Media saturation dominates in our lives. Every second of the day is a decision about what to eat, drink, wear, who to date, and how to think. 'Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun,' raps the multi-cultural cast on television. 'Drink the un-cola,' Seven-Up says. 'Get into a pair of khaki a go-go's,' Gap entices with tantalizing dancers and a catchy tune. 'The right relationship is everything,' Chase entreats. 'Think different,' Apple computers emboldens its consumers.

Ultimately, advertisers decide who we are and how we are going to live. After all, how could anybody resist Foxwoods Resorts' buoyant jingle that tells us to live for the wonder of it all. But with all this seemingly positive mantra bombarding us on a minute-by-minute basis, an image keeps playing itself over and over again in the mind of the Asian consumer—how closely do I resemble the heavily-accented and loutish, sesame-seed- bun Asian doctor from those sanctimoniously festive McDonald's advertisements?

Teenagers of the eighties were obsessed with Swatch watches. Remember those funky timepieces with the colorful rubber bands? It was all the rage of the time for Asian youth everywhere. Some of the popular kids even had the nerve to own Swatches in different colors with different colored bands and faces. Sometimes they sported five watches on one wrist. It was what separated the cool kids from the zeroes.

By the same token, yesterday's Swatch generation grew into the Gap college students who soon became the J.Crew professionals. In short, our image had been predetermined by these corporations who sought to make their brand the image of the day for every single person that their advertising dollar could reach. And heck, they did a pretty good job.

Imagine though, you're a young Asian American professional— perhaps an associate at a renown corporate law firm in New York— you're walking through the city streets feeling pretty good about yourself. The partners love the dedication you show to the firm. You and your fiancé just found your dream apartment on the upper West Side. Things are going your way. You're on top of the universe.

Between bites of an Au Bon Pain wrap sandwich during your lunch hour, you flip through an issue of Marie Claire. You come across an ad for the new Swatch Skin collection. The copy reads, "The Ultraflat from Swatch," and underneath it is a topless Asian woman wearing a scarf made out of Swatch watches, hiding the smooth silhouette of her cleavage with only her lanky arms. You're mortified. A question begins to play itself in your mind like a broken record—how closely do I mirror this woman in the ad?

You try to ignore the image of the naked and flat-chested Asian model and continue flipping the beauty pages. Quickly another picture of an Asian face greets you. She is trying on shoes, all the while seductively baring her legs. This is a routine that all women ritualistically pursue, race-irrelevant, but you look a second time at this Visa ad. Again, it's the copy that gets you. "It's a dog eat dog world. It's survival of the fittest. It's them or you…From kickboxing classes to strappy sandals. It's everywhere you want to be. Visa."

In a split second, the universe you were standing on has suddenly transformed itself into a small mound of horse dung.

"Ooh, I think that's obnoxious," says Carrie, 38, a former travel industry professional, referring to the Swatch ad. "They're making a statement that Asian people have flatter features. It's very obvious. I think both of these [ads] are obnoxious. [Referring to the Visa ad] Does that mean Asian people eat dogs? No, it's not necessary to do that," she concludes. Her friend Jasmine, 25, had a similar reaction to the advertisements. In reference to the copy in the Visa ad, she also immediately connects the Asian model to the word "dog" and says the ad "insinuates a coldness, kind of like the dragon-lady persona."

Neither woman was of Asian background.

Ning Zhang, a writer, agrees that the ads have the potential to, "perpetuate Asian… sexual stereotypes" although she admits that, "ads could be taken in so many ways."

"The problem with this ad is that the 'ultraflat' word is offensive," says Yoosoon Kim, the creative director for Kang and Lee Advertising, a top New York agency that specifically markets to Asian consumers.

Swatch representatives were quick to defend their ad campaign. "We were dismayed by your response to a recent Swatch Skin campaign… The slogan is in fact, promoting our Skin products… making this one of the thinnest plastic watches in the world. The slogan bares absolutely no relation to the physiques of the models represented in our ads," says Helena Urfer, head of public relations for the company. "This image is using models of different ethnic backgrounds, race, and gender, with different physical traits, along with partial nudity being the common denominator for an aesthetic and original campaign. For over 20 years, it has been the Swatch philosophy to celebrate diversity," she states.

