The advertising with Afro-Americans date back to 1960. Indeed, the ethnic minorities have been recognized as full consumers and as important as others not a long time ago.
What we want to do is tell you the position of advertising intended for ethnic minorities and show you that ethnic advertising is recent.
In order to explain the ethnic minorities´advertising in the US, we have divided the presentation in 4 parts:
- The General view of the United States media
- Media addressed to the ethnic minorities
- The ethnic markets
- The advertising intended the ethnic minorities
We will focus only in the television and magazines advertising. Also, due to the great ethnic diversity in the United States, we will consider the three most important ethnic groups, the Latin-Americans, the Afro-Americans and the Asians.
I would like to briefly introduce what ethnic advertising and why it exists
The ethnic advertising includes all messages addressed to the different ethnic groups. The history of the American people is related to immigration and diversity. No country has welcomed so many immigrants as the United States. Even nowadays, nearly one million people come to live there. Though highly involved in the American society, the members of the ethnic minorities have been ignored by the major American societies in their advertising messages for a long time. As their incomes and buying power have increased in the last years, the advertisers are now aware of their economic power. Therefore they are more interested in reaching them through their adverting messages.
The ethnic minorities only appeared as consumers in the adverts broadcasted by the media in the middle sixties. During the slave period, the Afro-Americans were excluded from the advertising industry. When the Afro-Americans first appeared in the advertising campaigns – see picture hereunder – they were usually represented as servants or as entertainers of the white population. This is an advert for « N.H.M. Hotels » from 1936.
After a while, the Afro-Americans began to appear in the alcohol, tobacco and fast-food advertisings. Only after 1956 Coca-Cola began to target the minorities starting by the Afro-Americans.
At late sixties, the advertisers wondered how to target the Afro-Americans: either representing them through the media or through the specialized media as the Ebony or Jet magazines.
The American society also began to be interested in the Latin-American market from the sixties. This is due to the quick demographic increase of this ethnic group. Indeed, from 1980, their growth is five times larger than the overall population. To target this population was therefore interesting for the advertisers. Aware of the language barrier, they began to translate their adverts into Spanish from 1986. The situation has evolved from the 80s. Nowadays, the advertisers can’t ignore the ethnic minorities. They are now a real target for the marketing strategy.
1/ In the national television
Nowadays, the ethnic minorities are more present in the television advertisings ; according to an investigation performed by the magazine « Marketing to the Emerging Majorities » (2001), 36% of the adverts show ethnic minorities during the primetime (from 20h00 to 23h00) in New York city.
In general terms, nearly one third of the tv spots broadcasted all over the nation include Afro-Americans as main characters. As for the Asians and the Latin-Americans, they appear respectively in 6% and 3% of the adverts.
Many adverts aimed to target the different ethnic communities are made by celebrities, actors or sportsmen/women, as the tennis players Serena and Venus Williams for Wrigley’s gum (a chewing gum brand) or Penelope Cruz for a new fragrance of Ralph Lauren.
The chart hereunder represents the percentage of tv spots where the different ethnic minorities appear and are broadcasted in the primetime. We can immediately conclude that the Afro-Americans predominate in tv compared with the other two communities.
2/ In the so-called « mass Circulation magazine »
According to a study performed by the « Marketing to the emerging majorities»
in 17 magazines addressed to the people at large, the adverts including ethnic minorities only represent 19% of a total of 435. They represented 29% in 1999. It is important to note that the number of pages has moved from 1157 to 760.
We notice that People, Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated, and US Weekly include the majority of the advertisings targeting the ethnic minorities (representing them). On the contrary, The Time, Elle, ladies Home Journal and Esquire are the ones that target them the least in their adverts.
These figures date back to 2001 then they must have changed since then.
CONCLUSION :
As we speak France debate about national identity, we have note a paradox between advertisement and politic. Advertisement wants differentiate each minorities and on the other side Republic wants to advocate equality for all.
