Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers - Softcover

Shankar, Shalini

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822358778 ISBN 13: 9780822358770

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2015

Synopsis

In Advertising Diversity Shalini Shankar explores how racial and ethnic differences are created and commodified through advertisements, marketing, and public relations. Drawing from periods of fieldwork she conducted over four years at Asian American ad agencies in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Shankar illustrates the day-to-day process of creating and producing broadcast and internet advertisements. She examines the adaptation of general market brand identities for Asian American audiences, the ways ad executives make Asian cultural and linguistic concepts accessible to their clients, and the differences between casting Asian Americans in ads for general and multicultural markets. Shankar argues that as a form of racialized communication, advertising shapes the political and social status of Asian Americans, transforming them from "model minorities" to "model consumers." Asian Americans became visible in the twenty-first century United States through a process Shankar calls "racial naturalization." Once seen as foreign, their framing as model consumers has legitimized their presence in the American popular culture landscape. By making the category of Asian American suitable for consumption, ad agencies shape and refine the population they aim to represent.

About this title

About the Author

Shalini Shankar is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley, also published by Duke University Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Advertising Diversity

Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers

By Shalini Shankar

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5877-0

Contents

PREFACE, 
INTRODUCTION The Pitch, 
CHAPTER 1 Account Planning, 
CHAPTER 2 Creative, 
CHAPTER 3 Account Services, 
CHAPTER 4 Production and Media, 
CONCLUSION Audience Testing, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
APPENDIX 1 Transcription Key, 
APPENDIX 2 Asian American Populations in the United States, 
NOTES, 
GLOSSARY, 
REFERENCES, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Account Planning

Having won the account for continuing business with the Chinese American market and launching the client's brand into Korean and Asian Indian "segments," the real work of making U.S. Census categories such as "Asian Indian" and "Korean" into effective messaging was about to begin. Which in-language and in-culture insights would work best for each ethnic group being targeted, and could a single creative concept be modified to reach all three? The account director, Sheng Li, posed these questions to the broader team, encouraging them to keep the very different segments of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian in mind when generating the creative concept. During the pitch George, the client, had reminded them that he is "ethnic," identifying his Hispanic heritage, but added, "Eighty percent of our guys are white guys. I mean no disrespect, it is what it is." He told the team that creative executions made by the Hispanic agency he worked with were also questioned and critiqued, and he primed Asian Ads to be as clear as possible in their presentations. George emphasized how important this was given the recession, as his company was still assessing its budget for multicultural advertising. Sheng Li reminded his ad executives that this was a major creative opportunity for the agency and that they had to launch the brand as strongly as possible in each segment of the Asian American market. He added that it was a major opportunity to introduce a brand through targeted advertising to particular ethnic groups and that it afforded creative possibilities that they did not have when they worked with the broader category of Asian American. As they nodded and considered this possibility, he reminded them of a recent promotion they had done for a home improvement store client, in which each of the three multicultural agencies was asked to provide a list of appropriate appliances that matched the price point for their ethnic audiences. During the joint conference call, that client had bluntly stated, "Asians prefer high-end appliances like Samsung or Electrolux, while African American and Hispanic probably prefer Whirlpool." Momentarily stunned, Asian Ads executives protested, "But it's a giveaway! All segments want good things!" The client quickly offered a detailed explanation of how each ethnic segment was willing to pay a different amount of tax on these appliances, and concluded, "We don't want to give them something so expensive that they look at the tax they have to pay on it and won't want it anymore. Ultimately we want to give them the context for buying power." Emphasizing the buying power he and other Asian American ad executives believed their audiences to have, Sheng Li reminded the team to play up this attribute in their creative.

* * *

Assumptions like these about the upward mobility and high per capita income of Asian American consumers, as well as how particular brands might resonate with specific Asian ethnicities in the United States, were not only common but also largely generated by Asian American ad executives themselves. Regardless of whether this agency was working on a pan-Asian promotion like the one for appliances, or the brand launch for a specific Asian ethnic group that Sheng Li asked his team to work on, the agency had to use available data about these populations to create meaningful cultural and linguistic representations. Careful manipulation of U.S. Census data and market research has allowed Asian American advertising to grow and flourish over the past three decades. This process has likewise contributed to shaping racial meanings about the category of Asian American in media and in the advertising industry.

