The relationship between advertising and society is perpetual. Advertising influences the social structure by generating fashion trends, stereotypes, ideals and habits which it then superimposes onto products or social goods ready to be consumed. This gives advertising an important role in social change as it transforms ideas and influences the behaviour of certain social groups (Alvarado, 2005).

The advertising discourse, especially in its commercial form, not only manages to transform certain practices, attitudes and social structures, but also imposes and perpetuates them. For example, the promotion of tobacco consumption among women in the 1940s was not a passing trend, but rather became a habit of consumption. This is also seen in the generation and reproduction of stereotypes and social models (Feliu, 2004). Social models within advertising are frequently presented through stereotypes: thin beauty models often associated with anorexia; family models largely reflecting heterosexual co-parenting; and racial models composed of predominantly white people.

Thus, the advertising system contributes to the reproduction of certain social structures that are part of the status quo (Herman and Chomsky, 2006 [1998]). The type of status quo that advertising currently reproduces, especially in commercial advertising, is capitalist. In other words, it is based on an economic and political system that benefits powerful elites (politicians and businessmen) who, in turn, significantly control the advertising system worldwide.

This article addresses the relationship between advertising and social issues, discussing how social issue advertising can be used as a tool for change. It considers the way social change in Latin America and Mexico has been understood as a linear process of development in which ‘delayed’ civilisations must aspire to be closer to ‘advanced ones’. It goes on to contemplate how this viewpoint perpetuates racist discourses (from the 16th to 20th centuries) through the existence of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races that have structurally permeated Latin American societies. Furthermore, it analyses how these structures affect campaigns on racism, often encountering tensions when efforts for social change clash with the structures that underpin these societies.

A comparative methodology is used to analyse campaigns carried out from 2000 to 2017 to contrast the ways they address the issue of racism. This paper contemplates campaigns specific to Mexico, including the difficulties encountered and successful strategies that have been developed. It also pays special attention to how future campaign strategies can be adapted to have a greater impact on the issue of racism in Mexico.

Feliu (2004: 3) points out that the relationship between advertising and social issues can be approached from three perspectives: the social aspect of advertising; social issues in advertising; and the publicity of social issues. These are defined as follows:

Kotler and Roberto (1992) state that advertising created with the specific intention of supporting social causes is not a new phenomenon. They mention that ‘campaigns were already launched in ancient Greece and Rome to free slaves.’ Moreover, during the Industrial Revolution, campaigns were carried out in England to evade prison for debts; grant voting rights to women; and abolish child labour. They also note that in the United States, during the 19th century, notable campaigns were launched to abolish slavery, prohibit and moderate drinking and persuade the Federal Government to regulate the quality of food and pharmaceutical products.

Sorribas and Sabaté (2006) state that from the 1950s onwards, social advertising was developed in a systematic way, and Alvarado (2010: 662) affirms that this development occurred mainly in the United States, Canada and the European Union. In this regard, López de la Cerda (2004: 83) points out that it is in the 1980s when social advertising grew rapidly in so-called ‘developing countries’.

For the purposes of this article, we understand social advertising as that which seeks to: persuade or influence certain social groups or targets; modify their habits, attitudes, stereotypes or ideologies; and achieve positive social changes for the common good to improve the lives of humans and other living beings on an individual and social level (López de la Cerda, 2004; Sorribas and Sabaté, 2006; Alvarado, 2010). It could be said that, in the same way that commercial advertising is an ‘artificial accelerator of consumption’, social advertising is an ‘artificial accelerator of change’ based on its persuasive force that is expressed in two ways: persuasion and deterrence.

When communication pursues a collective interest, it seeks to achieve mobilisation as an act of freedom, starting with joining up intentions for a shared purpose through the public act of citizen participation. The objective of this type of communication is to summon and attract desire so that it partakes in the mobilisation from its own standpoint, with its own arguments and according to its own interests (Botero, 2006: 8). It is in this context that social communication requires a strategy that makes every mobilisation project understandable, and is where social advertising becomes a tool for change.

For the purposes of this study, we understand social change to be any transformation observed over time, which affects, in a permanent or provisional way, the structure and functioning of the organisation of a given community. A change occurs when the relationship models between human beings are altered, when this requires a modification in the social structure and in the meanings and values of a society (Gutiérrez, 2013). These changes can be beneficial or harmful; incremental and planned or sudden; and generated from above or from below social structures (Sztompka, 1995).

