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We rarely see people exactly like us in advertising. And maybe that’s OK?

Who would ever have thought it? Channel 4 have just published the results of a comprehensive, six-year audit of British advertising, covering over 6,000 ads. It turns out that the world depicted in advertising, and the people in it, are not, in fact, statistically accurate depictions of reality. They are, instead, an aspirational reimagining of the way we’d like things to be, created to get people to engage with a brand and to persuade them to buy it.

You could have knocked me down with a feather.

So, let’s dive into the detail a little. Out here in reality-world, a lot of us carry a little more bodyweight than perhaps we ought. According to Government statistics, 64% of UK adults are either overweight or obese. In adverts, it’s just 5%. More than that, the percentage of plus-sized ad characters has fallen since 2023, when it was 13%. That was when Wynn Evans was still the face of the Go Compare campaign, before his antics on Strictly. But let’s not go there right now.

Then there’s age. Today, 14% of Brits are aged 70 or over. But, looking at the ads, you’d never know. There it’s just 2%. Then if you strip out the ads for stairlifts, mobility aids and funeral plans, older people cease to exist almost entirely. Similarly, if you’re disabled, or if you’re pregnant, then you’re not going to see many people like you in mainstream ads at all.

Moving onto sexuality: gay and lesbian men and women, and associated sexual minorities, account for 3.2% of the population, according to the report. Yet they only appear in 2% of ads. That’s a significant underrepresentation, the study says. Although my question about that would be, how do they know? I mean, obviously if you’ve got an ad where the storyline requires two people of the same sex, still in their pyjamas, to share a kiss over the breakfast table, then it would be a safe bet to say, yep, they’re gay. But someone opening a can of beans? Someone shining their pots and pans? Someone sipping a can of beer? How do you tell someone’s sexuality from that, for statistical purposes?

I’ve been thinking about that. My best bet, if I were in charge of working out that particular percentage, would be to call in the team from Netflix’s Queer Eye to review the footage. You could imagine them sitting there hooting with laughter at a particularly slobby individual: “Look at that shirt! Those shoes! That haircut! He’s got to be straight.” Then again, the decision on a character’s appearance and clothing would have been made by the casting team, so that takes us back to square one.

The report has slightly better news for some groups. But that news comes with a sting in the tail. Because if you’re from an Afro-Caribbean background, at 4% of the population, you’ll see people who look like you in an astonishing 50% of ads. This is up from an already-huge 36% in 2020. On the other hand, a lot of these people are going to be incidental characters thrown into multi-person vignettes in ads for things like insurance or furniture warehouses. You know the trope – the family all sitting round the table, with a light dusting of token minorities. I don’t know how that would make me feel if that were me. I do know how it makes some people feel – people like Reform MP Sarah Pochin, for example, who said all the Black and Asian people in ads ‘drove her mad.’ This was a statement that drove a lot of other people even madder, from the Prime Minister to MPs from her own party. Reform chairman Zia Yusuf can’t have been best pleased either.

To return to the central theme of the report: it’s becoming increasingly clear, if it weren’t so already, that what we see in advertising isn’t a reflection of us as we really are, or the world as it really is. It isn’t now, it never has been and it probably never will be. If it were so, there would be a lot more ugly people in the ads, for one thing. There would be more people with the kinds of problems that aren’t so easily solved by the act of choosing a new brand of washing-powder. There would be fewer Black people, perhaps, but the ones who were there would have better, less tokenistic parts to play. And there would be more people in houses that look, quite frankly, as messy and in need of maintenance as mine does half the time.

But that isn’t what advertising is, or how it works. Advertising works not when it portrays unvarnished reality, warts and all, and not when it portrays its opposite, an unattainable fantasy-world of pure perfection, but when it actually portrays something close to our own aspirations and our own self-image.

So, when it comes to weight, for example, most overweight people know they could probably lose a pound or two, but half of all overweight men (51%) and a third of all overweight women (30%) describe their weight as ‘about right’. Even if you put more plus-size actors in ads, a lot of plus-size consumers wouldn’t see themselves reflected in them. Similarly with age, most over-70s know exactly how old they really are, but at the same time they feel themselves to be, on average, some 12 years younger than their chronological age. A 72-year-old will often identify more with a 60-year-old character in an ad than with a fellow septuagenarian.

We all have an image of our best selves, and we see ourselves in that light.

This is why, when it comes to effective advertising, people respond best to stories that reflect the lives, challenges, hopes and dreams not of the kinds of people we really are but of the kinds of people we could scrub up to be.

And maybe that’s OK.

First published in WARC 21 November 2025.