-Caveat Lector-
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1101/111601nj2.htm
November 16, 2001
State Department works to create brand of the free
By William Powers, National Journal
Last Sunday, The New York Times published a 4,200-word front-page
story about the Bush administration's efforts to manage wartime
news and propaganda. The writer, Elizabeth Becker, reported that
top U.S. officials, working in concert with the British government,
are mounting "what may be the most ambitious war-time
communications effort since World War II." This "highly
orchestrated" endeavor is, the paper said, "a first step in a
broader campaign to create a 21st-century version of the muscular
propaganda war that the United States waged in the 1940s."
The story was packed with fresh information, but there was one
sentence near the top that wasn't exactly news: "To reach foreign
audiences, especially in the Islamic world, the State Department
brought in Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive, who is
using her marketing skills to try to make American values as much a
brand name as McDonald's hamburgers or Ivory soap."
By now, anyone who has been following the war news closely has
heard about Charlotte Beers and her plans to sell skeptical
foreigners on what she calls "the brand of the United States."
Since early October, when she was sworn in as undersecretary of
State for public diplomacy and public affairs-- essentially the
department's czarina of information--Beers has been everywhere.
Partly, this is because she was an unconventional choice, a major
business figure from New York City, the former head of two huge ad
agencies, stepping into the sort of job that usually goes to an
experienced Washington political or media hand. It was a very
important job when she was appointed last spring; now, with the
United States at war, the assignment is momentous.
Throw in that Beers has a reputation for toughness (The Times once
called her "Madison Avenue's steel magnolia"); that she moves in
glamorous Manhattan circles--Martha Stewart is said to be a pal;
and that she has a habit of speaking her mind frankly and
memorably, and you've got a bona fide media magnet.
On Oct. 15, two weeks after she was confirmed, a Wall Street
Journal story included several piquant hints from Beers about the
direction in which she planned to take the State Department's
wartime propaganda effort, which in Foggy Bottom goes by the more
genteel name of "public diplomacy."
"It is almost as though we have to redefine what America is," she
told the paper. "This is the most sophisticated brand assignment I
have ever had."
America as brand assignment! You could almost hear alarm bells
ringing in newsrooms around the nation. Beers's use of advertising
jargon hinted that we might be headed for one of those classic
culture clashes between the very different worlds of New York
business and Washington policy. She thrived in the Big Apple, but
how would she fare in the brutal intramural combat of national
government?
U.S. and British dailies rushed Beers stories into print, and
magazines and television networks followed close behind. In a
November 6 front-page story, The New York Times reported that Beers
was "planning a television and advertising campaign to try to
influence Islamic opinion; one segment could feature American
celebrities, including sports stars, and a more emotional message."
A few days later came the big Times front-page feature, presenting
Beers and her branding concept as one of the leading components of
the nation's formidable new World War II-style propaganda machine.
It looks very impressive in theory, and in practice it may well
succeed. Beers, who did not respond to several requests for an
interview, is by all accounts an exceptionally bright, bold,
dynamic leader. In the advertising world, where she headed both J.
Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather, she was particularly adept at
client relations--keeping those who hire you happy--an essential
skill for making it in Washington, and supremely important in the
bow-and-scrape bureaucracy of the State Department.
Given all this, it could be that Beers's marketing of the American
brand will help transform Muslims around the world into opponents
of Osama bin Laden, and supporters of the American campaign against
terrorism.
But don't bet on it. Though media people are fascinated by
Charlotte Beers--and she does cut a striking figure among the
capital's oatmeal horde--there are several reasons why her high-
concept notions about branding the United States, intriguing as
they are, may not figure hugely in how the war unfolds.
Indeed, it seems clearer by the day that the most crucial wartime
information operations are not those concerned with selling
American values to the world, which is, at best, a long-term
project. What matters more right now is the practical workaday
business of trouncing the enemy on the other battlefield that
really counts: the daily news cycle.
Public Diplomacy Evolves
The war on terrorism has two major theaters. While the military is
fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the civilian
leadership is waging a separate, but arguably just as important,
campaign out of Washington: a war of information. This latter war,
in turn, has two separate fronts, officially known as public
diplomacy and public affairs. Though Beers oversees both fronts at
the State Department, it's her comments about public diplomacy that
have been getting all the attention.
What exactly is public diplomacy? Basically, it's any government
activity designed to generate foreign support for U.S. policies.
Though the State Department is the home of this craft, other
government agencies practice it, too, including the Defense
Department, whose activities obviously have a huge impact on
foreign views of the United States.
Modern U.S. public diplomacy programs include academic and
professional exchange programs such as the Fulbright scholarships;
a longtime government-run wire service known today as the
Washington File; and radio broadcast services including the Voice
of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. It's widely agreed
that during the Cold War, radio was one of the West's most potent
weapons, especially in the early going, when targeted audiences in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had few other sources of news
and information.