This chapter considers issues of biopolitics and racialization by examining transformations of the census category Asian American into its current iteration as cultural and linguistic representations in multicultural advertising. Asian Americans have had a small but noteworthy presence in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, and media representations of them in each time period reflect political and social views about their economic and social status in the United States and are influenced by U.S. foreign relations, immigration laws, and regional economic landscapes. My discussion correlates major developments of the advertising industry with Asian immigration and public policy. Looking in particular at social representations relevant to advertising, I consider how advertising has naturalized meanings of race for Asian Americans during different periods and how it has done a great deal of work toward manufacturing and circulating representations that align with geopolitical events and economic trends. I draw on numerous meticulous textual analyses of Asian Americans in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century advertising to contextualize the current work of creating Asian American advertising. The second part of the chapter focuses on the rise and development of Asian American advertising and its connection to other multicultural advertising that targets specific ethnic and racial populations, especially African American and Latino consumers. I consider how Asian American ad executives engage with the very categories that shape their industry, especially Asian American, and the shifting collection of nationalities and ethnicities it contains. Through careful and selective rendering of the U.S. Census and other data, Asian American advertising has not only emerged but has faced economic downturns and found new ways to extend its reach and expertise.

CAPITAL, BIOPOLITICS, AND RACE

The category of Asian American has shifted and transformed in light of numerous economic and social forces since the late nineteenth century. The U.S. Census has been the most influential entity in defining the nationalities and ethnicities that fit into this category, as census-generated categories have been influenced by a variety of political and economic agendas. The broader cycle of knowledge production about the U.S. population in service of particular economic or state agendas can be understood according to what Kris Olds and Nigel Thrift have termed "cultural circuits of capital," which I discussed in the introduction. Considering how capitalism operates cyclically suggests a feedback system in which institutions impart knowledge and improve forms of conduct in capitalism. Such "discursive-cum-practical change," they argue, has an impact on work lives as well as culture and society in a broader sense. I focus on the cultural circuits of capitalism to consider how advertising executives interpret and recast U.S. Census categories and data to suit their agendas of advertising development and production. Olds and Thrift identify how new knowledge keeps the cultural circuit of capital going, and this is certainly the case with multicultural advertising, in which each decade brings new conceptions of ethnicity and race and increasingly sophisticated demands for expertise and strategy in advertising. In this sense cultural circuits of capitalism allow for dispersed knowledge to be collected from various sources, for skills to be codified, and for large amounts of data to be made manageable and sensible.

Biopolitics is useful in understanding how ad executives use U.S. Census data to create particular assemblages that form the basis of ethnically targeted advertising. It also helps to illustrate how Asian American ad executives build on imagery such as the model minority stereotype to breathe cultural life and linguistic specificity into the characterization of particular Asian ethnic groups. How individuals are counted and classified according to racial and ethnic categories can be understood as a process of biomediation, through what Patricia Clough has described as the "biomediated body." Clough contends that racism occurs through the biomediated body "because it is a racism that is deployed each and every time a differentiation is made among and in populations, constituting additional bodies of data." She extends Foucauldian conceptions of biopolitics, such that "the biomediated body allows the raced body to be apprehended as information." This contention is in keeping with the commonly held advertising belief I observed, that racial and ethnic difference is embodied and knowable in audiences, as well as in "talent," the actors or models in the ads. While I develop this point further in chapter 3, where I consider diversity as a qualisign embodied in ad executives of Asian descent, in this chapter I seek to understand the inception of this notion and briefly review the history of these biopolitical categories. Campbell and Sitze argue for the importance of biopolitics when attending to new formulations of racism that are no longer reducible to "biological essentialism" that suggests physical specificities based on race, or even "neo-racism" based on fixed "cultural differences." Racial naturalization, a concept I presented in the introduction and develop further here, is not simply about inclusion in the United States through legal citizenship; it is also about how Asian American ad executives use their social networks to connect with a rising, trending Asia and leverage connections in ways that were not valued or even possible in previous generations.

Asia's rising global importance accounts for only part of why Asian American advertising has thrived. This advertising has also been influenced by the current status of race in American society and how society-wide racism is at times regarded as a thing of the past. In an era that the popular press has heralded and liberal academics have critiqued as "postracial," the importance of race is thought to be declining. This ideology has been further validated by the election of President Barack Obama and various right-wing policies and politics predicated on the denouncement of race-based systems of institutional preference. Michael Omi has critiqued such claims of "colorblindness," articulating Asian American perspectives on a postracial United States. This predicament stands in odd contrast to the ongoing counting and classifying done by the Census Bureau. It is also intriguing that in an era when race is being downplayed in the name of racial equality, multicultural advertising emphasizes race more than ever in the name of profitability. Indeed the postracial turn has been especially serendipitous for Asian American ad executives because it has made race safe for mainstream discussion. Ad executives emphasize that, as a race, Asian Americans are excellent consumers, and this is what makes them valued members of the U.S. economy. To put it bluntly, in order to make money, ad executives have to define, manipulate, and underscore the significance of race. To do so they must project the most attractive and appealing versions of race, those that let them play up favorable cultural and linguistic attributes compatible with brand identities, but downplay those that would threaten the status quo of an allegedly postracial America.

