1. DIFFERENT CHILDREN, DIFFERENT DREAMS
RACIAL REPRESENTATIONS IN ADVERTISING
BY ANNIE BUCKLEY AND ELEANOR BEIRNE

2. CHILDREN IN ADVERTISING
• “All mothers want the best they can afford for their baby. Motherhood is one thing that transcends all cultures
and economic barriers”. (Fischer Price Marketing Executive,Advertising Age 1985).
• Advertisers often use children to appeal to female consumers, who make up a large amount of the target market.
• The use of children can represent several things that appeal to consumers such as family, love, innocence,
happiness, energy etc.
• Parents from all walks of life have expectations for their children, and hope for a good future for them.
• Parents’ potent dreams for a better life find expression in the purchase of books, toys, clothes etc.

3. WHITE CHILDREN IN ADVERTISING
• Seiter claims that most families on television are white middle class and form the happy, content faces used in
advertising.
• Dyer (1998) says that “White is not anything really, not an identity, not a particularizing quality, because it is
everything – white is no colour because it is all colours”.This shows the oppression and lack of representation of
ethnic minorities.
• Commercials have so often been ‘all white commercials’ according to Dyer, that it makes it hard to notice the lack
of ethnic minorities, he argues.
• Seiter argues that advertisements set in the domestic sphere usually feature white children only. If the space is
personal, intimate and familial then scenes are totally segregated by race.
• According to Seiter, more expensive, high class items are advertised using white, middle class families.
• Advertisers are playing into “the worst kind of casual, unconscious racism perpetrating the myth of an all white
America”, argues Seiter.

4. ETHNIC MINORITIES IN ADVERTISING
• Seiter suggests that ethnic minorities are “usually represented through the frame of problems” and television
portrays them as ‘suffering’.
• Due to racial segregation on television, in the 1980s it was hard for the white middle class to comprehend the fact
that staggering numbers of mothers and children living in poverty were white.
• Advertisers set minority images against a very different set of back drops to that of white people, usually taking
place outside of the domestic, private sphere.
• Seiter claims that whilst white children are often cast as adventurous or courageous, ethnic minority children are
either excluded altogether or represented as passive and ignorant.
• Stuart Hall (1981) argues that “the media are not only a powerful source of ideas about race.They are also a place
where these ideas are articulated, worked on and elaborated.”

5. RACIAL STEREOTYPES IN ADVERTISING
 Seiter claims that black children appear in nearly all advertisements for infant sport shoes, which emphasises a
presumably ‘inborn’ athletic ability.
 Seiter also argues that black children are used to advertise music and sport, which are a proud aspect of black
culture, but advertisers undermine these achievements by representing them as innate natural talents.
 In contrast, Seiter claims that white children often appear in education related products, showing them to be
articulate and creative.
 A McDonalds advertisement named ‘you deserve a break today’ centred around the strains experienced by
working mothers featured a more ethnically diverse cast, whereas an advertisement for Crest featured an all white
family which depicted two parents with children who were ‘the centre of their world’.
 Seiter highlights that a company called Burrell aimed to increase desirable representations of ethnic minorities in
advertising.

7. HOWEVER…
• For many contemporary critical scholars the term stereotype sounds outdate, old fashioned and irrelevant to a
study of postmodern media.
• Seiter was writing and 1990 and since then there have been huge changes in the perception and representation of
ethnic minorities in television and advertising.
• When Seiter was writing in 1990s America, there was an increasingly racist political climate which tragically
diminished expectiations for ethnic minority children.
• In recent advertisements, ethnic minorities are not only featured more but are also represented spheres and in a
more positive light. Different races are also seen as mixing more in modern advertising eg. Cheerios advert, evian
baby advert etc.