For a few decades after World War II, there was an unspoken
cultural consensus that such activities were a necessary and
important function of government. When President Kennedy talked the
revered World War II journalist Edward R. Murrow into heading up
what was then the U.S. Information Agency, public diplomacy reached
its zenith of prestige.
But in the late 1960s and `70s, when many Americans came to
distrust government, the idea of public agencies shaping
information and news to enhance America's military and commercial
interests abroad began to seem less and less savory.
Until the mid-'60s, "if somebody called you a propagandist, nobody
was offended," recalls Barry Fulton, who had a State Department
career in public diplomacy and now directs the Public Diplomacy
Institute at George Washington University. "Later on, it begins to
have a tone of doing something underhanded."
In the 1970s, efforts were made to take the propaganda-- with its
air of deception--out of public diplomacy, and to give government
information outlets the independence enjoyed by private news
operations. One law passed during this period insulated the Voice
of America's news reporting from the influence of State Department
policy makers, much the way quality news outlets allow their
reporters to operate free of interference from the business side of
the operation.
Still, none of these changes restored the luster of public
diplomacy, which entered a long period of decline. Except for a
stretch during the Reagan administration, when USIA Director (and
presidential crony) Charles Z. Wick briefly raised the profile and
funding of his agency, the slump continued through the Clinton era.
In the 1990s, with the Cold War over, the notion of promoting the
U.S. image abroad lost its urgency, and there were major budget and
staff cuts. Public diplomacy hit bottom.
But with the new Bush administration, it seemed to be on the verge
of a comeback, even before September 11. Last March, testifying
before the House Budget Committee, Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell said: "I'm going to be bringing people into the public
diplomacy function of the department who are going to change from
just selling us in the old USIA way to really branding foreign
policy, branding the department, marketing the department,
marketing American values to the world, and not just putting out
pamphlets." A few weeks later, Charlotte Beers was nominated to her
State Department post.
Redefining the identity of a gigantic, powerful civilization, about
which just about everyone on the planet already has a strong
opinion, is no small task. Beers hasn't revealed exactly how she
plans to do it, though she has said she is open to using any medium
that will bring the message to her target audiences, including
placing ads on Al Jazeera television and other outlets.
At a news conference last week, where she twice referred to the
United States as a "brand," Beers introduced some of the early
products of her campaign. Among them was a brochure titled "The
Network of Terrorism," which tells the story of the September 11
attacks on New York and Washington, and lays out the case for the
war that has followed. (The Internet version is viewable at
usinfo.state.gov.)
The text argues that it was an attack not only on America but "on
the heart and soul of the civilized world." There was a brief video
called Defeating Terror, Defending Freedom, featuring footage of
the attacks accompanied by pulsing, solemn, atmospheric music that
recalls the sound tracks of "issue" movies such as Traffic. Beers
also showed two prototypes of public service print ads, one
offering rewards for information about terrorists, the other
asking, "Can a Woman Stop Terrorism?"
Though more colorful than most government media products, none of
these materials was particularly memorable, not next to the media
images that surround us every day. In presenting the brochure,
Beers mentioned that her shop had tried to come up with something
that was "more emotionally driven." But compared to the intensely
emotional news coverage of Bloody Tuesday, these products seemed
relatively cold.
This points to one of Beers's key challenges, which is taking her
acute professional knowledge of how one communicates with a
media-savvy global audience, and getting a sprawling, highly
risk-averse government agency to buy into it. The State Department
is not the most fertile soil in which to plant bold new ideas about
communications.
"She's surrounded by cautious bureaucrats," says an administration
official who has watched Beers in action, and who spoke on
condition of anonymity. "She cannot be productive, and have those
people around her. They're afraid to be controversial, afraid to be
out there. That isn't her."
A second, more immediate problem is the sheer time and hard work
required to change the minds of millions on the subject of the
United States, a task that would be hard enough to pull off in
peacetime, never mind under the stress and strain of war.
A key tenet of some of the most effective public diplomacy programs
is that real change comes over the long term. If you broadcast
radio programs into a hostile land for years, you'll gradually pull
in listeners, and from among them, ever so slowly, you'll win
converts. If you spend decades bringing visitors over for extended
stays in the United States, showing them the best things about this
country, those people will return home and slowly build up good
will for America in their own countries.
Still, advertising is an extremely powerful tool. Beers appears to
believe it can speed up this process and make short work of the
hearts-and-minds mission that currently looms so large.