In Western European thinking, it was assumed at the end of the Middle Ages that, with rational knowledge, humans would be able to influence nature and their surrounding reality. Change, then, would manifest itself in the domination and control of nature, and by applying knowledge to achieve improvements in society (Bacon, 2000: 285). On the other hand, in cultures such as the pre-Hispanic, human beings are represented as part of a totality, thereby creating an ecosystem in which human, animal and plant populations coexist in a system of biological and energetic interactions. There is, therefore, more predisposition to change as a result of these interactions (Singer, 1991: 20).

During the last five centuries, the dominant ideology in the western world has propelled the domination and control of human beings over nature, leaving other worldviews aside. However, it should be noted that the concept of social change has been explored within different social sciences and its meaning changes depending on the ontological, epistemological and methodological approaches used (Spencer, 1864; Pareto, 1916, among others).

The current disenchantment of ideas related to modernity is evident in 21st century thinkers. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation were treated as synonymous with development and progress. Despite this, many people have been disappointed with the supposed progress of society due to various issues: the world wars, the millions of murders in local and global conflicts, unemployment, poverty, hunger, epidemics, increasing drug addiction, ecological destruction and recurring dictatorships (Alexandre, 1990:15). This overwhelming reality has replaced the concept of ‘progress’ with that of ‘crisis’. One of the consequences of the normalisation of ‘crisis’ is the rupture of optimistic narratives on social change and historical evolution (Holton, 1990: 43).

Fortunately, the concept of social change has been revamped by various decolonial movements and intellectuals, such as Quijano (2000), Dussel (2000), Mendoza (2010) and Rivera (2018), who have emphasised the contexts of domination and colonialism. They have also exposed how ‘linear processes’ were favoured with the presumption that there are some civilisations that are more developed than others; the latter, voluntarily or involuntarily, needing to attain the levels of the former. This decolonial thought, promoted from Latin America, questions European modernity by reflecting on its antithesis: the coloniality of power, knowledge and being in America, and the impact of this on the global colonial subject.

Ideas on race, held for more than five centuries, have also been reassessed. In 2000, advances in human genome studies were made public: from a genetic point of view, all people, regardless of skin colour and geographic origin, are 99.8% the same. The differences between human beings are contained in 0.2% of our genome, and it is this 0.2% that determines differences in skin colour, eye colour, physical build and size (Hoffman, 1994).

This has reconfirmed what sociology, cultural anthropology, anti-racism movements, feminist theories and decolonial theories have been asserting since the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, racism, understood according to Moreno (2016) as power and privilege relationships that distribute resources under the pretext that human differences exist and thus establish the legitimacy of some to subordinate others, persists as a sociopolitical phenomenon that permeates society. It can lead to very damaging circumstances when interconnected with issues such as poverty, gender, sexuality and migration.

Racist ideas are far from becoming extinct: as Van Dijk (2007) points out, racism is an ideology that has been deep rooted in social structures for centuries. As an ideology, it is a learning system that serves as the basis for racist and discriminatory social practices both in semiotic examples (discursive, gestural, etc.) and empirical ones (racist violence, beatings, murders, etc.). In Latin America, different studies have shown that people tend to recognise discrimination in their societies but it is not attributed to characteristics associated with race or ethnicity. Rather, it is attributed to other social conditions such as poverty, thus evidencing the denial of racism (Van Dijk, 2007). As Dulitzky (2000) points out:

In Latin America, where racism surged as a result of colonial processes, racial categories are not always easily identifiable since they are interchanged with socio-cultural categories. However, membership to a certain racial or ethnic group predicts the quality of life its members will enjoy; a clear indicator of racism and discrimination (Zárate, 2009).

In social issue advertising, racism is an ideological system with deep social, political and historical roots. Considering its extensive timeline, it is fair to say that it has only recently been given the attention it deserves. According to Kotler and Roberto (1992), it is not until the 1990s when more campaigns on racism began to appear in various countries.

In order to discern the strategic approaches and contexts of campaigns against racism in Latin America over recent years, an internet search was carried out to identify institutional or social campaigns concerning racism in Latin America from 2000 to 2017. Thirty-five campaigns were identified and classified using a systematic comparative methodology. This research process is based on the differentiation of phenomena in order to establish similarities and differences; identify common elements and regularities between different cases (or their differences); establish limited generalisations; and, thus, reach more comprehensive explanations of past or present phenomena (Makón, 2004: 8). It is systematic because the number of case studies is defined (Julià: 1989: 76).

