Aspiration, delusion, self-image, self-loathing, positive discrimination, tokenism and Uncle Toms in advertising. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director/ LMMiami.com

• As I said in the first installment of this piece last week, casting “regular folk” in advertising has been tried repeatedly with spotty results at best.
• When I say “regular folk” I mean “racially realistic”.
• A CMO who was in charge of a huge consumer packaged goods brand in a large Latin American country told me that she’d tried using a working class non-European looking cast once.
• You know, a cast reflective in appearance of the vast majority of individuals that actually consume packaged goods in a given Latin American nation.
• Interviewees at focus groups were ambivalent at best.
• Some of them simply hated it.
• They didn’t seem to like seeing themselves on the screen (!)
• Their opinions were oblique though, they never showed their true colors (pun intended).
• Self-loathing?
• Self-sabotaging?
• Aspirational folly?
• Malinchismo?*
• Question is, is it possible that we are so brainwashed by colonialism and other assorted bogeymen that we are being racist against ourselves?
• Are we a bunch of unwitting Uncle Toms?
• Is it a conspiracy to oppress minorities and the working classes?
• Nonsense.
• Procter & Gamble, or any large marketer for that matter, would love for everyone to buy more of their products.
• Why would they restrict their market reach to a certain niche of ethnicity, gender or income?
• It makes no economic sense whatsoever.
• However, for some inexplicable reason, the masses want “aspirational”.
• That is, Euro-looking casts.
• Not only in ads.
• When was the last time you saw a telenovela or newscast that truly reflects the ethnicity of its viewing audience?
• Hold the hate mail.
• Don’t lynch me on a public square.
• Don’t troll me on social media.
• I’m just the messenger.
• Apologies if I offended your brittle feelings.
• I’m just trying to understand this very odd phenomenon.
• Maybe it is not self-loathing.
• Maybe it is just escapism: maybe non-European looking working class folk don’t want to be reminded by the media once and again that we got the short end of the stick.**
• Remember that old Jewish joke:
• Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altmann,” said his secretary, “I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer, a Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?”
• “On the contrary, Frau Epstein. I used to buy the Jewish papers and all I read about were pogroms, riots in Palestine and assimilation in America. But now in Der Stürmer I read that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. It makes me feel a whole lot better!”
• Then again: what’s the definition of European in 2018?
• Go ahead, take a look at a Panini soccer card album.
• Check out the lineups of the European teams of the World Cup.
• Whites are the minority.
• The pecking order is changing.
• Faster than we think.
• It looks like, finally, ethnic minorities are overcoming the inferiority complex and low self-esteem that has bogged us down for centuries (to put it somehow).
• Meantime, in Hispanic culture, we might still be lagging a bit in the Uncle Tom chapter.
• Reggaetton and other intrinsically AfroLatin rythms are ruled by Maluma and Pittbull.
• Yup, whiteys.
• I rest my case.

*Are you a malinche? READ: https://hispanicad.com/agency/business/are-you-malinche
**I owe you my 23andMe and Ancestry.com reports to prove that I am in fact a member of an ethnic minoruty. But I’ll share them with you guys as it shows up in my in-box. Word.