I interviewed high school students on behalf of a university’s recruitment department.  The students all described how to do a recruitment ad visual.  “There has to be at least one Latina, one Black girl, maybe too, an Asian guy, maybe a white guy but he shouldn’t be too white, like a white guy with dreads…that’s perfect.”  They all laughed at how much of a predictable formula is being followed here.

The Baby Boomers who create these ads still congratulate themselves on how little they resemble Archie Bunker.  The Millennials for whom they are created are bored and unimpressed with them.

Millennials live in a profoundly different world than Boomers.  Intermarriage, marrying someone of a different race or ethnicity, is now double what it was in 1980.  If you interview Millennial early adopters, you’ll find that they invariably are not only interested in cultures other than their own, they actively seek to be influenced and personally changed by those encounters.

Let’s call it EthnoPloring.

This challenges a lot of conventions that arose in Boomer culture.  “Multicultural” advertising budgets are often just another effort to buy market share by being patronizing rather than really doing something relevant within the culture.  And they often unconsciously rely on a premise of ethnic insularity when Millennial culture is going the opposite way. 

Benetton’s recent advertising is an interesting case in point.  The United Colors racial diversity idea of the eighties and nineties is now in the background: it’s understood, implicit.  It is subordinate now to a fashion idea: “Undercolors of Benetton.”