Ready, Fire, Aim! - Mihail's Public Blog: The Selling of America, Bush Style

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Wednesday, August 28, 2002

The Selling of America, Bush Style

The New York Times on the Bush administration's efforts to improve things abroad.

Within weeks of Sept. 11, Charlotte Beers, celebrated as the "queen of branding" among the public relations cognoscenti, was named undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Her job was explaining and selling the administration's foreign policy, especially its war on terrorism. The problem of "Why they hate us" was rephrased, in ad speak, as "How we reposition the brand."

To help win market shares from jihad, the former chairwoman of J. Walter Thompson Worldwide advertising agency recently received a $520 million Congressional appropriation to focus on "disaffected populations," especially in the Middle East and South Asia. As Ms. Beers testified, "a poor perception of the U.S. leads to unrest, and unrest has proven to be a threat to our national and international security."

However, this problem required much, much more than a slick avertising campaign. We need to start from the very basics -- by helping kids get an education, learn how to think, get trained in various skills, find jobs, and look forward to a better future -- only then can we hope to see success in changing how the targeted "angry young Muslims" feel.

...Advertising, when disconnected from more substantial cultural exchanges, runs a double risk: either it is treated as just more background noise and so ignored; or cited as another example of America's overwhelming media presence abroad, for which the nation is already criticized. The bottom line, to use ad speak, is that advertising is only as good as the product being sold.

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