[jbob2000]

We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.

My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned".

So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.

[gumby]

> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.

What? It’s all about the money.

Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible.

In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed.

Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before.

I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.

[thisiszilff]

It's true, in a way, society looks like what the people in power want society to look like because the people in power are those with money and people who figure out how to make more money get power. It's like you say, that TV and ads are on the trailing edge as people figure out how to keep up with the distribution of money in society.

[rchaud]

> I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.

OP wasn't exactly ambiguous. Only thing that was missing from "people in power" was maybe three sets of parantheses enclosing it.

[sudosysgen]

This seems like a ridiculously uncharitable explanation to the point of bad faith. A better interpretation that is also accurate would be that the people in power are people with money and influence.

[CharlesW]

> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.

The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted.

If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.

[jbob2000]

And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?

[slowmovintarget]

It is definitively not. CCP has zero interest in sales. It is interested in preserving the party by controlling the populace, with special emphasis on ideology.

The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship, which is a completely different problem from a top-down, military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.

[duxup]

Promotion?

They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.

[jbob2000]

Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be cut off.

Same shit, different process.

[duxup]

I can't comment on what your marketing team is up to but I don't know of any state level limitation on the demographics of ads. I see plenty of ads with white only folks in it...

[dillondoyle]

Absolute not.

Even disregarding your false promotion comparison, what about the other side?

CCP 'promotes' (actually carries out) the brutal persecution of non-Han and specifically Uighurs in part facilitated propaganda ('ads')

US corporations are not forced by the government to include for instance only one community or exclude another in their communications.

Us corporations are not de facto owned by the government and do not have the same goal of consolidating power to maintain the CCP's (and increasingly just one man at the top's) grip over its own citizens.

In the US many spend lots of money lobbying to keep the government out of their business!

[nemothekid]

I think it's strange that you equate "using racially ambiguous people" to promotion of said group. The fictional marketing company and the CCP have very different goals and I think you are projecting your own personal biases onto modern television marketing.