The IPA has today (21st April) published Clearcast data which reveals the portrayal of people from Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic Groups within television commercials.
21/04/2011
As of December 2009, agencies have had the option of stating whether the actors within their advertisements are from Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic Groups, through the addition of two tick boxes on the Clearcast submission form; ‘Ethnic (BAME) featured artist?’ and ‘Ethnic (BAME) walk-on artist?’
The additional boxes were introduced following discussions between the IPA and Clearcast about tracking the portrayal of people from ethnic minorities in advertising.
Key findings from the submitted data include:
• Of the 34,499 commercials cleared by Clearcast and aired on mainstream UK television channels in 2010, 1,845 (5.3%) contain BAME actors, according to the data supplied by agencies when they upload the commercials*.
• 1,130 of those 1,845 commercials have featured BAME actors.
• 537 of those 1,845 commercials have both featured and walk-on BAME actors.
• 178 of the 1,845 commercials have walk-on BAME actors only.
• Significant product categories indexing greater than 100 for BAME actors are household equipment, online retail, property, entertainment and pharmaceutical.
• Government indexes strongly overall for BAME actors, however, it actually underrepresents featured BAME actors but indexes highly on BAME walk-on actors, giving it a high overall index.
• The worst indexing categories of scale, indexing <60, are food, motoring, mail order, retail, travel and transport, telecoms, household stores and clothing.
• According to the data no BAME actors at all appeared in gardening or household appliance ads, although these are small categories.
Says Chris Mundy, Managing Director, Clearcast: “For the first time the industry has a baseline measure for its representation of BAMEs in commercials. I hope this will provide creative stimulus, particularly for brands in categories that significantly underperform according to the data.”
Says Saad Saraf, Chairman of the IPA’s Ethnic Diversity Group and CEO, Mediareach: “I have spent over 23 years marketing to diverse audiences, and what this experience has shown is that people react better to advertising when they see themselves reflected in it. So what these figures reveal, rather disappointingly, is that commercials are drastically underrepresenting the diverse make-up of the UK population, of which BAMEs comprise 13% (ONS Mar 2010), and consequently that advertisers are missing out on an important and rapidly growing revenue stream. I would therefore advise them to take a better look at who their customers are, and hope that these figures will become markedly more representative over the coming years.”
Says Hamish Pringle, Director General, IPA: “We very much appreciate the support of Chris Mundy, Kristoffer Hammer and the team at Clearcast for providing this data. It’s so valuable to be able to address this issue in the context of the facts.”
*This data is reliant on agencies completing the checkboxes when they submit the ads, however, Clearcast cannot rely on the fields being completed in every case.
Clearcast don’t generally clear ads for ethnic only broadcasters so there will be some targeted advertising on these channels that is not included in this data.
The 2010 IPA Census revealed that 90.0% of the employed base within IPA member agencies is from a white background whilst 10.0% is from a non-white background, up from 8.9% in 2009.