Advertising in Asia targets transnational culture

CONTACT: B.J. Almond
PHONE:
(713) 348-6770
EMAIL: balmond@rice.edu

ADVERTISING IN
ASIA TARGETS TRANSNATIONAL CULTURE
Rice University receives grant from
Luce Foundation to study ad campaigns’ effects

Americans who still
think of Asians as primarily having “exotic” or traditional “oriental” values
might be stuck in the 20th century.

Researchers at Rice
University in Houston are in search of a more contemporary — and accurate —
perspective on Asian culture, and they believe it can be found in the messages
conveyed through advertising there.

With a three-year
$150,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, Steven Lewis, Benjamin Lee and
Richard Smith are researching how civil society is marketed in a transnational
China.

“The rapidly increasing
circulation of people, commodities, technologies and ideas among Chinese
societies made possible by globalization is changing Chinese culture in
fundamental ways,” said Lewis, senior researcher for the Transnational China
Project (TCP) at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Lee, a
professor of anthropology, Smith, the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of
Humanities in the Department of History, and Lewis lead the TCP as part of a
broader, interdisciplinary effort to explore the changes in contemporary culture
caused by globalization.

“With the end of Cold
War rivalries and the opening up of China, distinctly transnational Chinese
middle and upper classes are emerging,” said Lewis.

Smith, a historian,
agrees. “This pioneering research, spearheaded by Dr. Lewis, has prompted me to
think far more carefully about the relationship between public images and
personal identity, not only in modern and contemporary China, but in premodern
China as well,” Smith said.

Lewis is intrigued by
the changes he has observed in ads geared toward the “jet-setting Chinese middle
class” and wonders whether the new lifestyle advertising campaigns could result
in political identities that are no longer national.

A traditional ad for a
sports drink, for example, might picture national gymnastics athletes in front
of a Chinese flag, appealing to nationalism and suggesting that people should
buy the drink because all Chinese people use the product.

A more trendy ad for an
airline, however, might feature a young, affluent Chinese couple eating Italian
pasta, watching an American movie and getting ready to fly off to Bali. Rather
than emphasize such traditional values as hard work and perseverance, the ad
appeals to a lifestyle that embraces cultural products from all around the world
and implies that a more modern person is not afraid to try things outside the
country.

For the research, the
three have collected several thousand images of billboard-like ads found in the
subway stations of Beijing, Fukuoka, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Seoul, Singapore,
Taipei and Tokyo. Those ads have been translated and coded by Rice undergraduate
student Michelle Lin (class of 2001) and Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of
Management student Arthur Yan (class of 2003). Baker Institute research intern
David Ho (class of 2002) has also provided background research on Chinese
advertising and survey research firms.

Because the ads are
useful for student analysis of changing values in Chinese societies, Shisha van
Horn in Rice’s Classroom Technologies Services is constructing an interactive
archive of the images that will help Lewis in teaching an experimental seminar
this semester called
“Transnational China.”

After the archive and
database are constructed, Lewis, Lee and Smith will contact the individuals and
companies that produced the ads to determine what their intentions were,
including the values honored by the ads and their relation to nationalism. The
final portion of the three-year project will entail surveying consumers in China
to determine whether and how they may have been influenced by the ad campaigns.
The analysis will be conducted by Rice faculty and scholars at institutions that
are part of the TCP’s network: the University of Hong Kong, National Tsinghua
University, MIT, and the Chinese and Shanghai academies of Social Sciences.

Lewis noted that
Westerners in general seem to forget that 75 years ago, during the era of
globalization and rapid circulation among Asian societies, the great
cosmopolitan centers of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo were created; instead,
they think about the five decades of isolation of populations under the great
nation states during the worldwide economic depression, colonialism and
war.

“Now we have returned to
a period of looser boundaries and much interaction among societies in Asia,”
Lewis said. Smart advertisers are well-aware of that change, as evidenced by
campaigns that target a new generation of “Pan-Asian” young people who identify
less with national culture and more with middle-class, transnational tastes and
preferences–a blend of European, Asian and American values, Lewis
added.

If such advertising
efforts are effective, “the ability of nation states to mobilize populations for
economic development, international conflict and other causes will be affected,”
he said.
“We were awarded this grant because we were able to show the Luce
Foundation that interdisciplinary research and pedagogy are a hallmark of Rice
and the Baker Institute,” Lewis said. “Unlike most larger universities, Rice can
quickly form informal groups of faculty to pioneer collective
research.”

The Henry Luce
Foundation, established in 1936 by the late Henry R. Luce, co-founder and editor
in chief of Time Inc., supports programs focusing on American art, East Asia,
higher education, theology, public policy and the environment, and women in
science and engineering. The foundation is supporting this research by Rice
faculty to help Americans better understand how globalization is affecting
traditional notions of national and collective identity in China and other parts
of Asia.

More information on the
TCP’s research and pedagogical support programs can be found on the project’s
award-winning, bilingual Web site, <www.ruf.rice.edu/~tnchina/>.

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