Regardless of her intent, she'll never win now. Sir Alan wouldn't want to be seen to hire someone deemed to be racist.

Agreed *ducks too just in case*

Isn't it worrying how hung up we still are about race?

I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't see people in terms of colour. I just see people.

It wouldn't make a jot of difference to me if the ad campaign contained 5 white individuals or 5 black individuals.

Yasmina made a huge deal out of something that I consider a non-issue.

If you really believe that an advertising campaign using 5 black models would be perceived in the same way as one using 5 white models you are almost unbelievably naieve.

Remember that when making an ad you have to deal with the views of the target demographic.

yasmina is right. you need a mixture of both the minority and the majority. That's the whole point of an advert. It has to encompass all

I don't think it's racist at all. I think she just wanted a fair representation, and that would be a mix of people.

Yeah, I don't think she was racist, although I can very well understand why some people may take offence.

To be honest, I think her swearing at Debra was worse than the actual 'racist' comment to be honest. She had a point, but some people will argue that if she truly was racist, she wouldn't have thought 'Hey, there's not a white person in this, maybe we'll give out the wrong impression'.

And people, I DO NOT think she was racist, I was just being open-minded. I'll personally need more evidence than that before I can even think of accusing her of racism. If we see more of this in the next 2 months I may be a tad suspicious, but I'm not going to judge her like that from a couple of sentences.

yasmina is right .the add is in the uk and so the target audience is mainly white so using ethnic only be strange /stupid and people would spot this .. ..debra is just trying to make her look bad like sum posters here ...Yasmina to win ..

Show starts in a couple of hours so we'll find out what exactly happens.

Is this really true? 93% white - where did you get this from? Obviously this hugely depends on where you live. In the Greater London area the ratio will be a lot higher and in general the population as a whole are more accustomed to a multi-cultural society.

I used to go to college in Winchester - and you don't see any non white people there at all.

This is all perception- the actual comment is actually rather valid, but taken in the context of being 'pc' anyone can pick it apart. It's controversary for controversary's sake - ridiculous really.

I'm sorry but if a poster or TV ad was to contain multiple ethnic actor it wouldn't be an odd assumption to think that it's ethnic only (and this is coming from an ethnic person).

A little out of date, but then the average Polish plumber tends to be white!

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=273

Tern is right - much depends on your target audience. Diet Coke was obviously aimed at women, when the window cleaner was a hunky bloke and likewise, the Sun has women on p.3. If your image is only of one type, especially where it is a minority, then the subliminal message is "this is only targetted at said group".

Our budding Thought Police constables on here clearly know nothing about marketing!

The fact that you don't see soemthing doesn't mean it's not there.

I really want to see this and understand the context of what she said.

If she said it in a "we need to be more diverse" kind of way - then fair enough.
But, if she says it in a "we can't have only ethnic minorities in our ad because white people would think it is not aimed at them" kind of way - then I have a problem with it.

I don't think Jasmina's comment is racist. The only dubious thing about it for me is that she partly bases the validity of her comment on being an ethnic minority. Should be completely irrelevant.

For your next trick, try to prove a negative. Put the Thought Police rule book away and start thinking about what the task is trying to achieve.

Oh, FFS - if I am no fan of football and I see an advert featuring football fans, might I be interested in the product?

Since when are asians and blacks part of the same ethnic group? And since when is advertising just about appealing to race demographics? Of course we'd have to see the advert but an asian man and a black woman in an advert is just as much as a non issue as two white people in the advert. I would have though a sports advert looked to appealing to different body shapes and ages before race. I'd probably go as far as to say, of all genres, it would be expected the most in sport.
I dunno...would anywhere here think what Yasmina thought if they passed by an advert for sportswear?

Surely, your interest should be in the prouduct. If you don't like the product they are offering you ignore it.

If a computer manufacturer that you use/have used in the past, decides to use ethnic minorities in their ad, would you boycott it/stop using because the advert makes you think only minorities use the product.

What trick?!

You said :most of us do not even see the colour issue


You might not see colour as an issue, but it doesn't mean those issues do not exist and it doesn't mean we shouldn't continue fighting to change things.

Are you white?

Amen. It's dangerous that so many (white) people are now trying to write off race issues altogether because, ya know - it's only racist if they're wearing a bed-sheet and burning crosses!

She wasn't racist because it is true. Those are the main principles of advertising. You need your target audience set, and so you need certain people to get that message across. So of course if you had an advert which had 5 black people, it would be perceived differently as 5 white people, due to the way the 2 are represented in society and the different things the advertisers direct to each ethnicity quite often, which rubs off onto the consumer, which leads to the interpretation of the advert.

Don't advertising and marketing people take that stuff into consideration quite openly?
Like, when they are casting models in an ad they will frequently include race in their casting specs. I don't think it's considered racist in that industry to do so.
It's not pretty to admit it, but it almost certainly is a big marketing risk to advertise a product using two ethnic minority models (depending on the product of course.) My sense is that people in the advertising industry don't pussyfoot around that fact.

I'm not sure it would matter in this case; it wasn't an ad they were casting but just a face to face demonstration. But still.
Anyway, I actually thought Yasmina's comment was her trying to tactfully avoid saying that Nooral is too ugly to model! Damn did that backfire.

Talk about mountain out of a molehill: Debra was clearly desperate to have some people to brin back to the boardroom.