Analyzing how racial groups appear in TV ads

White people are more likely to be represented, and in a positive light, than blacks or Asians in Canadian television advertisements, says a new study from the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). "Previous studies have looked at depictions of race in Canadian media, but this is the first to focus on advertising," says Professor Shyon Baumann, chair of UTM's Department of Sociology. "It's also the first to take a sample of commercials and use quantitative data to find the connections between products and different racial groups." Baumann and PhD student Loretta Ho analyzed the appearance and context of over 1,000 white, black and East and Southeast Asian characters in 244 prime time television food and dining ads. People from other cultural backgrounds, such as First Nations, Middle Eastern and Hispanic, were too under-represented to include in the study, something Baumann says is a recurring issue when examining comparisons of race in Canadian media. The study examined human characters only, and did not include cartoons, graphics or voice-overs. Baumann and Ho found that Whites were disproportionally over-represented when compared to the other groups. Although comprising 80 per cent of the Canadian population, Whites were in 87 per cent of the sampled ads.