A new campaign that aims to counter images of an “all white” Christmas is to be launched on Thursday to increase the number of black and ethnic minority families portrayed enjoying the festive period.

A series of images of black and ethnic minority families doing things such as wrapping Christmas presents or decorating a tree will be made available on social media platforms under the hashtag #ChristmasSoWhite in a bid to increase the diversity of holiday images.

Nadya Powell, an advertising consultant, was inspired to start the project when looking for images for a school website project on favourite things at Christmas. She was searching for snowball fights to reflect the choice of her six-year-old daughter’s friend, Sara. “I looked at white family upon white family and then looked at Sara, who is black,” said Powell. “I asked her to choose a picture, and she chose the backs of the family’s heads.

“She was not seeing anything that looked like her and I realised she never did. This beautiful little girl is growing up in a world where on a daily basis she doesn’t see people like her in any media, where a perfect Christmas is a white Christmas.”

Powell believes that Christmas has somehow become linked with the idea of white people and snow. Online searches for families wrapping presents or throwing snowballs produce results that are almost entirely white models.

Powell teamed up with Looks Like Me, a modelling agency that was started because the founder’s daughter wanted to be white “like all the girls in the magazines”, to add balance to the overwhelmingly whiteness of most Christmas images.

The group is also talking to photography distribution platforms about access to the images. Shot by the photographer Helen Marsden, the images of families will also be available on the website www.christmassowhite.com from Thursday.

The campaign has been financed so far by eight large media and marketing groups including Google, MediaCom, Saatchi & Saatchi and Edelman. In an email Karen Blackett, chairwoman of MediaCom, said: “This campaign is long overdue and is so needed.”