Some who know the ad business agree. Abe Novick, a senior vice
president of Eisner Communications, a Baltimore agency whose
clients include the Nature Conservancy and the Voice of America,
says the job can be done. He suggests an ad campaign that offers a
hybrid of public-interest ads that promote a specific cause, and
general image spots of the sort that companies sometimes use to
cast themselves in a positive light, such as "the advertising that
Exxon or Mobil does on the pages of The New York Times. It's a
corporate message, but it's putting forth a point of view." He
feels there would be no shortage of content for ads promoting U.S.
culture: "There's so much richness to tap into that's inspiring....
I think we know who we are very well, and I think it's time the
world understands better who we are."
Others are more skeptical. "I'm not sure that even the best effort
wouldn't cause more negative reaction than positive," says Ellis
Verdi, the president of New York's DeVito/Verdi agency, which
designs ads for corporate clients, political campaigns, and
public-interest groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union.
"To construct communications broadly that can accomplish this is
going to take a lot of work and a lot of thought.... The objectives
sound sexy, but the execution won't be easy."
There's "no question" that advertising can work wonders in wartime,
says Robert Keim, who was president of the Ad Council from 1966-87,
and has just finished a book on its history. Keim cites the
domestic ad campaigns that, during World War II, promoted war
bonds, energy conservation, and secrecy ("Keep It Under Your
Stetson"). But he questioned whether creating Brand America for a
foreign audience is the most effective approach right now.
"To call our country a brand is to denigrate it in people's minds.
What you're basically talking about should be very elemental. Say
[in the ads], `Look, we'll pay you a $5 million reward for that son
of a bitch.' Tell `em the Taliban is on the way out, the leaders
are deserting, the men are deserting."
In other words, stick to the basics. Which points to the other side
of the information war, the nuts-and-bolts work of public affairs:
answering media questions, giving interviews about the progress of
the war, and knocking down misinformation and disinformation from
the other side.
As many news outlets have recently reported, the White House has
established a kind of informational war room in the Old Executive
Office Building where the flow of daily war news is monitored and
managed. Every morning, there's a conference call among key
staffers from the White House, the Defense Department, the State
Department, and the British government. The whole operation is
overseen by presidential counselor Karen Hughes, and managed by
James Wilkinson, the White House deputy director of communications
for planning.
"It is a kind of classic communications vehicle, doing classic
things," says Mary Matalin, counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney
and assistant to the President, and one of those who's in on the
conference call every day. The war-room warriors' primary goal, she
says, is to react quickly to false information put out by the
enemy, rather than letting it hang out there in the long time-zone
lag between Afghanistan and Washington.
"Typically, the Taliban, whatever happens, they take credit for
it," she says, citing as an example the misinformation about a U.S.
helicopter that went down a few weeks ago. The Taliban said they
shot it down, and that there were casualties. But soon, word came
down to the war room from the National Security Council that the
damaged chopper had not been hit by enemy fire, and that everyone
on board had been rescued. "We just got ahead of the story, so by
the time the nets [news networks] had it ... we knew what the right
answer was."
The war-room types also spend their time making the crucial
decisions about how to deploy top officials among media outlets,
which are always hungry for talking heads in times of national
crisis. Thus, Cheney spent a half hour last Friday talking to The
Sun newspaper of London, a tabloid that reaches a different
audience from that of the outlets normally favored with interviews.
"That was total war room," says Matalin. "It's less branding--I
don't know what that is--and more `What do we need to say to
advance the war effort here?' "
In another recent instance, after Osama bin Laden's latest
videotaped message, Christopher Ross, the Arabic-speaking former
U.S. ambassador to Syria, appeared on Al Jazeera for more than two
hours, responding point by point.
Matalin says these quick-response media tactics have allowed the
United States to gain the upper hand in the crucial daily media
struggle.
"What you're seeing," says Wilkinson, the war-room manager, "is the
crystal-clear evidence that bin Laden and his operatives are now
responding to us."
"It's less airy, less Madison Avenue," says Matalin. "This is just
Campaign 101." She even extends the campaign metaphor to the effort
to win over Muslims around the world. "Give them what makes sense
to them. What makes sense to them is `Islam is a peaceful
religion.' ... If you look at this in campaign terms-and I'm loath
to say this-these are swing voters."
The comparison may be jarring, but the basic point makes intuitive
sense. This story is moving too quickly for the United States to
craft anything grander or more calculated than short messages that
might incrementally move "swing voters" who happen to tune in to
today's news cycle.
Charlotte Beers "is really good, and she really is carrying a heavy
load," Matalin says. But, she adds, all the media fuss about
branding has "cast this patina over the whole operation" that isn't
quite right.
There's another virtue to the war-room approach: While it involves
interpreting and massaging information, it doesn't look or feel
like propaganda, certainly not in the way an ad campaign does.
Rather, it looks like a very American way to win a war.
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