In politics,
the name of the game is often zero sum. At times one
country may have a positive advantage in reputation and
influence, while others such as North Korea, China and
Cuba may be on the negative side. At the end of World
War II, no country could compete with the victorious
United States in ascendancy. Through its competitive
economic and ideological advantage, the US was able to
rebuild war-torn Japan and Germany through the Marshall
Plan and to create a marketplace for goods and ideas
that overshadowed its formidable but lesser competitor,
the Soviet Union.
In zero-sum games, one side
cannot gain reputation without the other side losing.
Following the trajectory of two careers in public
diplomacy since September 11, 2001, it seems that
Washington's reputation is fixed at zero in terms of
credibility and political leadership.
Margaret
Tutwiler, who announced her resignation from the US
State Department this April at the end of the bloodiest
month in Iraq, was well regarded in her five-month
stretch as the high-profile replacement for Charlotte
Beers, a former ad executive who left Washington in
March 2003, just days before the outbreak of war with
Iraq. Unlike Beers, Tutwiler had an inside-the-beltway
career working for four Republican administrations as a
State Department spokesperson and then as an ambassador
to Morocco. Tutwiler was expected to outmaneuver Beers
in sheer political experience alone, and hopes were high
that she would announce some major initiatives, despite
2004 being a presidential-election year.
At the
time of Tutwiler's confirmation hearings, it seemed that
her Washington political experience would serve her well
in helping to tackle the downward slide of America's
reputation in the world. But she deflected such insider
experience when she told the US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee overseeing her confirmation that when it comes
to the complex reality of winning hearts and minds:
"There is not one magic bullet, magic program or magic
solution. As much as we would like to think Washington
knows best, we have to be honest and admit we do not
necessarily always have all the answers." [1]
In
her short tenure, Tutwiler emphasized more active
listening on the part of the US government - including
listening to its diplomats serving on the front lines -
and expanding the discussion of American values and
policies to public venues outside of traditional elites
in diplomacy and government. "We only have to look at
the activities of US corporations overseas to see the
value of being present and engaged in neighborhoods that
we in government have for too long neglected." [2] She
also announced a slight increase in educational
exchanges, particularly youth exchanges, focused
primarily on the Middle East.
When Tutwiler
suddenly announced her switch from government public
relations to the New York Stock Exchange executive
suites, one could not help but notice that the move
occurred during the week that the first brutal images of
abused Iraqi prisoners were released worldwide,
rendering her youth exchange program from the Middle
East - Partnerships for Learning, with its fewer than
200 participants - a drop of hope in an ocean of anger
and resentment.
Steel Magnolia of
Advertising Charlotte Beers had been sworn into
office as under secretary of state for public diplomacy
and public affairs a mere three weeks after the
terrorist attacks on the United States. Although lacking
experience in politics or public diplomacy, Beers came
from the highest pedigree in advertising - the only
executive to serve as chair and chief executive officer
of J Walter Thompson Worldwide and Ogilvy & Mather,
two of the top 10 global advertising agencies. Known as
the "Steel Magnolia of Advertising" for her ability to
combine a feminine Texas charm with the forthright
determination to break the glass ceiling all the way to
the top, Beers was immediately thrust into the media
spotlight as head of the [President George W]Bush
administration's new mind war on terrorism.
It
was clear that the spotlight shift from
behind-the-scenes product guru to front-and-center
government propaganda CEO was more than Beers might have
bargained for with the appointment, despite Secretary of
State Colin Powell's defense of her before members of
Congress: "Guess what? She got me to buy Uncle Ben's
rice. So there is nothing wrong with getting somebody
who knows how to sell something."
Media wags had
a field day with the obvious avuncular comparisons. Some
reporters ruminated on just how the first female product
manager for Uncle Ben's rice could manage the mother of
all marketing campaigns - promoting Uncle Sam. The
Washington Post reported, "She's been pilloried by
pundits on at least two continents, who've mocked the
whole idea of advertising America." [3] Andrew Alexander
of the London Daily Mail wrote, "One shouldn't laugh,
really, but I must confess to a short guffaw on reading
that Washington's new war-propaganda chief is a woman
head of an advertising agency whose personal triumphs
included Uncle Ben's rice and Head & Shoulders
shampoo." Columnist Frank Rich of The New York Times
cracked: "The Bush appointee in charge of the propaganda
effort is a CEO (from Madison Avenue) chosen not for her
expertise in policy or politics but for her salesmanship
on behalf of domestic products like Head & Shoulders
shampoo. If we can't effectively fight anthrax, I guess
it's reassuring to know we can always win the war on
dandruff."
Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times
joked that the White House decision to choose Beers as
chief propaganda queen led to his "second out-of-body
experience" since the onset of the war in Afghanistan on
October 7, 2001. (His first out-of-body experience was
the White House decision to choose the project title
Operation Infinite Justice, which was quickly dumped for
the more modest Operation Enduring Freedom.) At first
befuddled that the White House would put an ad executive
in charge of America's image war, Lopez sarcastically
snipped: "Who knows? Maybe they're on to something. Just
the other day I took a sip of Coke and began singing,
'I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect
harmony.' How could anyone hate a nation of peace-loving
simpletons for whom the best part of waking up is
Folger's in your cup?" [4]
The key question,
sarcastic or not, that Lopez and other reporters raised
repeatedly in the autumn of 2001 was this: Is it
possible to sell Uncle Sam the way you sell Uncle Ben?
Can a battle plan for an image war be based solely on a
background in product development? Can a national
rebranding strategy be seen in marketing terms alone?
Branding America The US is, at its
heart, more an ideal than a product for sale, but
putting Beers in charge - a person with no experience in
international politics - seemed to ensure that the
branding-America campaign wouldn't even begin to address
the fundamental image problem of the United States. That
image problem stems in part from the perception that US
foreign policy is a form of propaganda constructed by
and for US corporations; that the McWorld thus
constructed benefits wealthy Westerners at the expense
of the world's poor. The US propaganda machine doesn't
represent Americans individually. It depicts the most
heterogeneous country in the world as a single-minded
monolith, and it hasn't begun to tell the story of who
and what Americans are.
If the US administration
is not willing to revamp its foreign policy, from which
many image problems originate, it could at least take
its public relations campaign to the streets and
neighborhoods of America - rather than the corporate
corridors of Madison Avenue, the center of US
advertising - and Washington could explore ways to
partner with new or existing non-governmental
organizations. For example, a citizen diplomacy corps of
teachers, students and cultural mediators could compile
anecdotes revealing America's strengths in principles
and ideals, could admit to past government policy
mistakes, and could seek to broaden everyone's
understanding of other histories and cultures. Such an
effort would evoke the sentiment expressed by the late
senator J William Fulbright, who wrote the
Fulbright-Hays Act of 1946, establishing the largest
post-World War II government-sponsored educational
exchange program: "My question is whether America can
close the gap between her capacity and her performance.
My hope and my belief are that she can, that she has the
human resources to conduct her affairs with a maturity
which few if any great nations have ever achieved: to be
confident but also tolerant, to be rich but also
generous, to be willing to teach but also to learn, to
be powerful but also wise." [5]
However,
Fulbright's educational and statesmanlike vision for the
United States stands in marked contrast to the glitzy
branding-America campaign that was spearheaded by "the
most powerful woman in the ad business". [6] Like it or
not, an ad woman was in charge of public diplomacy at
the State Department, and she was going to work with
what she knew best. In an exclusive interview with
Good Morning America (an ABC-TV program with
which she had previously collaborated), Beers was
introduced by anchorwoman Diane Sawyer as "the woman
whose job it is to tell the world who America is and
make the Muslim world understand. Talk about a daunting
assignment." [7]
Beers acknowledged that
reaching young Arab men taking to the streets to
denounce the United States was a challenge. In her
words, they were the "one target market that is the most
entrenched. And when we do consumer research, which we
finally started doing in a modern marketing way, we
learned that they need to believe that [Osama] bin Laden
is a holy man ... Some of the people will not join us at
all, but there are many more people in the whole Muslim
world who are very vulnerable to this kind of
information."
Taking her cue from the cacophony
of voices incensed that a Madison Avenue ad maven was
put in charge of cultural diplomacy, Sawyer asked Beers
to comment about her detractors: "As you know, some of
the Washington establishment sniffed mightily when you
arrived, saying several things. First of all, an ad
executive coming to do diplomacy. Second of all, saying
you cannot sell America like Coca-Cola ... Do you want
to answer them who say we can't sell it [America] the
way we sell from Madison Avenue?" Beers replied: "What
we are doing is using modern marketing techniques, and
we already have one of the world's most sophisticated
websites and computer facilities in the State
Department. When we talk to embassies and markets around
the world, we desperately need to do a better job of
getting communication beyond the elites and the
government figures into the mass markets. It's also
crucial that we learn how to use emotion in our
communication. Aljazeera lives on emotion and drama, and
we're content to let everything happen in a logical
fashion. This is not a reasonable dialogue we're engaged
in; it includes some emotion."
