And Now, A Word From Our Anti-White Sponsors!

2,380 words

Advertising is considered an extension of show business.
Sir Martin Sorrell, Chairman of marketing group WPP

Advertising seems a very modern phenomenon but it has been with us for millennia. A Roman tavern with a painting of a vine over the door was advertising for customers. A piece of papyrus found in Egypt and dated to around 3000 BC was written by a weaver wishing to persuade his fellow citizens to use his services rather than those of his competitors. There have been relatively recent advances in advertising’s reach, of course, with the rise of the print press, radio, and most obviously television and cinema, all of which have foregrounded advertising to the point where many find it intrusive. Churches seem to me to be the only places that don’t carry advertising, unless you consider the iconography of religion to be a form of advertising. I can’t really see the depictions of the stations of the cross in my local church as formally or culturally equivalent to the Benetton ads of the 1980s, possibly the first “diverse” ad campaign in Britain.

Today’s consumers – membership of which group being perhaps the one thing that unites us all – are aware of the fact that advertising is manipulative, but that awareness was not always the case. Vance Packard’s seminal 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, and its two sequels, were huge best-sellers, and Packard became the bête noir of the ad industry for revealing its dark arts. It was the first popular research to examine the manipulative side of advertising, which is a sort of psy-op targeting the consumer. Advertisers are, Packard wrote, “looking for… the ‘whys’ of our behavior, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favor.” The money spent on advertising is legendary, both on the creative and the marketing side. A 30-second ad slot for next year’s Super Bowl would set you back $7 million. But does advertising work?

Retail tycoon John Wannamaker said a century or so ago that only half of advertising works, but no one knows which half. Huge ad campaigns with no real positive effect on sales are exemplified by Guinness, and by extension their marketing people, who became famous for their stylish and innovative ads in the last half of last century. Their first ad ran on the opening night of commercial TV in the States, in September, 1955, and by the 1970s were something of a cultural reference point. It’s the first time I remember people talking about ads they had seen the previous evening rather than actual programs. My film-maker father pointed out to me the sheer quality of the camerawork in the Guinness ads and told me how expensive they must have been to make for the time. But they didn’t noticeably improve sales as each successive new ad came out, even though they were greeted with much media fanfare.

This type of formula should be relatively easy to produce. You make your ad, cost it out when it’s in the can, run it, and compare your sales over the subsequent period of time. In an industry overview in their book, Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds, Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart suggest that an average of 37% of all advertising budgets are wasted. But now there is something of a new phenomenon in the industry, running in parallel with a recent tendency of cinema, and subject to the same sarcastic catchphrase: Get woke, go broke.

We all know what this means. Filling movies or adverts with blacks, transgender characters, lesbians, disabled people and so on may improve your corporate DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity) score, but it will more than likely run counter to audience preferences. The Guardian newspaper, predictably, does not believe “inclusive” advertising harms sales, in fact it improves them. Quite apart from the fact that this is demonstrably untrue, the claim is based on “the findings of a global study from the Unstereotype Alliance, a business initiative convened by UN Women”. The name and gender fly a red flag indicating possible bias. We all know what woke ad campaigns did to the sales figures of Gillette, Bud Light, and Marks & Spencer.

Now that companies such as Walmart are starting to kick back against DEI, however, this ridiculous, anti-business behavior will hopefully go with it, but some areas of the ad industry in the UK are apparently at peak woke, with “woke” increasingly becoming slang for what is actually behind it; Anti-whiteness, or blancophobia. One of Britain’s most famous and popular chain stores has just taken the candy bar. We should watch their share prices with interest in the weeks to come.

We are used to the term “woke”, but it is proving to have been the chrysalis from which the dark black moth of blancophobia is emerging. There is an interesting and concomitant phenomenon in the British right-of-center media, which is the gradual recognition that anti-whiteness is what the young people call “a thing”, but the idea that white people are being “demonized”, to use a term popular on the left, is still only being whispered in what there is of the British right-of-center media. Ironically enough – and I used to see this happen when I worked in magazine publishing a quarter of a century ago – advertisers have the final say on content, not editors.

Christmas is obviously the season when advertisers are busiest trying to divert consumers into one store or another to buy this or that product, but a trend has become clear. Advertising, like so much of our cultural atmosphere, is becoming increasingly anti-white and anti-male, and this year’s clearest example of this neo-racism is the 2024 Christmas ad from Boots the Chemist.

The ad features Santa Claus’ wife, a pushy and aggressive black woman played by Adjoa Andoh, probably best known for describing the Coronation of King Charles as “terribly white”. Buckle up for this ad, Whitey, because it’s terribly black. Returning home, she finds her husband, a traditionally white, male St. Nicholas, dozing in front of the fire on what is presumably the night before Christmas. She, of course, takes over with her all-women crew and produces the presents herself with her diversity team of woke elves. The only man in the ad apart from Santa is a ridiculously gay stereotype who shrieks in horror because they have run out of bows for the wrapping paper. The ad does not center on Christmas, a holiday the modern left despises. It has instead as its guiding purpose what seems to have become a familiar motif in modern televisual advertising, that of the unreliable white man being rescued or advised by the wise and trusty black woman.

The Boots ad was covered by English YouTubers but the MSM ignored it, fully on board with the new anti-white agenda as they are and have been told to be by their advertisers (although not by their shareholders). It seemed only fair to see what the most famous Yuletide ad was this year, that put out by the department-store chain John Lewis. These have long been the gold standard of Christmas ads, and I was fully expecting a black Santa with transgender elves who only distributed presents to cripples in Africa. It was actually something of a pleasant surprise. The white mother has a dysfunctional family, sure, but these are dysfunctional times and so this is probably a fair reflection. It also has a happy mother/daughter ending.

