USA TODAY International Edition
SUPER BOWL ADS TO PUT DIVERSITY ON DISPLAY
Embrace morphing audience and reject objectification of women
Super Bowl ads are practically an event unto themselves. And when they unfold on the screen Sunday, viewers will see a display of America and the world in much of its diversity.
While Hollywood faces a backlash over an all- white slate of acting nominees for this year’s Oscars, several of the TV spots airing during the big game will feature actors, athletes and characters representing a range of ethnicities, generations and sexual orientations, from a Pokémon ad that shows children around the world empowering each other to succeed, to a spot for the grooming product line Axe, whose images of masculinity include a man dancing in heels.
“Super Bowl advertisers get that as the face of America changes, so must marketing tactics,’’ Karen Sinisi, director of sales for multicultural marketing provider Ethnic Technologies, said in an email.
Though some ad watchers say that Super Bowl advertising has had diverse casting for several years, others claim that a noticeable change occurred in 2015, when images were far less stereotypical and more people of color took center stage.
A 2015 study of Super Bowl ads by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found that African Americans had a leading or coleading role in 19 of 61 commercials aired last year, compared with just two such roles in 2011. The objectification of women in ads also significantly decreased.
Diversity “has definitely increased,” says Richard Lapchick, the study’s main author. “In the early days, it was also a fact those images that were presented were sometimes stereotypical, and that has definitely improved significantly.”
Tiffany Warren, founder of ADCOLOR, a group that celebrates people of color working in advertising, media and marketing, says that the advertising industry has been working toward making creative teams, and others involved in ad making, more inclusive.
“The more you ... increase op- portunities for diverse minds to provide feedback on what will work,” she says, “you’ll see opportunities to increase the relationship you have with the public.’’
It was a glaring lack of diversity among actors vying for this year’s Oscars that sparked the latest debate about parity in Hollywood. But beyond accolades, there remains a need for people of color to have more substantial roles in front of and behind the camera, says Gil Robertson, co- founder and president of the African American Film Critics Association.
“If those characters aren’t meaningful, if those portrayals aren’t three- dimensional, and relevant, you still have a problem,” Robertson says.
But not all aspects of diversity are getting their moment in the Super Bowl spotlight. Though SunTrust has a big game ad this year featuring a man in a wheelchair, “major brands are only beginning to recognize the purchasing power of the disability market of $ 220 billion,” Tari Hartman Squire, CEO of EIN SOF Communications, a strategic marketing and employment consultation firm specializing in disability- inclusive diversity, said in an email. When it comes to media, “TV shows are farther ahead on disability- inclusive diversity than ads or movies.’’
There is also a need for more inclusiveness in the top creative ranks of the advertising industry. According to the University of Central Florida report, of the 42 Super Bowl commercials for which data were available last year, only 7% featured exclusively a person of color as the head creative director. And 81% of the creative directors were men.