In order to understand the implications of Others in advertising, It is first necessary to understand the ways in which the Other isrepresented. In the new symbolic resurrection of Otherness, race and ethnicity have tended to fell into two modes of representation: Exotification and Normalization. I will briefly discuss the structures and systems inherent in these different forms of Otherness and explore how they relate to larger modernist and postmodern discourse. Hopefully, this will springboard into how these binary representations are both changing and staying the same, and the spaces in which the meanings in these ads can be challenged or changed when they are received.

Historically, race and ethnicity have traditionally been framed as the exotic and unwanted Other. Although the repulsion from these images may have changed, the mode in which they are represented has not. Contextualized by exotic costumes and distant places, the Other is often made to signify a distinct ethnic identity. Color is assumed to have an indexical relationship to culture in that the signifier is chosen to refer to a specific set of meanings. This is a modernist mode of representation. The Other is shown to have a direct connection to a distant and distinct time and place. This modernist relationship between the signifying Other and his/her signified culture assumes an authenticity in the image. It relies on the fact that the reader perceives both the relationship and the representation to be real, and values the authenticity suggested by it. It also relies on the fact that we buy into their construction of the culture. The exoticism in these ads is dependent on the belief that the Other is inherently different and distinct because if they were not, and if for heavens forbid they were at all like us or a part of the same global systems we were, their value as an Other would be minimized.

The alternative to this mode of representation of Otherness is a normalizing frame that shallows any difference to surface. Costumed in the context of dominant, white middle-class culture, Others are used not to signify a distinct culture, but to illustrate their ability to adapt to another's through the chosen commodities. Their value lies no longer in their difference from the others in their ad, but from other advertisements. Color thus is not an indexical referent to culture, but an intertextual marker of diversity. Read in this way, these types of normalizing ads are a type of post-modern representation. Race becomes a floating signifier without a root in a signified ethnicity and without a suggestion of an assumed authenticity. It may rely on signifiers to gain its difference (ie, the reason the ad stands out is that we recognize color as an Other) but it simultaneously denies it. It shallows it of inherent meanings and instead suggests there are none. Although this phenomenon is most clearly evident in ads where non-white models appear as tokens in larger white groups, I would argue this is also the case in the new trend of showing individual non-white models. Single non-white models in predominately white media are almost always situated in a background devoid of cultural meaning and removed from similarly colored people that could give clues to larger racial relationships. Alone, these models are not necessarily white-washed of a culture, but they are denied a context. This may to some be an improvement of exotic Otherness, because it no longer suggests there is an indexical relationship between color and culture, but there is simultaneously a denial of historical, class, cultural and social difference. It may reject the "authentic", but it is no less distortive in its presentation of the real. Race may not have any inherent meaning in itself, but it still a social fact with real implications for class and race relations.

Because our media and our advertisements are becoming the primary modes of socialization in our society, the repercussions of these appropriations are immense. Neither the stereotyping of caricatured cultures seen in modernist exoticism nor the whitened "I don't see color" ads of normalization offer an adequate representation. Fortunately, although these are the dominant forms of the day, as with most else in the market, they are also being overly-saturated and encouraging more diverse ranges of representation. However, just because some of the forms have changed, does not necessarily mean the content has. Most of these ads rely on the previous exoticized and normalized images for meaning and are usually no more revealing of advertising's ideologically constructed discourse.

A case in point is the current Sprite Campaign. With the slogan "Image is Nothing, Thirst is Everything" Sprite uses black urban spokesman to play off social conceptions of class, color and commodities. Three black basketball players break out of urban slang to question their acting performance in British accents and a white kid jokes about Penny Hardaway being his cousin to a black kid who claims that Grant Hill played the guitar at his Bar Mitzvah. Both mock the assumed relationship between the signifiers of black urbaness and their traditional signifieds. They also do so without assuming a white neutralization of black culture and difference. However, while the ads may question these modernist meanings, they simultaneously rely and promote them. The joke in the ads lie in the fact that of course black urban teenagers don't speak in Old English and the black kid could not possibly be Jewish. And though Sprite's slogan suggests self-reflexivity and honesty by admitting that their product can not provide you with a new image, their constant use of black spokesmen and urban signifiers suggests the opposite. If their were no value in the image of the exotic Other, than their ads would have no effectiveness. Sprite's newest ad even falls deeper into this trap as they show a black model talking slang with his friends as they walk through their urban neighborhood. ((Moving Ad?))The guy leaves his friends to "to do his thang" and we watch him enter the backstage of a modeling show, refuse to put on make-up and strut down the runway. Music stops, heavy deep bass kicks in and we watch the photographers go crazy over his brooding, exotic, authentic blackness. Sprite may be intending to mock this photographers exoticism, but they confirm their own role in promoting it by relying on the familiar codes of street authenticity. By saturating the commercial with urban signifiers like pavement, street slang, brownstone buildings and the model's natural, no make-up, magnetism, Sprite hypes the very pretense of authenticity that it claims to critique.

For all of the above analysis, I have been focusing primarily on the use of non-white Others in mostly white media. This is important because no ads exist upon themselves and all rely on the readers interpretation to have meaning. Although most ads may have intended meanings, different people read ads in different ways. This is particularly true in the use of culture in that people familiar with the appropriated ethnicity may have radically different readings than the ones that these ads may be aiming themselves towards. Same goes for many advertisement in mediums that are more popular in black communities like UPN, WB, or black music magazines. Black models in black mediums have very different significance and signifieds than the ones selected to appear in many white productions. I have focused this analysis on the latter because it where race is used to represent the Other, rather than the Self. The dynamics involved in these representations are not as much about alreadiness as they are about difference. This makes for important power plays between not only our view of the Other, but our perception of ourselves.