But, a marketing scheme with diversity in mind requires more than colorblind casting. While it's a noble goal for any corporation to adhere to, often times the right messages get misdirected by creative professionals whose main goal is to design an innovative campaign to market the product. Sometimes, it just sends all the wrong messages.

Another ad that has Asian women feeling dismayed and repulsed is the one from Hennessy Cognac. It pictures two women, one Caucasian and one Asian, getting dressed for a night out. The copy under the blonde woman reads, "vegetarian," while the copy under the Asian woman reads, "man-eater." The dichotomy of these ideas sends an undeniable message about the predatory nature of Asian women. In all three of these ads, the less obvious commonality is that the copy relates more to the model depicted in the photographs than the product itself.

Are corporations using Asian stereotypes to market their products and services?

Hennessy could not be reached for comment but advertising executives weighed in on the advertisement in question.

InterTREND Communications, a West Coast-based Asian advertising agency reviewed these ads with their creative team. "Most said immediately that the ads were obviously created by 'white folks,' [because] the models reflected the stereotypical view of what they feel Caucasians have of Asian women—slanted-eyes, long black hair, overtly sexual in a supposedly 'Asian' way," says the agency's president, Julia Huang. Her staff further concluded that "they either look demure and subservient or dragon lady-like with hint of evilness. The latter stereotype applied to the Hennessy ad of the Asian woman being the man-eater."

"To sum it up… if the intention of the advertisers were to be inclusive, it seems that they have not succeeded," stated Huang definitively.

New York's Kang and Lee team also organized their own review session in the form of an internal focus group consisting of Asian women. Their results were similar to that of the California agency, although the New York office felt more strongly opposed to the messages in the ads. All persons in the group were unanimous in the opinion that the Hennessy ad was "very, very offensive," the most offensive amongst all the others.

"The man-eater caption has a very, very negative meaning," Kim says. "Translated in Korean, it literally means 'one who eats and swallows up man.' It's like referring to someone as a prostitute," she says. (Traditional folktale depictions of man-eating women were known as gui- shin or "she-ghosts," sexually alluring evil spirits, often with long hair, fair skin and red lips; they preyed and feasted on men.)

So if both of these advertising agencies conclude that these images are evocative of sex, evil and dragon-ladies, what are these ads saying about Asian women in general? One can always give these corporations the benefit of the doubt, as Kang and Lee's vice president of strategic marketing services, Saul Gitlin points out, "no advertiser consciously creates an ad that is offensive to a particular ethnic group." But, ultimately what matters in the end is the effect it has on the consumer, Asian and non-Asian alike. He adds to the case against Hennessy, calling the ad more "overt in creating a negative impression on women overall."

Visa representatives issued a statement about their advertisement, saying that the company, "continually strives to create culturally diverse and audience-appropriate advertising. Visa tested this ad with a range of consumers prior to publishing, and at no time did we encounter perceptions of cultural insensitivity. Our only intent was to portray the woman featured in this advertisement in the most positive light."

Still, the ad only shows the model's profile, while exposing mostly her legs and her seductively long hair. If the intent was to be positive, why use words like, "dog," and "kickboxing," to associate with the Asian model? Will Valentine, corporate relations for the credit card giant acknowledged that this particular copy was not used in any other instance or for any other model.

Huang and her staff believe that, "most of the time, the casts and models are not really woven into the lifestyle of the American society, but only as a prop to create exotic nuances. From our standpoint, we do feel that overtly emphasizing perceived 'Asian-ness' does perpetuate stereotypes… a non-Asian perception of Asian characteristics."

When a consumer is predisposed to images with questionable messages, the bottom line is that damage is being done regardless of intent. Much in the way that women everywhere feel the pressure to be thin without overtly being told that they are fat, Asians also have a similar dilemma in that Asian images used in advertising are instinctively going to attract them. So these images are out in distribution, representing the 'Asian face', and if words like 'ultraflat,' and 'man-eater' is being used to describe Asians, therein lies a problem.

