show, she said. “All Black people are not alike, so the idea that they buy things based on race is just sort of faulty from the premise.”
But while the ad industry is working to be more inclusive in targeting and content creation, even among ads that show racially diverse groups of people, Ong said marketers often treat it as checking a box when casting Black actors. For some companies that might see representation as a requirement to fulfill in order to avoid backlash, they tend to cast light-skinned or biracial people, Ong said.
“We don’t see a lot of dark-skinned black people represented in media, and certainly not in advertising,” she said.
Even well-meaning brands that want to “dip their toes” into diversity gravitate toward showing biracial couples as opposed to exclusively Black families, Ong said. That step is one in the right direction, but Ong said brands need to cast actors with a wider range of skin tones to more fully represent the Black community.
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