Racial in Advertising Campaigns

In the increasingly fierce competition for international market, advertising takes place an important role. The design of advertising as one of the most important cultural factors affects the modern society especially in market and economy (Williamson, 1978). To comply with the theme “design as criticism” our group chooses race issue with advertising as the entry point. As we can see, there are more and more campaign use different race people or race issue. We live in a commercial world; we can see advertisements everyday and everywhere. Advertising with racial elements become more and more common at nowadays. So how does these advertisements change our mind? How does race sell? Does it work different in different space or culture? Do the advertisements with different race people changed the consumer to purchasing from 20th century to now on? We also need to think about the reason of people use these popular racial issues in advertising, and also find out the reason of this kind advertising is efficient or not. The purpose of this essay is reveal the research method process and refine the effect of advertisement with race elements in a critical way. In addition, analyze the reason of this kind of advertisement; contextualize the data into the culture background and a specific time, which based on postmodern to now. Moreover, this paper also indicates the reason for changes of the advertisement with racial issue and put it into design area. This not only has implications for graphic design and advertising but also help us understand advertising design in a critical way.

To answer these questions, it is important to find out where advertising with racial elements all began. From the 1970's, many parts of Europe had begun to show si...

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...mpany really care about the society issue. Although our results suggest the both side of racial issue exist in advertisements, it is worth noting the limitations through this process. Firstly, Our study focus on Benetton 20th century campaigns, which has a long time before, the effect from twenty years ago to now is different. Secondly, the respondents of probe and case study are in various ages, income levels, genders, and races, but we did not take this into consideration. It may ignore more positive findings. The present study also raises several questions that should be followed up through further research. The adverts have various effects on different ages, income levels, genders, and races people. Why? What is the advertising in ethnic trend now? Does it still play an important role? Answering these questions will help us understand more about how race sells.