"Asian Americans need to wake up and start protesting, complaining and threatening boycotts of advertisers," writes one aggrieved letter-writer, in posting on the Asian American Revolutionary Movement. "Try to jot down the number of commercials and ads and see how many of them even cast Asians in their ads, let alone positive ads. If you do see one it will be of some foreign speaking Asian cook holding a fish or some other stereotypical image. Images and ideas seen and heard over and over again influence the mind. The power of the media is HUGE…Tell the media and advertisers that we will no longer spend a single dime buying or supporting any of their products or services if they continue to feed us with negative and stereotypical views," exclaims the letter-writer.

Asians are a particularly sensitive consumer base, and the level of consciousness is raised to an even higher pitch because of the lack of positive images to balance out the ones that appear stereotypical. But, if Huang's earlier conclusion does hold true that advertisers fail to target Asians in their general audience ad campaigns, then these companies aren't exactly being business savvy in their marketing tactics.

Reports from The Selig Center for Economic Growth predict that the Asian buying power will quadruple to a staggering $454.9 billion by the year 2007, an increase of over 287 percent from the year 1990, and this number only accounts for the most heavily Asian- populated states. "Asian buying power is propelled by the fact that Asians are better educated than the average American, and therefore they hold many top-level jobs... The group's fast-paced growth…demonstrates the increasing importance of Asian consumers and should create great opportunities for businesses that pay attention to their needs," the Selig Center affirms.

Kalorama Information, a market research company in New York, also found that companies targeted the Asian consumer less than any other group in the country. They also found that television news networks—ABC, NBC and CBS—featured reports about Asians for only three and half minutes in their entire broadcast segment during a six-month time period.

It appears, then, that the goal would be to get companies to tailor the ad campaigns to include the Asian consumer, not to exclude them. The general marketing strategy, however, is a method that has already been proven to be dubious at best when applied to a specific ethnic target group.

In short, advertisers need to be able to "see" from the ethnic perspective. "These types of issues pop up when the perspectives of the people creating the ad do not sufficiently embrace… the target audience," Gitlin says. "Many marketers lose sight of the fact that the so-called mainstream general market is not only young, white males… Multicultural perspective is grossly underrepresented in the media."

Culturally sensitive marketing, as reported by the Institute for International Research, requires a long-term commitment to the target cultures and that "one hot promotion tied to the Chinese New Year isn't considered a serious approach." Fundamentally, American corporations still have a long way to go in understanding the Asian perspective.

Kim suggests that the Swatch ad could be less injurious and more effective if the word choice in the tagline could be changed. "Flat is a negative word but slim is more positive," she says. The Ultraslim from Swatch seems to indicate a slim figure, as opposed to the idea of ultraflat, which seems to suggest a specific area in a woman's body. Kim's concept for copy manipulation indicates that perhaps as an anodyne to these contentious debates, the one good footnote to these arguments is that an Asian agency does understand the needs of its consumer base—plain and simple.

Sadly however, not counting the sesame-seed-bun Asian doctor from the McDonald's commercials, Asian men are barely visible in the media. This issue alludes to the contention that positive imagery equates with greater acceptance, as the aforementioned letter-writer points out, "When one is familiar with something or someone, are they willing to be more receptive, more forgiving, more understanding, more respectful… it means… greater acceptance." Due mainly to the media's portrayal of Asian men, society's perception of this group remains pretty much status quo from the days of Long Duk Dong and "kung fu chopping wife beaters," as Zhang puts it. Research hasn't turned up, and no conclusive evidence as to why Asian men are not included in various corporations' diversity campaigns has been found. Perhaps in this case, it just maybe a blatant form of discrimination.

What is evident is that Asian stereotyping has been further propelled by the fact that the community as a whole has remained relatively silent and passive for so many years and hence, advertisers are baffled by the protests that are only now beginning to manifest themselves as a unified voice. Meanwhile, others assert that analyzing messages in these advertisements is being overly critical and sensitive. But, advertising executives like Kim say that this is "a natural feeling," which is the resounding opinion of the majority.

In the end, a little sensitivity may go a long way in achieving the benefit of fair and reasonable representation.