Carl W. Jones Publications

Typically, advertising contains two messages, one from the brand and one that reflects cultural thinking. Examples include adverts selling cleaning products that show stereotypes of women as housewives, or tech adverts that depict white men as head of companies. These messages re-enforce how society thinks. Across the world, brands such as Nike and PayPal have been expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement by issuing statements and adverts of support—from Nike adapting their memorable tagline of “Just Do It” by asking consumers “for once, Don’t Do It”, to the $500 million donation from PayPal. In the post-Black Lives Matter movement period, adverts in the UK and US appear to represent a more diverse representation of race, undoubtedly also thanks to the positive impact of the BLM movement. But has the Black Lives Matter movement made an impact in causing other races to be less discriminated elsewhere?

Brands such as Nike and Adidas to PG Tips and Space NK have been expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by issuing statements and adverts of support – from Nike playing with their memorable tagline of “Just Do It” by asking consumers “for once, Don’t Do It” to the #Solidaritea hashtag taken up by many tea brands. Many of these messages have been accompanied by promises to take a hard look at each company’s history and current working practises to see what changes can be made to address structural racism.

This paper explores how Mexico’s population has been faced with the polemics of class and race. This division continues today through the Mexican ruling class’s appropriation of advertising. I am interested in the functions and systems in place that allow this to propagate and how meaning is being reproduced unperceived by the audience. My thesis question asks, What are the visual representations of the power relationships in Mexico’s political economy as reflected through the appropriation of advertising? To answer this question, I perform a semiotic analysis of branded advertising messages created by the companies Bimbo, Palacio de Hierro and FEMSA, owned by the Mexican ruling families Servitje, Baillares and Garza respectively. Each television commercial is examined for signs, cultural codes, gestures, gaze and word tracks. These signs are decoded, and the conclusion is expressed through “An Exhibition of Visual Messaging”, designed to inform the Mexican public of how messages are constructed and received, empowering the viewer to interpret and challenge the meaning behind the communications they are receiving through the metamedia.

Since before it became an independent nation state in 1821, Mexico’s population has been troubled by issues of race and class. When Europeans arrived to colonise the Americas more than 500 years ago, they introduced a social hierarchy based on skin colour and race that persists to this day. In contemporary Mexican advertising and films, lower class people are almost always shown with darker skin and richer class people with white skin. The lead character in the Oscar-winning film Roma, for example, is a darker skinned maid – representing somebody considered poor in Mexico. Her boss is rich and white.