Table 1 (in Appendix 1) lists the campaigns identified along with their slogans and information on who created them. It shows that of the 35 campaigns on racism reviewed,1 20% were launched between 2000 and 2010, while 80% were carried out during the following seven years, from 2011 to 2017. The highest concentration of campaigns was in 2011, representing 25.7% of the total identified. This shows a clear upward trend in placing racism on the agenda in public opinion and the international arena. Notably, in 2001, the International Year of Mobilisation against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance were celebrated in addition to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa. At this conference, states were specifically urged:

The UN Assembly declared the period from 1995 to 2004 as the Second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People. 2011 was proclaimed the International Year for People of African Descent; the period from 2015 to 2024 the International Decade for People of African Descent; and 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages.

Table 1 also reveals that 37.1% of the total number of campaigns reviewed were carried out by governments; 28.5% by non-governmental organisations or institutions; 14.2% by governments in alliance with organisations; 11.4% by agencies and international organisations; and 8.5% by international agencies in alliance with other organisations. In other words, governments, both alone and within alliances, promoted 42.7% of the campaigns, whilst international agencies and organisations, both alone and in partnerships, accounted for 20%. Figure 1, that is shown below, exhibits the images of some of these campaigns. (See Figure 1).

In comparing the campaigns (see Table 2), various factors were considered: the way racism was perceived in the campaign (stance on skin colour, discrimination vs. racism, racism and intersectionality, etc.); the campaign’s target group (specific groups, racist people, people who suffer the consequences of racism, the general population); and the campaign’s aim (raise awareness, persuade, make a call to action, etc). The campaigns were grouped under the following headings: (See Table 2).

The first line on Table 2 shows racism in soccer as constituting 20% of the campaigns. Soccer games are public spaces in which racist insults towards players, generally Afro-descendants, frequently arise. However, it is striking that Latin American campaigns on the subject are only enunciative with slogans such as ‘Report Racism in Soccer’, ‘Stop racism’, and ‘Say no to racism’. Only the ‘#WeAreAllMonkeys’ (2014) campaign carried out by Dani Alves and Neymar, both Brazilians playing for F.C. Barcelona at the time, went beyond the ‘Stop racism’ line to generate concrete action. This campaign arose as a response to a banana thrown at Dani Alves in the stadium which he picked up and ate. Consequently, Neymar took a video of himself eating a banana with his son which went viral and was replicated by several players eating bananas as an act of solidarity.

Table 2 also reveals two positions the campaigns took concerning the way people are treated based on their skin colour and physical characteristics. On the one hand, there were six campaigns whose message stated that skin colour shouldn’t make a difference in the way people are treated; underlining a message of equality instead of difference. Examples of this include the Bolivian campaign with its slogan, ‘We are closer to being alike than different, it is our obligation to treat each other equally’ (2011); the campaign against racism in Uruguay with its slogan ‘Skin colour does not say who we are, racism does’ (2011); and the UN campaign, ‘Let’s fight against racism’ that took place in various Latin American countries including Mexico in 2011, with its slogan: ‘Appearances are deceiving. Let’s fight against racism!’.

On the other hand, there are five campaigns explicitly addressing the way people are treated differently due to the colour of their skin and physical characteristics. In many cases, these campaigns also state that it is important to understand why this difference occurs in order to be able to change it. Several campaigns carried out in the last decade have such an approach, for example, the Brazilian campaign developed by UNICEF ‘For a childhood without racism’ (2010) which highlights the diverse life conditions of children according to their skin colour and heritage. The campaign ‘Racism in Mexico’ (2011), carried out by 11.11 Social Change for the Mexican Council to Prevent Discrimination (hereafter, CONAPRED), intended to replicate ‘The Doll Experiment’ carried out by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the United States in 1939 in segregated schools, under the title ‘Viral Racism in Mexico’. Similarly, the campaign ‘This is how we experience racism’ (2014), carried out by the Collective for the Elimination of Racism in Mexico, COPERA, with the hashtag ‘#WeAreRacistsWhen’, invited people to create signs about racist experiences. The Brazilian campaign ‘Feel it under your skin’ (2015) argues that ‘You can’t fight that which is said not to exist’, and the Bolivian campaign was designed to enforce the law against racism and discrimination in Tarija (2015), promoted by the Vice-Ministry of Decolonisation.