Beers' reference
was to the bureaucratic tendency in the US Information
Agency and State Department to "let the facts speak for
themselves" and to downplay the important emotional and
very human connection necessary for influencing public
audiences overseas. However, her statement also implied
a cultural stereotype that Arab and Muslim "target
markets" are more emotional by nature and that
Washington must utilize the vernacular nuances that
reach people, if it wants to gain more influence. She
could have stressed mutual dialogue, both emotional
(heart) and rational (head), emphasizing the need for
nations to come together in a shared way to eradicate
the misunderstandings and misperceptions that incite
terrorism and war. Her statement was more
homeland-oriented and downplayed a global common ground.
Rewards for Justice During the
interview with Diane Sawyer, Beers introduced a radio
advertisement associated with the State Department
Rewards for Justice program, which was designed to get
Americans to spot terrorists in their midst: "Do you
know a terrorist? Not long ago, this would have seemed
like a ridiculous question. But not anymore. The United
States government is offering rewards up to $25 million
for information that prevents an international terrorist
act against US persons or property or brings to justice
persons who have committed one." [8]
The Rewards
for Justice print ad showed a picture of September 11
ringleader Mohamed Atta along with the text: "He was
spotted in Hamburg, Prague, Florida, Maine. And if
someone had called us, his picture wouldn't be spotted
in this ad, it would have been prevented." The Rewards
for Justice website included ads targeted specifically
at American women: "You, as a woman and perhaps a
mother, may be in a unique position to act against
international terrorism," declared the print ad
headlined, "Can a Woman Stop Terrorism?" Beers explained
to Sawyer, "I really believe that women do understand
and see more in many ways," not mentioning that women
purchase 80 percent of all consumer goods and thus are
the primary audience of advertisers.
The Rewards
for Justice campaign was the most ambitious undertaking
in Charlotte Beers' tenure. It was not a Beers
brainchild but rather the expansion of an existing
program that began under president Ronald Reagan in 1984
and had already paid out more than $7 million to 22
informants in the United States and abroad before
September 11, 2001. Beers was helped in her crusade by
Scott Case, a co-founder of Priceline.com, who used his
marketing and Internet prowess to set up a private fund
for the Rewards for Justice campaign, including "United
We Stand" license plates in Florida and other states to
subsidize the State Department's reward funds. "This is
fighting terrorism with capitalism," Case beamed. "We
expect a tsunami of people coming forward with
information," he predicted, as if anticipating a greater
turnout of terrorist spotters during a recession.
At a news conference for the foreign press in
November 2001, Beers unveiled her new campaign. "First
we will have print and radio. We are going to follow
very soon with banner ads that tap into adjacent
websites. We will have movie-theater clips and maybe
even matchbook covers." One reporter asked, "How
confident are you that your new campaign is not going to
end up like, you know, New Coke or the Edsel?" Against a
backdrop of a few cynical reporter chuckles, he added,
"Is there a poster child - a poster man or woman - that
you envision to be set up to, you know, represent a
symbol of America abroad?"
To the first
skeptical question, she responded, "I did a Harvard case
study on what happened to New Coke, and if you'll pull
it up and read it, you'll get your answer to that." To
the second quip, she said, "Well, you know, in a way,
our poster people are President Bush and Secretary
Powell, who I think are pretty inspiring symbols of the
brand 'The United States'." That answer prompted
Washington Post reporter Peter Carlson to chortle:
"Brilliant! Asked to suggest a symbol of America, she
immediately named her boss and her boss's boss. It was a
rare demonstration of the kind of talent that can take a
person to the very heights of the advertising business -
or the federal government."
Beers believed that
the essential elements of marketing the United States
brand name were not unlike the ones she used so
skillfully throughout her Madison Avenue career. In an
interview with Business Week, she insisted that, despite
a hostile target market: "We are going to have to
deliver the intangible assets of the United States,
things like our belief system and values. This calls up
a different set of skills ... much closer to the kind of
disciplines we always had to have in advertising." [9]
And, she added, with the USA brand, as with any great
brand, "the leverageable asset is the emotional
underpinning of the brand - or what people believe, what
they think, how they feel when they use it. I am much
more comfortable with that dimension of the assignment,
because I've dealt with it before."
