There's a TV ad showing in some American markets that's kinda interesting. It's for Brink's Home Security.

Bedtime in a perfectly unremarkable professional-class household of 30-something parents and their two kids. Mom tells the kids to get ready for bed. Dad is brushing his teeth. This mundane tranquility is about to be disrupted. A scruffy-looking but photogenic man's face appears outside the kitchen window and unlatches it. An alarm goes off. A Brink's representative is reliably on the phone. Mom answers, saying that the alarm just went off. The phone rep reassuringly tells her that help is on the way.

The woman of the house is unambiguously shown as taking charge. Undoubtedly, it is her equivalent in the audience that the ad targets. The man has no lines and remains in the background. How cool is that!

If you haven't seen the ad, I'll let you guess the race of the family. The burglar is White. Knowing something about casting, I'm certain that there was discussion about the races of the characters and something tells me that making the burglar any shade other than White was thought to be a bad idea. Be that as it may, the color of the family is what I've been thinking about.

The product presumably works well in households of all races. So, how do you depict an everyrace family? Would a South Asian take-charge mom identify more with an East Asian, Arab or Latino counterpart? Wish I were a fly on the wall in the conference room where this was discussed. So many possible scenarios! The race picked for the family would have to appeal to all races and it couldn't be mixed-race because that would be too busy a background for effective product identification.

I am sure it took many hours of deliberation to come to the decision. What I think of it is irrelevant since I'm not a take-charge mom and I wouldn't want anything in my house that'd drive photogenic bad boys away...but that's beside the point. The choice does seem to work and it's almost impossible to imagine any other color being as universally persuasive. I am not quite sure why that is. Do we live in puzzling times or what?

--aslam

10:14:46 PM