Another focus observed in the campaigns is to approach racism within a wider discussion of discrimination rather than address it as the main issue. As previously mentioned, this form of campaign highlights the way racism is denied in Latin America. Five of the seven campaigns identified in this category are Mexican, and they will therefore be further analysed later in this paper. The other campaigns in this category include the ‘National Campaign against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination from Dominican Republic’ (2006) with the slogan ‘For a multicultural world, without discrimination; Let’s celebrate diversity’, addressing ideologies of multiculturalism and diversity (UNESCO, 2001). Similarly, the campaign promoted by Amnesty International in Paraguay using the slogan ‘Death treats us all equally, life should too’ (2012) refers to categories of rich or poor, heterosexual or homosexual and black or white, all without naming racism as the issue.

On the other hand, there are five campaigns that specifically name racism and include a ‘call to action’. These campaigns, with the exception of one, were implemented within the last decade:

In the campaigns referring directly to racism against Afro-descendants, including the two campaigns in Colombia in 2009 and 2015 and the ‘Communication Campaign for the International Year for People of African Descent’ (2011) in Ecuador, the campaign dates clearly correlate to the UN Declaration on the 2011 International Year for People of African Descent and the International Decade for People of African Descent from 2015 to 2024. In Mexico, these declarations have led to clear actions and campaigns to support this population. Several of these campaigns and activities relate to censuses and Afro-descendant populations in countries such as the Dominican Republic, Chile, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador and, recently, Mexico.

Finally, Figure 1 highlights two campaigns whose strategies, at least until April 2017, were the least common for messages about racism in Latin America. First, the Ecuadorian campaign ‘Together in Diversity’ (2011) with the slogan: ‘For an Ecuador free from racism (let’s not discriminate against the racist)’. In this campaign, the focus shifts from the person who suffers racism to those who exercise it in attempt to increase their self-awareness. This is a very original and interesting campaign in terms of its approach to the subject. The other example is the Guatemalan Campaign ‘My commitment is’ (2017) promoted by Tzununija, OxFam, RedNovi, KALA, and AMUTED. The underlying message of this campaign is: ‘My commitment is to end violence and racism against indigenous women’ intersecting racism and sexism. This was the only campaign that had an intersectional slant, understood as the multiplicity of the personal and collective oppressions and power relations that exist in our daily lives (Crenshaw, 1991). This is one of the main areas of work pending in Mexico’s anti-racism agenda.

As seen in Table 1, campaigns on racism in Mexico begin a decade later than in other Latin American countries. These campaigns started in 2011 and, by April 2017, nine campaigns had been implemented. These campaigns can be grouped into four strategic approaches on racism:

Half of the above campaigns produce a rhetoric of discrimination in order to avoid directly addressing the issue of racism. This avoidance lies within the historic denial of racism in Mexican society. As Moreno (2012: 19) points out, deracialisation, the process of racial and racist normalisation, has allowed Mexican people to express and be convinced that in Mexico there is no racism because ‘we are all mestizos and we are mixed’. Subsequently, Mexican people do not often consider themselves as racial subjects, but as national and citizen subjects. Of course, in this miscegenation there are some mixtures that are ‘better’ than others. It is enough to review the colonial caste system (Navarro, 1989) to understand why there are still expressions in Mexico such as ‘We must improve the race…’.

As the Collective for the Elimination of Racism in Mexico, COPERA (2016) states, Mexican miscegenation is anti-colonial, which is not the same as anti-racist.

The position of the Mexican state and its public policies, until recently, also denied the existence of racism. An example of this is the Declaration of the Mexican government before the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) at the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1996. Here, the Mexican representative declares the following in reference to the armed uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994; a breakthrough in the visibility of the indigenous population in the country:

In other words, it was a matter of poverty and marginalisation alone rather than racism; a belief still strongly supported by various social sectors in Mexico and Latin America.

The National Survey on Discrimination in Mexico (hereafter, ENADIS) indicated in its 2010 results that 61.5 million people (54.8%)3 stated that others were insulted because of the colour of their skin, and 16.8 million people (21.5%) felt that their rights had not been respected due to the colour of their skin (CONAPRED, 2010). Yet, it is striking that just one year later, the campaign ‘Racism in Mexico’ (2011) and more specifically the video ‘Viral Racism in Mexico’, viewed more than 6 million times on YouTube, generated such a strong debate about whether or not racism even existed in the country.