Marketing
America So what's different about marketing a
country? Dialogue. Insightfully, Beers admitted,
"Countries like the United States, which are big and
powerful, will always translate into arrogance if there
is no dialogue." [10]
In marketing the USA brand
name, Beers and her staff consulted with a list of at
least 400 American Muslims, fielded traditional consumer
research in Jordan, Lebanon and other Middle Eastern
countries, and called upon a kitchen cabinet of
corporate marketing whizzes ranging from the Nonprofit
Advertising Council to private research and marketing
firms. Their global marketing research was
non-policy-wonkish by design. In Beers' outlook: "The
government is well poised to give you research in terms
of major policy issues, but they're not going to tell
you much about what will help you talk to a 14-year-old
boy who has been inculcated for years with a really
different vantage point." To start with, her premise was
different from just explaining foreign-policy positions
as wonks are trained to do. As Allen Rosenshine,
chairman of BBDO Worldwide, said of the USA rebranding
campaign: "We have to start from the basis of 'OK,
people hate us.' If all we do is go out and tell them
America is the land of the free and the home of the
brave, we're damn fools." [11]
One problem with
the Rewards for Justice program was that it tapped into
a post-September 11 US consciousness that a terrorist
was hiding behind every tree. It harkened back to the
Advertising Council's "Loose Lips Sink Ships" crusade of
the 1940s, warning Americans not to spill secrets to the
enemy living among us. As Beers told reporters at the
marketing rollout for her campaign: "This might have
been unthinkable before September 11, but this is the
first time we realized that we must ask every citizen in
the United States to think about information they might
have, because for the first time we know clearly
terrorists are here. They have been here among us, and
they are here." [12]
A basic program emphasizing
mental alertness about suspicious behavior was one
thing, but what kind of information might it invite?
Would a Middle Eastern-looking man or someone who just
looked Arab lead to a tip to the Rewards for Justice
hotline? The program ran the risk of becoming,
inadvertently or not, a collection center for data about
people who were guilty of being associated through
religion or ethnicity with the September 11 attackers.
As Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute in
Washington, DC, warned, the State Department ad campaign
might turn into a citizen-watch program gone awry.
Washington would do better beefing up intelligence work
than encouraging citizens to turn in their neighbors.
The Rewards for Justice campaign corresponded to
a general rise in advertising as propaganda after
September 11, 2001. After a brief advertising respite in
deference to the American psyche in the first few weeks
after the September 11 attacks, the Big Three auto
makers in Detroit were compelling Americans to do their
patriotic duty and get back on the road with big
American sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) and trucks. The
rush to glorify the pleasures of capitalist materialism
in the face of fear and uncertainty helped to soothe the
collective American psyche, troubled that perhaps not
all was well on Main Street, USA, and to remind the
individual consumer that the socioeconomic system was
still working just fine.
As if to reinforce
further in surround-sound fashion what the market system
was really all about, the Advertising Council initiated
its own Campaign for Freedom to remind Americans just
how good we have it - pass it on. Presented as an
unprecedented volunteer effort from the advertising
industry to assist Americans during the "war on
terrorism" (as if someone had asked for "Ad" Nauseam),
the Campaign for Freedom's public-service announcements
celebrated US freedom in the face of terror. Television
and print ads appeared with the tag line, "Freedom.
Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it." The campaign was
inspired by Bush's declaration on September 11, 2001,
that US freedom itself was attacked, and so Americans
must vigilantly defend freedom (likely through military
force) wherever and whenever it comes under future
threat or attack.
Advertising versus public diplomacy In
his book Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion,
Michael Schudson states that advertising in a capitalist
system such as the United States serves basically the
same function as the state-sanctioned socialist realist
art of the Soviet Union. "American advertising, like
socialist realist art, simplifies and typifies. It does
not claim to picture reality as it should be," asserts
Schudson. [13]
One Campaign for Freedom ad
included the following text depicting its own version of
reality: "Because while rights like freedom of speech,
freedom of religion and freedom of the press get all the
attention in the constitution, the smaller liberties you
can enjoy everyday in America are no less important or
worthy of celebration. Your right to back-yard
barbecues, sleeping in on Sunday and listening to any
darned music you please can be just as fulfilling as
your right to vote for the president. Maybe even more
so, because you can enjoy these freedoms personally and
often." [14] Such ad copy simplifies and typifies the
level of intellectual rigor that arose from the ashes of
the September 11 attacks.
The question remains,
is it necessary to rebrand the United States? To many
throughout the world, America is already a brand, a
multitrillion-dollar brand of mass consumerism,
bolstered by cultural and military dominance and
championed by such worldwide symbols as Marlboro,
McDonald's, Boeing, Coca-Cola and General Electric. Any
further selling of America, even in a new format or
packaging, might simply add to the global perception
problem that continues to plague the United States.
