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26 August 2005
Unhealthy Ads Target Black and Hispanic Women
by Angie Rankman 
Several years ago, the market-research publisher Packaged Facts released a report that made many in the marketing and advertising industries prick up their ears. Entitled The U.S. Multicultural Women’s Market, the report contends that in the United States, African-American, Asian and Hispanic women are a younger, more economically dynamic group than the comparative Caucasian market. The report says that the non-Caucasian female population grew approximately forty percent - 23 million to just over 32 million - between 1995 and 2003, and exercises $723 billion in combined spending power. By 2008, it is expected that this group will have grown to 36 million, and have more than $1 trillion in retail spending power. For advertisers and marketers, the female black and Hispanic market is a gold mine just waiting to be tapped.
While advertising agencies may salivate at the idea of a new market of financially secure black and Hispanic women, the increasing wealth of this group has not been accompanied by improvements in health. In March of this year, New York City Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas R Frieden presented findings from a study entitled Women at Risk: The Health of Women in New York City. The study showed that proportionally, black and Hispanic women still experience poor health despite growing income levels. An estimated 30 percent of black women and 26 percent of Hispanic women are obese. Hispanic women have less health care coverage. And black women have a life expectancy almost 5 years shorter than their Caucasian counterparts.
Has consumer advertising significantly contributed to the poor health levels among black and Hispanic women? Some researchers think so, contending that magazines have been shown to be one of the key sources of health information for women. The study, appearing in BMC Public Health, suggests that women often make health-related purchasing decisions from magazines, making choices for themselves which can have implications for entire families. The study goes further, claiming a relationship between the growing numbers of negative health related advertisements found in black and Hispanic women’s magazines, and the health of those women.
To provide some background to their research, study leader Susan Duerksen’s team draw on numerous studies that link health information with “black attitudes towards disease, treatment, screening, and outcomes.” These studies suggest that disproportionate levels of access to health messages may significantly affect non-Caucasian “help-seeking behavior.” For example, Duerksen says that: “a disparity in access to basic information about breast cancer and mammography and in cues to screening action may contribute to the delayed detection of breast cancer in black women compared to Caucasian women. That lag in detection is believed to be one reason black women have a higher breast cancer death rate despite a lower incidence rate.” They also cite another study that researched two popular black magazines. The study found that out of the total of food and beverage ads published, the magazines devoted around 50 percent of the adverts to alcoholic beverages. By contrast, a White-oriented women’s journal dedicated only 2 percent of their advertisements to alcoholic beverages. Duerksen’s study also found that: “Black faces are more frequently used to advertise products with a negative health impact than are White faces,” and adds that this particular finding alone “deserves further research.”
“Compared to readers of mainstream magazines, readers of African American and Hispanic magazines were exposed to proportionally fewer health-promoting advertisements and more health-diminishing advertisements,” said Duerksen. This figure stands in contrast to mainstream magazines, where approximately half of all adverts are health-related, more than double the proportion in the black and Hispanic magazines.
Duerksen’s team concludes by stating that their “findings suggest that health information disparities in the advertising content of lay magazines could contribute to health disparities among women of differing ethnic communities.” It is an important finding, but it should also be remembered that advertising might better be described as a symptom of much more entrenched biases against black and Hispanic Americans. A more balanced approach to advertising may be the result of getting to some of the root causes that create minority groups within society in the first place; which includes advertising messages that have a negative bias toward women generally. While Duerksen states that more research should be conducted into advertising aimed at ethnic women, so too should further research be done on portrayals of women in advertising as a whole.
Read Duerksen’s study
Health disparities and advertising content of women’s magazines
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