According to the National Institute of Indigenous Languages, Mexico currently has an indigenous population of 25 million people and, according to the 2015 Intercensal Survey of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, an Afro-descendant population of approximately 1.5 million people. According to this survey, 1.725 million people speak Nahuatl in Mexico. However, this language, which is not studied in public schools, is at risk of extinction along with 51 more indigenous languages in the country.4

Accordingly, the campaigns conclude that skin colour and phenotype influence the way people are treated. The campaigns make an important contribution to increasing the possibility of social change in relation to racism in Mexico. These campaigns encourage a discussion on structural racism, privilege and pigmentocracy, defined as the relationship between skin tone and symbolism in any given social context or power relationship (Lipschütz, 1975). In an ideal world and within many campaigns, skin colour and physical characteristics should not affect the way people are treated. As demonstrated in the 2011 Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA), the 2015 Social Mobility Survey and the 2010 and 2017 National Discrimination Surveys (ENADIS), however, this ideal is not the reality.

In this sense, society must accept and highlight that there are structural and systematic exclusion practices that are activated in response to values given to facial features and body characteristics (Moreno, 2016). Sizing and naming the problem and its origins facilitates work on racism by deconstructing the idea of aspirational whiteness, an idea still so widely used and exploited by commercial advertising in Mexico, and breaking down the idea of a one-directional path of development.

As mentioned in this paper, Mexico implemented campaigns on racism almost ten years after other Latin American countries. Nevertheless, the campaigns, books, research papers, media coverage and workshops on racism that have emerged in the last decade have pushed Mexico’s anti-racism agenda in a positive direction. However, there is still a long way to go to see real social change.

This paper has described some obstacles and recommendations in respect to the design and implementation of campaigns against racism in Mexico, ones which can be extrapolated to Latin America in several cases.

Among the most common obstacles facing social issue advertising campaigns are:

Short-termism and the lack of continuity prevent the design of mid and long-term campaigns, with short-term campaigns being the norm in Mexico. The duration of a campaign and its repetition are key factors required to raise awareness, motivate action, change an established habit or acquire a new one, and this can rarely be generated in a short-term way (Alvarado, 2010).

The lack of campaign continuity is what Feliu (2014: 10) refers to as ‘the excessively conjunctural nature of social advertising’. As such, underscoring the need to establish a communication policy that discourages social issue campaigns from responding to public opinion image interests or serving a media agenda rather than collective needs. As an example, CONAPRED’s campaign following the ‘Viral Racism in Mexico’ was based on discrimination rather than racism, thus breaking the continuity of the message.

The lack of evaluation and systematisation of social campaigns, at least in the case of Mexican advertising, means that experiences are lost and the same mistakes are repeated. The culture of recording, evaluating and systemising institutional and social campaigns in Mexico is less than 20 years old. It is necessary to promote research on social issue campaigns and evaluate them, as is already happening in other places.5

Finally, the use of advertising for social and non-electoral purposes makes it necessary to differentiate between institutional or governmental advertising (whose purpose is to communicate public policies or social issue messages for the collective benefit) and electoral advertising, whose purpose is to obtain political power (Fernández Guerra, 2007). Unfortunately, it is very common for electoral campaigns to continue when a government has been elected. Thus, social issue advertising is used as a pretext to promote a hidden agenda such as continuing to endorse those who hold public office or government.

These three obstacles have undoubtedly been present in campaigns on racism in Latin America, making their role as social change agents even more complex.

Regarding recommendations and strategies in the design and implementation of campaigns on racism, the following are worth mentioning:

The author’s experience reveals that a greater number of allies implies greater potential for resonance, but also greater possibilities of conflict due to personal agendas and different approaches to the subject. Therefore, it is necessary to coordinate and establish written agreements detailing the commitments, dates, responsibilities, execution and delivery of results. If this is achieved, and voices are unified, there is a much greater chance that the message will get through successfully.

Finally, campaign impact measurement observes to what extent the campaign message impacts people’s attitudes or beliefs (Donovan and Vlais, 2006). This provides very valuable information regarding possibilities, times and strategies for generating social change engaging with racism.