NM Tourism Dept. Responds To Race Reference In National Campaign Casting Call
The New Mexico Tourism Department is vowing to never agin use “ethnic descriptors” in its casting specifications for campaigns after a controversial ad surfaced.
Veronica Valencia, director of marketing and communications for the Department, said that’s a break from industry standards.
The change comes on the heels of controversy surrounding a recently released casting call written by a third-party contractor asking for Caucaians and “light-skinned Hispanics” only to portray tourists in an upcoming TV commercial.
“It was never our intention to make this advertising campaign about race and it’s unfortunate that this has caused a distraction from our truest intention which is just to promote New Mexico,” said Valencia.
The campaign is a $2 million branding project to include TV, print, online and billboard ads.
University of Texas at El Paso professor Richard Pineda, who has a background in media and ethnicity, said the campaign may already be tainted by all the negative attention.
“It does have some impact on the image of the state because the story after this is not going to be, ‘Look at the great advertising campaign New Mexico had.’ It’s going to be, ‘Look at this crazy process New Mexico had to (undergo for) this campaign,'” said Pineda.
Pineda said it is common for people in production to request specific types of actors for their projects. However, he said the casting call could have been misinterpreted because of race relation issues in New Mexico.
“It’s a question of some badly worded plans by the (casting) agency. This just happens to come at the same time you’ve got a lot of concerns about representation of Native Americans in New Mexico, and you’ve a got a split between Latinos and Hispanics,” said Pineda.
The campaign debuts next month.
The Tourism Department has also gotten heat for hiring a Texas agency to handle the campaign, even though two New Mexico companies were also in the running for the lucrative contract. Valencia said New Mexico companies automatically get a slight edge when competing for these kinds of contracts, but explained the Austin-based firm won the contract because it got the highest evaluation overall from her department.