It’s a bit frantic but does at least feature no black people. We often hear that the number of blacks in any capacity, from newsreaders to the police, should reflect their numerical proportion in society. For UK blacks, this is around 5% countrywide, whereas adverts seem to feature blacks at well over 50%. The Chinese population of the UK is 0.8%, so there should be about one Chinese person for every five blacks in adverts. From the sample I have seen, there are none. It’s the same with Sikhs and Muslims, although advertisers won’t touch Islam for obvious reasons. Put a Muslim in a bacon ad and it’s goodbye head office.

So, what are we to make of all this? Firstly, why would a board of directors risk ads of this sort, likely as they are to alienate their customers in a country still around 85% white? A quick glance at the board members of Boots shows no obviously black or Jewish names, and so it can be assumed that they are mostly white men, as are most boards of directors, to the chagrin of uppity women everywhere. Can we imagine them all seeing the ad for the first time and applauding enthusiastically in the board room, congratulating themselves on another marketing master-stroke? Unlikely. But advertising has shifted from a pure marketing exercise linked exclusively with profit-making business practice to yet another weapon in the culture wars the left claim don’t exist. But at least we have the past, and watching old British ads from last century, I was reminded of and amazed by the sheer class of the writing and direction.

Advertising is, or at least can be, highly creative, and Guinness and their marketing people were ahead of the pack for a long time albeit, as noted, without causing people to drink noticeably more Guinness. Salman Rushdie, Fay Weldon, Len Deighton and Ridley Scott all worked in advertising before finding fame as writers or, in Scott’s case, a movie director. Scott directed some of the Guinness ads in the 1980s, and actors who appeared in successive Guinness ads included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and Rutger Hauer.

I would never have thought I would be, as it were, advertising advertising, but this selection of Guinness ads from 1955 to 1995 is incredibly entertaining (aided by a dose of nostalgia for those Brits of my generation), although you may of course feel the need to pop out for a pint of “Dublin soup” afterwards, or even during. Advertising’s core principle is to associate the client product with a more desirable lifestyle for the potential consumer. Buy this, and you will be like this, and that’s a good thing.

Association is a key device for advertisers, with a projected lifestyle being hitched to their product or service. Eddie Izzard, who used to be funny before he became a transexual Labour Party activist, had a little skit in his shows about how advertising has developed from simple announcements that a product was good for you, or tasty, or efficient in some way, to making your life more exciting. Now, association is key. The advertisers will suggest to you that a product is good, said Izzard, by pointing out a couple. “They’re using it, our product. And they’re shagging”. Sex sells, obviously, but so does the depiction of a desirable lifestyle, or at least one deemed to be desirable. Now, it seems, what every consumer wants is a product from a store whose owners and executives wish to denigrate whites and lionize blacks. It’s a spectacle without dignity, and a boycott of Boots is something profoundly to be wished. Get woke, go broke. I certainly hope so. It was not always this way.

Adverts broadcast in the UK of the 1970s could never get off the storyboard today. This selection of 10 such ads begins with one of the famous PG Tips ads for that brand of tea. These notoriously featured trained chimpanzees dressed as humans and, in the opening ad, a father and son are shifting a piano downstairs when the lady of the house distracts them with a cuppa, causing the piano to crash down the stairs. “That’s one way of shifting it”, says Mr. Shifter. The final line passed into common usage in England at the time, as the son says to his dad, as they drink their tea, “‘Ere, Dad. Do you know the piano’s on my foot?” “You hum it son, I’ll play it”.

Ads had genuine and intelligent humor then, not the snarky, blancophobic sneering exemplified today by the Boots ad. In an advert for Cockburn’s Port in the 70s, we see a surfaced submarine taking aboard two high-ranking British sailors. “Rescued by the Russians”, laments the very English captain. At dinner, there is a disagreement between him and the Russian skipper on the pronunciation of the word “Cockburn’s”, which is not pronounced phonetically, but as in “James Coburn”. The Russian captain fails to grasp the difference and points at a clock. “So that”, he proffers, “is a clo”. “Clock”, comes the British reply. The Russian shows his red sock, brilliantly decorated with a hammer-and-sickle monogram. “So!”, he says triumphantly. “Sock!” Finally, the sub-mariner says, “So, I come from Moscock”. The captain of the British ship ends the ad with another line which is still spoken today when a Brit wants to dismiss an idiotic statement. “Yes, I think you probably do”. The ad is here, a Cold War classic that probably did little for UK/USSR relations. It is brilliantly conceived, a linguistics discussion staged over 44 seconds. But this was an age in which a lager ad would feature Schubert, and viewers would still know who he was. Drinking in the pub, someone shouts, “Herr Schubert! What about your unfinished symphony”. “What about my unfinished Kronenbourg?” It is slightly sad that even adverts show that these were more intelligent times.

In one century, and vastly aided by the arrival of electronic media, advertising has moved from this watch ad in 1924 to the Boots ad noted above. What has changed? The nature of our culture, that much seems clear. Then, the idea was to persuade people to buy your product rather than that of your competitors. Now, much of it seems to be designed to command you to hate your own skin color, should you happen to be white, or celebrate it (for no apparent reason other than the diktat) should you happen to be black.

Another wise-crack beloved of my father in the 1970s he would use if I or my bothers happened to have our flies, or the zippers on our trousers, either open or at least at half-mast (I suspect all men have made this faux pas at least once in their lives). “It pays to advertise”, he would say with a smile. But that was then, and this is now.