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

Shankar, Shalini

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822358778 ISBN 13: 9780822358770

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822358778
• ISBN 13: 9780822358770
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 326
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande