AD NAUSEAM
CHANNEL 4’s
Mirror on the Industry
report is an annual review of diversity in television advertising. This year it showed once again that adland and reality have little in common.
There were findings to excite both sides of the woke divide. Pregnant women appear in just 0.1 percent of adverts; only 2 percent feature identifiably LGBTQIA+ people, below the figure of 3.2 percent in the 2021 census; and only 4 percent feature visibly disabled people (the Office for National Statistics says 17.8 percent of the population have some kind of disability). That’s unchanged from the average representation of the last six years. Over 70s, despite making up 15 percent of the population, only feature in 2 percent of ads. This is also odd, as they often have lots of money.