Advertising Age reported on an Equinox campaign featuring imagery publicly condemned as racist Asian stereotypes.
Based on the corporate response, Equinox apparently agrees with the protestors, as the ads are being fully pulled and official apologies have been formally posted.
The responsible White advertising agency—Angry Gods—also admitted to cultural cluelessness. Plus, Angry Gods pledged charitable donations to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. Expect scholarships to follow in performative style.
Ironically, the campaign theme reads, “Question Everything But Yourself.”
Equinox and Angry Gods failed to question everything while executing the work. And the co-conspirators will probably not question themselves for being insular, insensitive, ignorant racists.
Equinox pulls AI ad after creators call out racist Asian stereotypes
By Gillian Follet
Equinox, the luxury fitness company, has pulled an AI-generated out-of-home ad and apologized after dozens of Asian content creators accused it of perpetuating racist stereotypes.
The ad, part of a campaign that broke in January, featured an AI-generated image of an Asian woman’s head mounted on a metal rod, with a hand pressing a thumb between her lips; the image was juxtaposed with a real photo of a different woman, including her exposed torso. Over the past two weeks, creators across Instagram and TikTok have condemned the ad as dehumanizing and fetishistic.
“Asian women have already been treated as dolls, submissive sex machines, anime girls, robots, decorative objects [and] mail-order fantasies for decades now,” said artist and content creator Eunnuri Lee in a video posted Friday. “We are constantly positioned as hypersexual beings and also not fully human.”
Lifestyle creator @relishwithreese called the ad “so disturbing” in a video uploaded earlier this month, questioning what message Equinox was attempting to convey. Soogia, a food creator with nearly 3 million total followers who uses only her first name online, called the ad a “literal embodiment” of the sexualization and objectification of Asian women. And Ed Choi, a creator and podcaster, went further, directly calling out Equinox’s chief marketing and digital officer, Bindu Shah, in a video criticizing the ad for “overly sexualiz[ing] Asian women.”
Though conversation around the ad spiked over the past two weeks, it originated as part of the company’s “Question Everything But Yourself” campaign, launched in January. Made with Los Angeles-based design and strategy agency Angry Gods, the ads addressed the proliferation of AI imagery online by pairing absurd AI creations—Pope Francis in a puffer jacket, a high-heel-wearing Justin Trudeau wrapped around a stripper pole—with images of real people. The idea was to position human strength as a counterpoint to digital fakery.
The ads ran across social, digital and out-of-home placements.
Equinox told creators in comments and DMs last week that it was “in the process” of “fully remov[ing]” the ad from OOH placements. The ad has been taken down from 10 Equinox club locations across New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco where it was still on display, an Equinox spokesperson confirmed today.
“This campaign was designed to explore the false realities created by AI and social media, including fake leaders, fake bodies, fake food and fake robots,” another spokesperson for the company said in an email. “While that was the creative goal, we recognize there was an unintended impact, and we apologize for that. We made the decision more than a week ago to fully remove the image—a choice guided by our core values of inclusivity, mutual respect and empathy, which ensure the Equinox community is a place where everyone is welcome.”
The agency, Angry Gods, also apologized for the offending image in an Instagram post shared Friday, then edited the statement the same day after facing criticism for initially referring to the backlash as a “discussion.”
“Whatever we intended, an artificial, eroticized Asian woman’s face is not a neutral symbol of ‘fake,’” the agency stated. “It carries a history, and we should have seen that before the work ever shipped.” The agency will be donating $5,000 to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, with agency founder and CEO Krish Menon contributing an additional $5,000 to the organization, Angry Gods stated.
Some OOH displays from the campaign, including the ad at the center of the backlash, had remained up for months in cities such as New York before Equinox removed them. While some creators had occasionally discussed the ad since it went up in January, Equinox earlier this month posted a video of its gym on New York’s Bond Street, where the ad was prominently displayed in one of the windows. The video has since been deleted.
Several of the creators who criticized the ad, including Choi, pointed out that the unsettling image of an Asian woman’s disembodied head didn’t match the surreal yet playful tone of the rest of the campaign.
“Hey, Equinox, if you want me to ‘question everything,’ I’m gonna ask: why the f*ck did you … think [this] was a good idea?” Lee said in her video. “Why did you need to use an Asian woman’s body? And I’ll also ask this: who the f*ck was in that marketing room?”
The controversy around the ad echoes the backlash American Eagle faced almost a year ago, when its Sydney Sweeney campaign was criticized as racist and overly sexual. American Eagle stood by the campaign, with Craig Brommers, the retailer’s chief marketing officer, later telling Ad Age that the polarizing campaign actually boosted the brand’s business.
