Dear Editor,
We have read in your edition of Tuesday, September 25, 2012 a letter from Elizabeth Deane-Hughes under the caption ‘Census advertisements should have been more reflective of the diversity of the nation.‘ Tagman Media, the agency tasked with designing and implementing the public awareness/information campaign in support of the 2012 Population and Housing Census, wishes to respond to the issues raised by the writer.
In the letter, Ms Deane-Hughes posits that “…the debut public awareness advertisements could have been more reflective of the diversity of our nation.” At the outset, we wish to mention that, while Sunday was the first time that ads appeared in the newspapers it certainly was not the debut of the campaign. However, the more important issue has to do with a reflection of the diversity of our nation and the writer’s view that the images used in Sunday’s press “… limits itself to the perceptional evaluation/s of the population in this polarized time.” The fact of the matter is that three images were used on Sunday: (1) an Indian couple, (2) an Indian family, (3) an African family.
It is our conclusion that the writer may have preferred to see a group of persons made up of the six peoples of Guyana. The group of six persons’ concept, apart from trivializing the approach to any form of communications in Guyana by assuming that we cannot deliver a message using any one individual or family without offence, in our view does not work for the promotion of the census.
We take this view because the census by its very nature targets households, and families do comprise an integral component of all households. Therefore we seek to present primarily families, and sometimes individuals, in the materials.
So on Sunday, any Indian family that read the newspapers would have seen a family unit that looks a lot like theirs. Similarly, any African family that read the newspapers would have seen a family that looks like theirs. On some other day an Amerindian family or Chinese family would see a family that looks like theirs.
While we do have mixed families, and those are reflected along the way in the campaign, there is no family in this country that looks like the ‘group of six persons‘, so we have consciously and deliberately chosen to present families as they are.
More important is the fact that the newspapers represent only one facet of this multi-faceted and multi-media campaign. Our information products also appear in print at indoor public locations, on television, online, and most importantly on the roads, trails and rivers.
We are taking this campaign to the southernmost village in Region 9 (way past Lethem) and equally to the villages on the north-western coast in Region 1. We have been in the villages on the Corentyne coast in the east and are headed to the villages near the Pakaraima Mountains in the west.
On the road (roads, trails and rivers) we are delivering a lot of our information to individuals and groups through printed materials. These printed materials, by virtue of the flexibility we have, display a much broader spectrum of the peoples of Guyana. For example, we have printed materials that feature primarily Amerindians which we are using in Regions 9 and 1.
Also, we have posters that feature ‘Brazilians‘ with messages in Portuguese that we have deployed in Lethem and will also mount in selected parts of the city. And there is a poster being developed that features Chinese persons with Chinese language content.
The Portuguese and Chinese products are reflective of the fact that immigrant populations are growing and have to have equal access to information. It should be noted that growing immigrant populations will also put new pressures on what images we use in the future if we do not force some maturity in the society on this matter.
It should also be mentioned here that we have used Street Theatre in our roadshows with a cast of persons of different races.
We are confident that our campaign, taken as a whole, is very reflective of our ethnic and geographic diversity while rooted in the nature of the specific process we are promoting at this time. Remember that the census by definition is the total count, the total evaluation, and whatever images are shown in our media are intended to convey that totality – the inclusion of all in our population count, oneness in our rich diversity.
Yours faithfully,
Alex Graham
Tagman Media