In a corporate world where race is largely avoided or ignored, neoliberal ideologies allow multicultural ad executives to market racial and ethnic difference through capitalism in ways that will benefit them financially. Neoliberal ideologies of race and ethnicity provide a fertile context for ad executives to produce the category of Asian American and further define the ethnic groups it contains. Under neoliberalism, meanings of race and ethnicity that are rooted in political economy are recoded simply as "differences" that can be considered equal. John and Jean Comaroff put it like this: "Here is the harsh underside of the culture of neoliberalism. It is a culture that ... re-visions persons not as producers from a particular community, but as consumers in a planetary marketplace: persons as ensembles of identity that owe less to history or society than to organically conceived human qualities." Asian, the shorthand for Asian American in multicultural advertising lexicon, is used as an aggregate category to emphasize the collective per capita income, spending power, and willingness to consume of a growing segment of the U.S. population. Asian American advertising executives construct "America" as well as "Asia" as points of contrast for how they envision their audiences. The term Asian American, first coined by Yuji Ichioka in 1968 at San Francisco State University during a third world strike, was intended to challenge racism, and its use still does in some institutional contexts, such as universities and NGOs. Corporate America, however, has co-opted the term without these political agendas. How this census-derived racial category is invoked as a whole and how it is parsed into the shifting range of ethnicities and nationalities it encompasses speak to the biopolitics of counting and transforming ethnoracial difference into profit. The type of knowledge production that Asian American advertising executives currently undertake to make this category viable for advertising is done in conjunction with other institutional practices of state knowledge production and classification.

ASIAN IMMIGRATION AND AMERICAN ADVERTISING

The advertising industry, like Asian immigration to the United States, has undergone numerous shifts and transformations, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. Prior to this time both existed on a far smaller scale. The postwar period, especially from the 1960s onward, was the most dramatic in terms of immigration as well as changes in advertising strategy and innovation in media platforms. While certainly not comprehensive, the sketch I offer here correlates demographic shifts and public policy affecting Asian Americans with commercial media development and circulation. Considered together they set the stage for the emergence of Asian American advertising in the 1980s.

Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Prior to the early twentieth century, neither Asian immigration nor American advertising had a major presence, but minor events in both suggested larger changes to come. Most Asian immigrants came for physical labor such as agriculture and mining, and waves of immigration were small, were concentrated on the West Coast, and were curtailed a few decades after they began. The first Chinese immigrants arrived during the 1780s, but the discovery of gold in California in 1848 brought a large wave. Between 1851 and 1852 alone the number of Chinese in that state grew from 2,716 to 20,026. By the time the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, over 300,000 Chinese were living in the continental United States. Several decades after the Chinese began to arrive, in 1830, Asian Indian immigration began, when Indian merchants, sailors, and indentured workers traveled on East India Company ships to North America. Most came to work in agricultural jobs in the Pacific Northwest, in Canada and the United States, especially Washington, Oregon, and California. Many hailed from colonial Punjab, a state that would be divided during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Japanese and Korean immigrants arrived late in the nineteenth century. Japanese immigrants first began to arrive between 1885 and 1895 in the regions that would become Hawai'i and parts of the West Coast, on the heels of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The first wave of Japanese immigration peaked between 1886 and 1908, and the second from 1916 to 1920. In 1882 the United States and Korea signed a treaty of amity and commerce, allowing Korean immigration to the United States, and many diplomats, merchants, political exiles, and students began visiting, but none reportedly settled. The first significant wave of Korean immigrants to the United States came in 1903, arriving in Hawai'i to work in the sugar plantations; they were introduced as strikebreakers as unrest grew among Japanese laborers. Filipinos were among the earliest to arrive in the United States, when mariners under Spanish command landed in Morro Bay, California, in 1587. The first significant influx of Filipino immigrants arrived only in the 1830s, and not on the West Coast. Hunters and trappers of Filipino origin permanently settled in the Louisiana region below New Orleans, which at the time was the busiest port after New York City. No significant Vietnamese immigration was recorded during this period, although this population too would settle in Louisiana, among other regions.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822358778
• ISBN 13: 9780822358770
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 326