Advertising Age reported the ANA extended its SeeHer/#WriteHerRight heat shield to integrate Latinas, creating a guide to improve Latina representation in marketing and entertainment. The new edition is a multicultural muchacha to the Black women’s guide produced earlier this year. It’s highly unlikely that either set of instructions will improve racial and ethnic female representation in Adland. But expect an Asian version to join the girlfriend guide get-together soon—and maybe a single-page flyer for Native American women.
New Guide Aims To Improve Latina Media Representation
NBCUniversal, Telemundo and SeeHer team up to produce Latina character guide
By Sydney Gold
NBCUniversal and Telemudo have partnered with the Association of National Advertisers’ SeeHer initiative to release a guide aimed at improving Latina representation in marketing and entertainment.
“Latina Characters: Authentic Representation and Storytelling Guide” will be introduced Tuesday at the 2021 ANA Multicultural Marketing and Diversity Conference. It offers users a series of guiding questions in scripting Latina characters, and is the latest push in the #WriteHerRight campaign.
Some of the questions include: Are there any Latina heroines? Have the artists portraying the Latina characters been invited to share their own experiences, in their own words?
“Latinas are integral to the fabric of the American story, so they have a right to be fully seen, heard, and reflected in the content we create and consume,” Dr. Knatokie Ford, an executive advisor for SeeHer, said in a press release. “It is a tremendous disservice to exclude them or reduce them to tropes, stereotypes and caricatures. There is no singular Latina story — there are infinite stories. So, we should endeavor to paint more vivid pictures of Latinas to illustrate the fullness of who they are, where they have been, and even where they hope to be.”
The focus on Latina representation is not just morally imperative, but also savvy business, according to Mónica Gil, executive VP, chief administrative and marketing officer for NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises.
“Nearly 1 in 5 women in the U.S. are Latinas influencing a large part of the $1.9 trillion in Hispanic consumers’ purchasing power, so it is important for brands and content creators to connect with them authentically and accurately to fuel their businesses’ growth,” Gil said.
Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble's chief brand officer and a SeeHer co-chair, also voiced his support for the effort. “We see a lot more diversity in ads and programs today, but we need to ensure that Latinas are accurately portrayed in a real, respectful and genuine way that truly reflects who they are,” Pritchard said in a statement.
This is the second SeeHer writing guide. The first debuted earlier this year in collaboration with the Oprah Winfrey Network and was centered around the representations of Black women in advertising and entertainment.
1 comment:
Procter & Gamble is one of the biggest perpetrators of Latino stereotypes in America, sorry/not sorry.
They feed high-paying advertising work to their white agencies in the United States and allow them all the freedom in the world to "transcreate" it into Spanish under the guise of Total Market work (which just means swapping in some vaguely brown talent and giving a translator some nickels to add some Spanish after the fact). Latinos are rarely if ever given meaningful assignments, because those are reserved for P&G's white agencies and white partners.
Then any crumbs that are left over are given to agencies and creators in Latin America and Spain, who get pennies to make P&G ads that are stuffed full of the light skinned talent that's popular there, and are packaged as "Latino" ads in the US. Even though they were made, bought and traded abroad.
Just because P&G airs an ad in Spanish on Telemundo that portrays Latinas "in a positive light" doesn't mean P&G actually cares about or supports Latinas, it means they paid foreign countries pocket change to create ads that look passably Latino.
Hell, even P&G's "US Hispanic Heritage Month" type ads made for the US markt are made entirely outside the United States. There's zero investment in Latinos inside the country.
P&G talks a big game, but behind the scenes are contributing to an all-white lock on how Latinas are portrayed.
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