Diversity, equality and inclusion in advertising: Representations of men in effie advertisements

Although advertising is a form of commercial communication, it has the power to shape the culture with the meanings it produces. It is important how advertisements delineate different groups of society, especially women, men and disadvantaged groups. The reason for this is that the meanings that the advertisement produces and spreads about women or masculinity determine how society makes sense of femininity and masculinity. In the last decade, the questioning of the role of advertising in ensuring gender equality has brought the debates about how women and men are delineated in advertisements to the agenda again. Diversity, equality and inclusion principles are one of the approaches used to ensure gender equality in advertisements and limit representations of gender inequality. This study focused on the neglected representations of masculinity in the literature in Turkey, and it examined representations of masculinity in terms of diversity, equality and inclusiveness criteria. There has not been found any study in the literature that searches the depictions of masculinity in the axis of these criteria. Research focuses on the use of stereotypes in advertising. However, while studies on stereotypes are suitable for detecting repetitive qualities, they do not allow examining other dimensions of representations. For this reason, 20 advertisements that were finalists in the 3 product categories with the highest male protagonist usage in the Effie Turkey Advertising Event Competition 2021 were examined using the 3P scale, which makes it possible to question the advertisements on the axis of diversity, equality and inclusivity.