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

Shalini Shankar’s fascinating ethnography is based upon participant observation and interviews she conducted at Asian American advertising agencies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City, where she also carried out research at “general market agencies” (p. 9) that do not specifically target Asian American audiences. She deftly explores the quotidian work involved in the development and production of race and ethnicity in American advertising and how these processes impact those involved in their creation. The book comprises an introduction, four content chapters, and a conclusion followed by two helpful appendices that provide the reader with notes on transcription and demographic information on Asian American populations. Each chapter opens with a vivid ethnographic vignette that provides the reader with a glimpse into a different stage of the advertising production process. Chapter One, “Account Planning,” provides historical context for the emergence of the prevailing contemporary paradox Shankar observed in her research, whereby “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” (p. 41). Tracing representations of Asian Americans in U.S. advertising from the late nineteenth century to the present, Shankar very effectively demonstrates that while the emergence of advertising targeted at Asian American consumers may be new, their public cultural presence and contributions to U.S. life more generally dates back centuries. Shankar argues that changing social mores related to significant migration-related U.S. demographic changes in the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and women’s increased participation in advertising all paved the way for multicultural marketing as it exists today. Yet, as Shankar discusses in this chapter, a complex set of forces inform contemporary representations of Asian Americans in advertising, including Census Bureau data, careful consideration of religious or other specific imagery, and the need to convincingly appeal to a wide audience. In so doing, advertising targeted toward (and often produced by) Asian Americans helps to create particular truths about specific ethno-racial groups as part of a process that Shankar, following the advertising executives with whom she worked, terms “transcreation” (p. 88). Chapter Two, “Creative,” explores the process that “creatives”—the industry term for advertising executives who generate the conceptual elements underlying advertisements— engage in as they attempt to attract particular Asian American consumers through the use of language, symbolism, and other in-group imagery. To successfully do this, creatives at Asian American advertising agencies must possess an extraordinary skill set that includes a “metalevel understanding of both general market brand identity and cultural and linguistic signs that will resonate with Asian American consumers” (p. 101). Ethnographic accounts presented in this chapter detail the ways in which Asian American creatives attempt to homogenize significant differences in class, gender, sexuality, and other identity variables in ways that can (and often do) reinforce patriarchal gender norms that creatives eschew in their own lives. They do so while simultaneously attempting to determine the best lexical and visual means to convey cultural authenticity even as they collapse the significant regional, class, linguistic, and other important differences between individuals from particular Asian American groups while still resonating with the intended audience.