Advertising Diversity and profits climb as firms cash in on change

Sarah Pochin's claim on Saturday that she was driven mad by "seeing adverts full of black and Asian people" might have seemed like another hard right hard sell from a politician who used one of her first sessions in parliament to ask Keir Starmer if he'd "ban the burqa".

- Lanre Bakare

This time, the Runcorn MP was later forced to apologise, saying her comments about advertising were "phrased poorly", but as well as highlighting what the prime minister described as Pochin's "racist" views, they also pointed to a very real change the advertising sector has seen in the past five years. It is true that, since 2020, there has been a noticeable increase in the representation of black people in UK adverts.

Data from Channel 4's Mirror on the Industry report showed there was a spike of representation following the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020, when many industries - including advertising were criticised for poor representation after the murder of George Floyd in the US.

In 2020, 37% of UK adverts featured black people, with the proportion increasing to 45% in 2021 and 51% in 2022 before a decline in 2023 to 49%. The 2021 census showed 4% of the population of England and Wales is black.

Since the BLM protests, black people remain the best represented group in advertising relative to their population size, but brands can still become unstuck when it comes to how they are depicted.