Subliminal Advertising #1

I'm starting a series of observations about the world of advertising and the messages that are conveyed from the many forms and techniques of advertisting strategy. This is the first entry of many more to come.

I recently read AT&T's new marketing piece touting all of their new digital services. Very well thought out marketing piece, but the one thing that struck me the most was not their prices and services, but the fact that all of the many fuzzy warm photos of family members surfing the net, or talking on their phones were all single race families.

I wondered why was the corporate giant reluctant to show mixed-race families in their marketing material. Do mixed-race families not exist? or worse yet, do they not constitute a family that the US considers palatable, or does society consider them taboo like gay parents? Every election year, you'll hear the standard "America is a melting pot" or the other infamous phrase "We're all one race, the human race".

These types of subliminal advertising techniques clearly illustrate the fallacies of those two election year phrases.

News Flash!!

The Dept. of Justice recently announced that disparities exist in traffic stops involving drivers of color compared to white drivers. What happens after the stop is where the disparities begin, the report claims. Of course this phenomenon is no news flash to the millions of people of color who have been treated differently, particularly young male drivers of color, who have experienced these disparities firsthand.

The real news flash here is that these same disparities, and hyper-sensitivity to drivers of color have existed since the invention of the automobile and its relationship to law enforcement. Here we are, over 100 years later, still the same problem. That's sad.