Rosa-Salas on “Race, Data, and Advertising”

Marcel Rosa-Salas, Ph.D., will be the speaker for a Mary Junck Research Colloquium talk Friday, March 1 in the Freedom Forum Conference Center. We invite faculty and students from your department/school to join us for lunch starting at noon, followed by the talk by Dr. Rosa-Salas at 12:30 p.m. A bio of Dr. Rosa-Salas is below. Please register here if you plan to attend and let Casey Hart (UNC Hussmann Graduate Studies) know of any questions.

Further Information on the Talk: 

Marcel Rosa-Salas, Ph.D.

Co-author, “The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture and Identity” (Clarkson Potter, 2023, with Isabel Flower)

Author, “Total Market American: Race, Data and Advertising” (forthcoming, Duke University Press)

American advertising has a longstanding tradition of creating and selling racial representations that are designed to provoke and persuade the public. However, the impact of race ideology in American consumer culture extends beyond the visible advertisements on television and social media platforms. The labor of producing and placing brand advertising often involves institutionalized practices of consumer research and strategy that reproduce racial theories about an ad’s target consumer.

In her upcoming book, “Total Market American: Race, Data, and Advertising,” Dr. Rosa-Salas delves into ethnographic case studies that explore the U.S. marketing industry’s endeavors to measure, theorize, and sell knowledge about racial difference to corporate advertisers as a form of expertise. By situating advertising within a centuries-long legacy of racial theorizing that has unfolded across academia, government, and big business, she illuminates consumer culture’s dual role in not only promoting products and services but also selling ideas about what it means to be a human being.