Advertising, The Great (Asian) American Art Form: What Possible Futures Come From Seizing the Means of Brand Production?
Here’s a bold idea already fraught with some impending criticism: advertising is a form of poetry. Maybe it isn’t impossible to conceive of, but then, what does it have to do with possible futures for Asian Americans; or any marginalized American identities for that matter?
Admittedly, it is a faux pas to answer a question with a question, however, that is what I am going to do. Consider examining the more abstract condition of our question: can advertising, itself, provide a position of meaning to imagine and deliver a genre of expression that creates possibilities for decolonizing language while affirming new and unique American identities? It’s a tough one. Let me prove it to you.
Part I: the Past
In 2015, self-expressed Muslim, queer, Pakistani-American poet and performer Fatimah Asghar shared her poem “Speak American” as a preface to her TEDx Talk entitled “We Own All the Language in the World.” The title of Asghar’s poem was taken directly from the trending hashtag at the time, “#speakamerican,” which embodied the xenophobic backlash against Coca Cola’s 2014 ad campaign #Americaisbeautiful.
What could have caused such a backlash? How about a fully rendered-and-edited vocal performance consisting of 7 multilingual performances of “America the Beautiful,” sung each time by a different bilingual American. Not only was this a key issue of the hashtag, but also many racist verbalizations of disdain for pro-Muslim American representations in the commercial. Despite this, the multiplicity of American identities represented in the ad left many, like Asghar, with a feeling she surmises in her TEDx Talk ,“it felt like we had achieved the ideal of what America is supposed to be.” However, as Asghar admits both in “Speak American” and in her TEDx Talk, ideal America can seem a very naïve desire when considering backlashes like #speakamerican still exists. Backlashes like these situate the “ideal America” as something controlled still by “traditional” American conservativisms that celebrate whiteness and the English language.
However, the #Americaisbeautiful campaign remained successful on social media throughout the duration of its advertising run, prompting the question: didn’t the ad work exactly as intended? If there is indeed an experiment engrained in the ad, was it successful? To older audiences, a closer look at the idiom of the #Americaisbeautiful campaign might seem familiar and might even be capable of explaining why the ad was so successful. The answer, in one word: Hilltop.
In 1971, advertising firm McCann Worldgroup (formerly McCann Erickson) aired a campaign known colloquially as the famous “Hilltop” Coca Cola ad. Cashing in on the potent image of the 60’s hippie movement and new age philosophy, the lyricism and folksy tune of the jingle “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” asserted a worldly philosophy: “I’d like to buy the world a home.”
Featuring a large cast of characters, and actors of many ethnicities, the television commercial attempted to represent an entire world united by love, and Coke, bringing a message to all of their families and friends back home. For Americans of the early seventies still nostalgic for “free love” in an era of disillusionment, this was an optimistic, perhaps naïve, perspective gazing towards the future of world relations for people of all nationalities. Hilltop was calling the whole world home. For many critical viewers, however, the question remained; “where is this home?” In 2014, 43 years later, Coca Cola finally delivered an answer: that home is America.
What “Hilltop” suggests is that the world wants a home to share with each other, and the #AmericaisBeautiful advertisement campaign answers 43 years later that this home is America. These ads effectively deliver the message that “America is a brand” as much as “Coca Cola is America” and “America is Beautiful.” Effectively, the success of #Americaisbeautiful lies in the ad’s ability to expand the concept of “American” and “ideal America” to include all of the identities expressed in Hilltop. The ad ultimately imagines and delivers the concept that America’s beauty comes from the multi-ethnic culture of America within the previously established framework of the brand’s association with big concepts of love, nostalgia, and home.
With that in mind, a larger question arises regarding the work of Wieden + Kennedy’s work on #Americaisbeautiful: could the American brand include queer, Muslim, Pakistani, women of color like Fatimah Asghar, for instance? If futures for these types of identities possible in advertising, let us posit this even greater question: is equality through a neo-liberal economic framework possible for marginalized Americans by seizing the means of brand production?
Part II: the Future
To answer the questions that brought us to this moment, let us return to our earlier statement: advertising is a form of poetry. Why is this an important concept? Furthermore, let us reconsider how this affects Asian Americans and other marginalized American subjects. How does considering advertising as a poetic form benefit these identities?
A possible foothold exists in Fatimah Asghar’s TEDx Talk, as she describes the performativity of poetry allowing herself as a teen to occupy her unique and uncommon identity. Asghar cites this as the inception of her love for spoken-word performance, poetry, and educating. To Asghar, the meaning of poetry is “to create something new; the ability to make.” This broad definition of poetry is able to encompass how poetry can benefit marginalized identities, giving a voice to people who wouldn’t be heard anywhere else.
To Asghar, however, poetry is even more than just a voice. Asghar speaks to her audience on her belief in poetry as something that “involves anything that is creating or making” like “gardening, or painting,” she says. Asghar relies on the words of fellow poet Terrence Hayes to better dictate her meaning. She quotes Hayes as saying “poetry absorbs all genre.” This is precisely what Asghar means when she says that poetry seemingly be anything that is creating something, that “words are our wands, we are wizards.” Under this definition of poetry, it is entirely possible that advertisements, like #Americaisbeautiful (which Asghar directly quotes), has the potential to be considered poetry.
