Ethnicity and Media in the UK

Well basically, before we speak about the subject, I just wanted us to have an insight of the ethnic communities in the UK. Do we understand who the ethnic communities are? Where do they come from? Where do they live? What diversity do we have? I think if we do not understand, then we are unable to communicate effectively and that’s probably, for me, the main issue. People talk about, you know – millions of people are here; there’s, you know, been more than 1.4m Eastern Europeans come in so far, and more than 1.2m Bulgarians and Romanians and other Eastern Europeans are expected within the next year and a half. Do we know where these people – I mean, what makes them tick, do we know the triggers? And hence, you know, we need to understand the
diversity and the issues we have here. And that’s where I’m amazed at the lack of understanding that broadcasters have; agencies, where I come from, have. In fact, I’m amazed that for example, if you look at London, where it’s said 36% to 40% of the people are of difference diverse background, yet advertisers either choose to ignore, or choose to spend 100% of their budgets targeting 60% of the audience, which is amazing by any standards. I think if I work in a company and I waste 40% I’ll be booted out straight away, but there are lots of people doing some mediocre jobs out there, but I think there needs to be some re-think there, you know; we need to be a bit more
radical and that’s the commercial aspect here.
Are we represented and how well are we represented? Let’s look at film, drama, game shows, the output that comes out every day – how are we represented there? And I think, rightly so, the ethnic communities always see themselves in a secondary role, they’re not a part of the plot and it always feels like the token faith in there and that ought to change. I think the numbers are there and if we really need to make an impact, we need to effect some change there and that’s where the representation fails. I mean, in sport and music, we are represented well, because we do quite well in there, but in other subjects, we don’t seem to feature at all, or hardly. And the representation
tends to be bad news – we are well represented in terms of bad news, you know, if it comes to issues, and even the issues I’ve discussed are one-sided as well, if you look at the issues of niqab, and stop and search, and terrorism, immigration, faith schools, Islam, fundamentalism and this will go on and on. I think there needs to be a balance in there between bad news and good news, because lack of understanding creates a disconnect, as we have seen up in Oldham and Bradford. And I think editors who in the whole – I mean, apart from Aaqil – tend to be white, middle class and people in the newsroom ought to promote some people into senior positions who come from
16 different ethnic backgrounds, so that those issues such as terrorism or fundamentalism, or whatever issues that are boiling beneath the surface at least are on the radar and then we can discuss them and we can deal with them. And so these big issues don’t suddenly come out, you know. And broadcasters need to be sensitive to people’s feeling and I don’t need to say those two words, Big Brother, but that actually showed, you know, a mild manner; as we were told, the Indian community coming up in arms to re-address that imbalance.
What do we need to do in the future? I think we need to obviously employ more people in senior positions in the newsrooms and in ad agencies as well. We need to listen, we need to understand, we need to make an effort to understand. It’s okay to make mistakes while we’re trying to do something about it, people wouldn’t mind that, but sitting on our hands and doing nothing, it’s not a solution. And then programmes and ad campaigns need to move away from tokenism, you know, we don’t want just a black face and brown face in the ad, we need to have sort of radical solutions there and people ought to be part of that process, part of the script. And I guess – and maybe this is a bit more radical – but we should have, we should insist on maybe 15% of the output coming from, I don’t know, minority ethnic businesses, or it should have some diverse
people in the plot and this will conclude my four minutes.

Saad Saraf
CEO and Head of New Business
Media Reach Advertising

www.mediareach.co.uk