MediaPost reported on an analysis claiming people of color were well-represented in Olympic advertising.
Okay, but the story didn’t clarify the representation in terms of specifics and percentages, such as how many of the ads featured athletes of color—which would certainly spike the numbers.
Of course, the examination didn’t probe if people of color were well-represented in the White advertising agencies that produced Olympic campaigns. It’s safe to say no advertising agency would earn a medal—or even compete—in such a category.
Report: People Of Color Well-Represented In Olympic Ads
By Steve McClellan
Video ad platform Extreme Reach, which has partnered with NBCU to deliver linear + digital ads for NBC’s coverage of the Paris Olympics, has been analyzing the ads in the games for DEI representation, specifically based on skin tone and gender.
Compared to this year’s Super Bowl ads (which only showed 14.3% for dark skin representation in ads), darker skin tones are significantly more represented in this year’s Olympics ads, according to the analysis.
Ads during the first weekend of the games, based on skin tone representation, performed above the total number of US TV ads shown in the first half of the year, with darker skin tones represented in 38% of the Olympic ads versus 28% for all H1 ads.
By gender however, ads fell 3% below the total H1 benchmark of 43%.
Top performing categories by skin tone included telecommunications, home & garden, and apparel/footwear/accessories. Lower performers included retail, automotive, travel, consumer products and services.
Top performing categories by gender included cosmetic hygiene and home and garden. Laggards included entertainment/media/leisure, legal/financial, automotive, travel and telecommunications.
The company offered some guidance to advertisers: “Keep track of evolving benchmarks and audience feedback to continuously adapt advertising strategies and maintain alignment of creative to the broader audiences and communities we serve.”
Of course Extreme Reach jumped right over the real issues to instead focus on skin color eugenics. It's a distraction from who financially benefits from the status quo.
ReplyDeleteThe particular Tide ad in their fawning press coverage was handed by P&G on a silver platter to an Olympic mountain-sized pile of white partners. It was created by a white ad agency, who chose a white director and white cinematographer, working for a white British production house, and then edited, scored and colored by even more white vendors.
That means a dozen white vendors working on a single P&G ad with one black actor can thus score massively more "diversity points" in Extreme Reach's ranking than a black ad agency that hires a black director, a black DP, a black-owned production house, a black editorial company, and a black composer, if that ad stars someone who is black and lighter skinned (or Asian, or Latinx, or a "too light" shade of indigenous).
And there is something terribly wrong about Extreme Reach using AI and skin color calculations to deem and reward P&G-backed all-white efforts more "diverse" than majority black efforts.