A journalist once lamented that while doctors bury their mistakes, reporters print theirs all over the front page. This kind of high visibility is also a characteristic of advertising, which is why, like the media, it has come under intense scrutiny for its alleged racism.
However you define it, racism is endemic in SA advertising. It is pervasive throughout all of society, and advertising is probably no worse in this respect than in other sectors of the economy. However, the parliamentary hearings into racism in advertising, conducted last November were instructive for the ad industry, exposing a deep-seated distrust of what were seen (by some parliamentarians) as effete, self-interested practitioners of an arcane, out-of-touch business practice.
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Even one of the industry's leading practitioners, The Agency chairman Jannie Ngwale, subscribed to this view. "The industry continues to be stuck in the redundant notion of a superior race as espoused in the Bantustan philosophy," he charged. "This nation will never be freed from its past because of the way it continues to portray certain racial stereotypes."
Transformation, he contended, was characterised by "false, deceptive mechanisms to resist change by finding a black person, setting him up in business and using him for presentations whenever empowerment credentials are required. These token entities must be discouraged."
This, of course, isn't fair, but if perception is reality, then this is a reality the industry must deal with. The lesson to be taken out of last year's hearings was an understanding of the depth of feeling on the subject, and a realisation that advertising is a soft target. It will get hammered and it must deal with that.
(See linked story Advertising's reponsibility.)
Another lesson from the hearings was that you can't handle an emotional issue with a purely logical response. A presentation by the Media Directors' Circle came across as a typical media director's presentation to a client - all numbers, tables and facts. Facts which demonstrated that marketers were not ignoring the reality of the marketplace when they placed their ads in so-called "white" media. But cold, hard facts come across as precisely that - cold, hard and unsympathetic. The response in the corridors of parliament outside the committee room was one of rage. "People like this should leave the country and go back to Europe," said one observer.
The fundamental problem MPs had with the current state of advertising is that eight years after the transition to majority rule, whites still play dominant roles in media ownership. Ad agencies, which perform the key function of communicating brand messages to consumers, and making or breaking radio stations and newspapers through their choices of where to place their advertising, are still 70% white. The population is 88% black, but most TV commercials still portray white rather than black characters.
The start of the trouble was some complaints by a black-orientated radio station, Yfm, that it is not getting its fair share of the advertising cake because media planners and buyers in agencies don't understand the black market. As Portfolio committee chairman Nat Kekana famously characterised them, media buyers are 22-year-old white girls who live in Sandton and watch Ally McBeal - consequently lacking understanding of black media.
And all of this exemplified racism among white advertising practitioners. Perhaps, some MPs were prepared to admit, it was not deliberate racism as much as ignorance. But even that fell under their definition of racism. If media buyers failed to understand the market, that was an example of racism either on their part, or on the part of the people who employ them.
The ad industry was set up. It was given little time to prepare, and almost no information about how the hearings would be conducted.
Can it really be true that marketers are ignoring legitimate ways of communicating with their huge black markets purely because of racial prejudice? It's just not realistic to believe that marketers prefer to sell their products to whites than to blacks. Not even the most racist of businessmen would penalise himself for the sake of so misguided a principle. Money has no colour. But those who accuse the industry of racism seem to accept this unquestioningly.
What they fail almost totally to understand is that marketers view the marketplace in commercial terms. Some consumers are worth more than others because they have more spending power. Which is why, for example, the FM, with a circulation of 30 000, generates more revenue than You magazine, with 230 000. Racism has nothing to do with it. Differences in adspend per reader, listener or viewer also reflect the demographics of the medium's audience. At R715, Business Day's adspend per reader is higher than any other daily newspaper, because it is read by the rich. The Star gets R320 and Sowetan R47.
Price is a crucial element in any decision about placing advertising. Is Yfm a cost-effective way of reaching a desirable target market? This is a key decision for any advertiser, but the critics of supposed racism ignore it.
An undesirable legacy of the apartheid years is a correlation between race and affluence. No amount of shouting that plenty of black people drive BMWs can gainsay the fact that whites, who represent 12% of the population, still account for a disproportionately large share of consumer expenditure. To be precise, 47%.
These are the kinds of realities that a marketing manager ignores at his peril. His job is to obtain the best possible return on his investment in advertising, and that means communicating cost- effectively with the people most able and willing to buy his products.
Are advertisers guilty of basing their media choices on racist feelings? Of ignoring certain media because they are black, even though they reach the desired target market in a cost-effective way. There's little evidence to support this accusation. The Media Directors' Circle presented figures that showed, for example, 65% of the audience reached through advertising on the 10 biggest radio stations was black, and that 69% of that on all TV stations was black. These ratios may still fall short of the population balance in the country, but the difference is easily accounted for by the variations in affluence between blacks and whites.
You can reach almost as many blacks by advertising in the Sunday Times as in the Sowetan, and you get the advantage of many white readers as well.
Accusations have also been made that the characters portrayed in TV commercials are unfairly biased towards whites. The Media Monitoring Project (MMP), an independent NGO funded by the Ford Foundation, says that if our advertising is a window on society, "it cannot in any sense be SA".
The MMP, which normally monitors the balance of political and news coverage in the media, did a dipstick survey covering one week of television advertising and found that "the overwhelming majority of main protagonists and voice-overs were white". Across the four major free-to-air channels (excluding M-Net), which flighted 1 863 commercials during a particular week, more than 80% of the voice-overs (the indicator of final authority) were white, and 49% of the main protagonists were white. "The near-invisibility of Indian people is also startling," said MMP director William Bird. "There were more cartoon characters than Indian people, and no coloured people were identified."
That, of course, is changing, and rapidly. Again, one could justify this lack of balance on the basis of financial clout. Whites, who have the money, probably identify more closely with white actors and voices. But here one is on thinner ground. Advertising should reflect society more realistically than it does, and any failure to do so serves only to entrench prejudice. That's the burden of an industry so publicly exposed.
(See linked story Advertising's reponsibility)