Let’s take a step back. Advertising can be seen as a poetic form because it allows the creator to occupy an identity and a voice, and that poet has a license to create through any means possible using whatever language at their disposal. This could include visual language, or what Asghar says are “languages we don’t even know yet.” To Asghar, we literally own all the languages in the world; it is a line in her poem “Speak American” that describes the moments of solitude a Pakistani immigrant has in her own home, alone, but it also describes the infinity of meaning left to the poets of the world to create identity. That power is eternity.
However, Asghar also warns that words can be incredibly harmful, like #speakamerican. She says to her audience during the TEDx lecture, ”words are coded in histories of power.” Languages like English have long been used to oppress immigrants who do not fit the model of an “ideal American.” This means that the #Americaisbeautiful advertisement is dealing with an incredible power of language to value the multi-ethnicity of American heritage and culture, and devalue the destructive mindset of white ethno-centric America that is seen as traditional. The poetic form and style of the ad is fully capable of addressing the inequalities of representation in American media while also contemplating the incredible beauty of America’s diverse generation of children growing up in the United States today.
The effect of the #Americaisbeautiful campaign has led to other poetic advertisements that showcase through similar idioms how ideal American marginalized identities are. In 2016, Wieden + Kennedy produced another advertisement, this time for P&G, which aired during the Rio Olympics. The name of the cinematic-style advertisement was “Thank You, Mom,” focusing on several Olympic athletes and the inspiration of their success, their mothers.
It’s not surprising for Portland ad agency Wieden + Kennedy to have featured predominately again this idea of how brand identity interacts with humanity and the key elements of love, nostalgia, and home. Also heavily featured in this advertisement were non-English speaking people from around the world, representing both their nations in the Olympics as well as on screen. It’s safe to say that Wieden + Kennedy are committed to work that seeks to create meaningful idioms in their advertisements that provide a voice and a visual language with which the multiplicity of language and culture can be represented to American audiences.
In 2022, P&G brought on Asian American creative director of R/GA Leah Alfonso to develop a promotional advertisement for Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month. The end product was a short tv spot (“The Name”) in the same cinematic style as #Americaisbeautiful that told the story of a young Asian American girl named Yeong Joo and the promise of an America that would learn her name. The commercial also features an unnamed Middle Eastern girl, promoting a shared solidarity of hardship growing up as Americans with non “traditional” names. The closing to the commercial read “Belonging starts with a name.” This advertisement is especially key to understanding the poetic cinematic experience that advertising agencies have been seeking to implement.
By now, it is clear that advertising is certainly a form of poetry. Consistently the form has generated the ability to associate Asian American identity, as well as other identities, to interpret possible futures for marginalized Americans and provide a position of meaning to imagine and deliver a genre of expression that creates possibilities for decolonizing language while affirming new and unique American identities.
Part III: the Present
Hopefully a lot of discourse has been generated by considering questions of Asian American futures in advertising. However, this entire subject is a complicated argument, and therefore some criticism might be warranted. Especially considering that success in this field might open the form of advertising to the criticism that advertising cannot produce such interpreted futures because the art associates identity with a brand in order to generate this opportunity.
While the hypocrisy does exist that the art serves to sell a product, is the controversial foothold identity has in advertising enough to potentially give marginalized peoples a position of power to include Pakistani, Muslim, Queer, Women of Color in the category of “ideal America?”
In the greater discourse of Techno-Orientalism and consumer culture, there may be a future danger in commodifying Asian cultures, as in the case of Japanese art like manga and anime, as well as the consumer cultures of Asian cuisines and beverages like ramen and Boba tea. These futures tend to devalue the actual cultures presented to American markets, instead leading to capitalistic western appetites possessing the avenues of success Asian Americans have generated to become apart of the greater American fabric of culture.
These are questions that are important to consider going forward. However, for the time being, this writer maintains that advertising is an important interpreter of AAPI futures in America.
Part IV: Poetry
In her TEDx lecture, Fatimah Asghar reads her poem, “Imagined Apology from my Father.” As the title suggests, her words attempt to outlive her desires to see her father, and dream of the life she would have had with him if he had lived to see her grow up. Asghar says of this poem “grief is more than sadness, it is an echo of love. When a part of the earth is gone, it echoes absence in all the parts of our bodies.”
Asghar quotes fellow poet Ocean Vuong’s poem “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” saying “remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.” It is incredibly important to both writers that the image of their desires lives on in their poetry, so that it is not forgotten. It is also true of advertising that an image of our desires is created so we know what we want before it is gone forever.
Although we may not know it yet, the work in advertising for a future where all kinds of Americans belong is only the beginning of a greater foundation of new poetry that we will reach the entire world and teach so many to read with our hearts, while listening alone to the echoes of absence in our bodies. That is where we will know the work must continue.
