The Video

Minorities in Advertising

Walking around Berlin, there weren’t too many ads that “featured” minorities. With clothing companies like H&M, pretty much all of the models were white with blonde hair, except for that one black baby. I’ll be honest; I wasn’t looking too hard for ads with minorities on them. Still, it seemed the only time there were any minorities would be on the posters about giving money to charities supporting children in Africa, as in the picture below.

However, there were often ads in Turkish, though those ads did not feature people on them. Berlin is a relatively diverse city for Germany, but pretty much all the ads just feature white people and their white body parts. Seriously. So many ads feature just the (white) body parts, think that’s weird? Well think about the Apple ads, and the ad below that’s encouraging you to shop naked in German!

So this whole hardly-any-minorities advertising is a far cry from Miami’s approach to advertising. Tons of advertisements in Miami are in Spanish, or feature both English and Spanish (and even Spanglish if you want to talk about those lawyer ads on Univision) and print ads are a total melting pot. There are often kids of all races, from Asian to Middle-Eastern, in all sorts of ads. Often times it feels like there’s more diversity in a Kids R Us catalogue than all of Berlin.

It’s funny, I was on Volkswagen’s site for it’s new car: the CC. I was browsing through its photo gallery and there’s a picture of a funky black dude driving their new, high-end sport sedan. On the German site, they don’t have a picture of anyone driving their car at all.

All in all, I feel it’s hard to judge whether Berlin’s advertising is truly diverse or not, as we never really watched TV, so we never watched the TV ads. We also didn’t look through much promotional material. In fact, pretty much the only thing we were exposed to were the ads on the subway stations and public billboards. So keep in mind, my view of minorities in advertising is limited.