A New Normal

The hardest part about creating an alternative advertising culture is not in identifying a problem, or getting people to realize that there is a problem; or even a proposal for a better alternative/solution to the problems advertisers face. Even people who aren't media literate can and do recognize that commercials are dumb and pandering, and they know that they don't like it. Women and other under-represented minority groups can clearly see that there isn't enough of them in the media, and express their feelings of under and misrepresentation. And everyone can agree that diversifying who makes the ads and who we see in the media; showing that a wider variety of people do exist is the solution.
 In a few words, the simplest way to change advertising is to stop using what are clearly oppressive symbols in advertising, and replace them with more diversity.
And it's not even that the advertisers themselves are an opposing force to any changes for the better that could possibly be made; because as part of the business, they have to give people what they want. As things are now, people don't want to be pandered to or marginalized; and they themselves can identify what they would liked changed.

Which leaves the question of why things haven't changed, what's gotten in the way. And it's not so much a problem with advertising as it is with media in general; but in particular to advertising, how we are exposed to ads.

Advertisements are just one part of the media that influence our idea of normal. Not what we know normal is; but how we perceive what is normal in the media. And the two are extremely dissonant. For example: we all know what morning looks and feels like. We wake up at 7am and it's still mostly dark out. There's a stillness and a grogginess to the morning that we're all used to by now. However, mornings in the media look like this:

And this is clearly not morning; this is mid-day lighting. That's just one example, but it's things like that; small queues and symbols that define what we think of as normal in the media. And it's those small things, those almost subconscious queues that are the biggest problem.

Slowly taking this closer to the topic; in commercials, pizza is always delivered to a house. This has a lot to do with a house having windows and a door that leads directly to the outside. Pizza delivered to the front of the house, with the delivery man outside handing the pizza to the waiting family indoors is the media normal. And as of now, we have made enough progress where the same delivery could be made to a black family as well as a white one. However, you won't see pizza delivered to an apartment. Even though we're all aware plenty of people live in apartments, and those people order pizza; we won't see that experience replicated on a commercial.

Getting even closer to the point; there aren't many unattractive people on television. This mostly applies to woman, but has less to do with who is attractive but rather who we listen to. Everyone will listen to an attractive person. Everyone will listen to an attractive woman, especially. Even though we know that plenty of non-attractive people are worth listening to; its not normal to see someone unattractive in an ad, and want to listen to them. The biggest gender discrepancy here has to do with
the types (plural) of men people will listen to compared to the type (single) of woman people will listen do; but this is not an issue that has to do with commercials alone. But, we will listen to this guy:

and this guy:

and this woman:

but not so much him:

President of the People's Republic of China

or her: Executive Editor of the New York Times

And as I said, I don't believe this is so much a problem with people not wanting to listen to unattractive people as it is with this definition of normal we see in the media, combined with how we interact with advertising. Basically, because there is so much advertising, and each advertisement we see only has a maximum of 30 seconds to leave an impression on us, and we will see the same advertisement dozens of times; advertisers have to rely on this media normal in order to get a message across at all without the message taking too long to process and too reliant on the one impression where seeing it multiple times would ruin the ad. Because of this style of interaction with the ad, construction has to be quick and transparent for the message to get across; and conforming to the normal makes that efficient. If we don't see an attractive person in a house than we won't pay attention to what they are trying to sell. We rely on these similar and quick queues to know that something is important and we should pay attention. Furthermore, any change from the normal distracts from the message of the ad, which means that the ad could not effectively do it's job in the time allotted. So likewise, if we see a fat guy in an apartment, we would either not want to pay attention, or be to startled by the appearance of a not attractive person in a not-house to register what the guy has to say.

What this means is that for advertising, along with media overall; change will be a long, hard and extremely subtle process; as it will involve changing the culture's idea of what normal is. It will change when we can be used to seeing a pizza delivery to an apartment and not wonder why the pizza guy isn't outside, or why the sun isn't bright in the sky at 7:00am in TV land. It will change when we are used to seeing an average looking Joe on television as much as we are used to it in real life. It's when we can equate real normal to media normal in the time it takes a commercial to air, that commercials can start looking more like reality; more like we want them to.