America Inc is presented in glittering
generalities of freedom and democracy fighting evil and
tyranny the world over, but our global audience knows
that the reality of America is quite different from the
rhetoric. The United States remains the world's leader
in arms trafficking, and as long as our international
assistance favors arms transfers over humanitarian
assistance, developing countries will remain vulnerable
to military forces and non-state actors - such as the
Taliban and al-Qaeda - that systematically violate human
rights and exploit people's deepest fears. Rebranding
America is one strategy to improve the US image, but it
may not be the best strategy. As a superpower, the
United States is very used to doing the talking and
marketing of its position on the global stage. It may be
time to listen more to the legitimate grievances that
even US allies have with the unilateral position that
Washington takes in so many geopolitical arenas.
Likewise, regarding culture and communication, the US
supports the free exchange of information in theory but
not in practice, preferring to let the market, and not
governments, regulate that flow.
A new way
forward? The United States might want to take a
step back from its obvious advantage in marketing and
advertising and think about how to build bridges of
mutual understanding between Americans and people of
other countries. Washington's ability to huckster an
image overseas is what fuels misperceptions and feeds
stereotypes that Americans care most about market share
and least about sharing.
The world continues to
view the United States predominantly as a product, not
as a country of diverse peoples with dissenting
positions. Recounting America's story by depicting the
concepts of freedom, civil liberties, justice and
pluralism is a necessary book chapter but not the entire
book. Madison Avenue, Hollywood and the White House must
do their triad campaign, but their storytelling will
always be viewed somewhat cynically as a manufactured
spin that tilts in favor of a particular US policy or
product tie-in.
Telling America's
story What is needed is a public, grassroots
campaign to tell America's story to the world - a
recasting of Rewards for Justice to Rewards for
Dialogue, directed by the American people and their
neighbors overseas. This project should be as authentic
as possible, not driven by merchandising, branding or
buying. Its tag line could be, "Let's listen and learn
for our own sake."
Globally oriented newspapers
such as the Christian Science Monitor and the
International Herald Tribune could devote a weekly
section to this global dialogue project, inviting
citizens around the world to tell the stories of their
lives - how they live, what they desire for their
children, what they wish to know about how people live
in other countries. It's a small leap from the self-help
advice of Dear Abby to the universal knowledge database
of Dear Global Citizen. An influx of a few million
dollars could sponsor more questionnaires along the
lines of the Pew Center's Global Attitudes Survey
designed to poll citizens both at home and abroad about
their impressions of each other and the nations in which
they live.
The events of September 11, 2001,
have forced US citizens to look within themselves as a
global people. Winning a worldwide "war on terrorism" is
much more about overcoming cultural mindsets that set
people apart from each other out of fear and ignorance
than about celebrating the freedom of the American
barbecue. In the post-September 11 era, no country is
isolated from the realities of any other. In a split
second, in the most horrific way, the planet became
Marshall McLuhan's global village. Now is the greatest
opportunity for global citizens to come together, not
through the legacy of Margaret Tutwiler's frustrating
spell or Charlotte Beers' bottom-line approach, but
through open hearts and learning minds.
Endnotes
1. Margaret
Tutwiler, Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Washington, DC, October 29, 2003. 2.
Tutwiler, Testimony before the House Committee on
Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security,
Emerging Threats and International Relations, February
10, 2004. 3. Peter Carlson, "The USA account; Ad
woman Charlotte Beers's new campaign: Getting the world
to buy America", Washington Post, Style, December 31,
2001, p C1. 4. Steve Lopez, "We need people, not
propaganda, to sell America to the world", Los Angeles
Times, October 29, 2001, p B1. 5. Senator J William
Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York:
Vintage Books, 1965), p 27. 6. "Charlotte Beers; How
world's top woman ad executive hit the heights", Los
Angeles Times, AP Wire, May 4, 1992, p D6. 7.
Interview transcript, Good Morning America,
Burrelle's Information Services, ABC News, December 14,
2001. 8. Rewards for Justice
(http://www.rewardsforjustice.net). 9. Alexandra
Starr, "Building Brand America", Business Week, December
10, 2001. 10. Starr, "Building Brand America". 11.
Marci MacDonald, "Branding America", US News & World
Report, November 26, 2001, p 46. 12. Michele Kelemen,
All Things Considered, National Public Radio,
Weekend Edition, December 15, 2001. 13. Michael
Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion (New
York: Basic Books, 1986), p 215. 14. Ad
Council Campaign for Freedom
Dr Nancy
Snow is an assistant professor of communications at
California State University, Fullerton, and a senior
fellow at the Center on Public Diplomacy at the
University of Southern California. She is the author
of Information War (Seven Stories Press) and a
regular contributor toForeign
Policy in Focus. Used
with permission.
Jun 3, 2004
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2003, Asia Times Online, 4305 Far East Finance Centre, 16 Harcourt Rd,
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