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 Books, 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.

Review:

"Shalini Shankar gives us a vivid, sharply observed dispatch from the place where multicultural marketing meets the pieties of a putatively postracial America. To her enormous credit—and our great illumination—she effaces neither the open-endedness of advertising practice nor the structural persistence of racist effects. Critical rather than polemical, Shankar's stance exemplifies the ethnographic ethos at its finest." (William Mazzarella, author of Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity)

"Advertising Diversity combines the analytic dexterity of a talented cultural interpreter and the careful and nuanced vision of an accomplished ethnographer. Shalini Shankar has written a stunning study of the inner workings of capitalism's nervous system: corporate America. As such, she offers a virtuosic yet sobering exploration of the competing discourses, intents, aspirations, and creative impulses that go into the process of producing the advertising copy of a consumable image of multicultural USA." (Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0822358778
• ISBN 13: 9780822358770
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328