Now that ads increasingly have minorities in them, marketers are taking advantage of some of the qualities that these minorities bring.
Those ads for teeth whitening products now almost exclusively include those with darker skin. Why do these companies do this? Why simply because the contrast of the white teeth against darker skin tones is greater. The whitening they show looks almost like it’s glowing in the dark.
In ads, back in the old days, they would show exclusively men dining at a burger place. I think it was to show that even men, with men’s appetites could be satisfied by a burger chain’s burger. That’s no longer the case.
Today they are using small women. Why? To play up to the idea of how big that burger looks in that hand. Or how the woman can barely get her mouth around the burger.
I’m thinking they can take this further. Primordial dwarves are rare but they do exist. These are dwarves with the same proportionate features as a more average sized human. If those burgers begin to look absolutely gigantic, they might have switched to primordial dwarves in the ads.
But watch closely. If there are no sounds from the subjects and music drowns out everything and those burgers seem huge, it is more than possible that they are using primordial dwarves. They won’t want primordial dwarves to talk because their voices are also proportionately higher than average sized people. They want to maintain the illusion.
There are other ways marketers can use minorities in ads that get our attention. Imagine using a drag queen in a limo ad. “We can subdue even the most extreme looks” might be said over images of a drag queen in full regalia getting in the limo. She closes the door and bam!: the tinting hides all her extreme colouring to the public.
“Which leads to the most dramatic of entrances,” the voiceover now says as the limo pulls up to the curb and the drag queen exits the vehicle to flashes of paparazzi cameras. The flashes make the scene entering drag queen even brighter than she was before.
Look for more of this capitalizing on minorities as more marketers wake up to the advantages of minorities in their ads.
