The late George Lazarus, who wrote a column about advertising and marketing for the Tribune, had his desk just across the way from mine for many years. Lazarus, during his career, was described with any number of adjectives, but “soft-spoken” was not among them.
I believe I heard the complete texts of every telephone call that Lazarus made or received during the hours I was in the office — years and years of hearing Lazarus calls. Thus it did not take me long to figure out where I had heard the name of the person who is now in charge of selling America’s image to the world during the war against terror.
The person is Charlotte Beers, and her title is undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Her name figured in many high-decibel George Lazarus phone calls. This was because she did not come to the State Department from the worlds of politics or diplomacy, but from the world of big-time advertising. Among her positions were chairman of J. Walter Thompson and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather.
When Lazarus would be trying to get her on the phone, it was usually in pursuit of information about new ad campaigns for products people buy in supermarkets or drugstores. Now the Bush administration has asked her to make the United States her client — to use her marketing skills to sell America’s vision of itself to a world that watches our soldiers wage war.
Predictably, there have been some sardonic responses to this concept. A commentator in a London newspaper 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 person] whose personal triumphs have included Uncle Ben’s Rice and Head & Shoulders shampoo.” Other commentators have been more respectful of this whole idea, saying that advertising works — and that to promote the United States as a brand makes perfect sense.
A case can be made that those two widely divergent viewpoints suffer from the same flaw: They are looking at the ad-executive-goes-to-the-State-Department picture from such close range that they are missing the real lesson here. Which is:
This war does not need to be advertised. This war effort does not need to be marketed.
There is an old phrase to describe strategic mistakes made in combat: “The generals are fighting the last war.” It means that military leaders, in looking backward at how a previous conflict was won, can undermine themselves in a current fight. Generals may build up enormous infantry units, because that worked last time around — only to see their soldiers wiped out by air attacks from above, which were not a factor in the last war.
It’s not that the military generals in the current conflict are necessarily fighting the last war — but that the public relations generals are fighting the last several wars. Vietnam in particular.
Ever since the Vietnam War, there seems to have been a sense in the government that because that conflict was so unpopular, any new war the U.S. undertakes will be met with the same antipathy — both at home and abroad. Thus, winning “hearts and minds” — a phrase with a bittersweet, defensive double edge — is almost as important as winning battles.
And in fact in some parts of the world the U.S. war against terror is quite unpopular. But advertising-type campaigns are not going to change that. Such campaigns may even exacerbate the problem — may help the world make the assumption that this is just another slick American operation, cynically undertaken.
The best antidote to that notion isn’t marketing or branding — the best antidote is letting the truth speak quietly and firmly for itself. This time around, the U.S. doesn’t need any honed-in-conference-rooms promotional exhortations, doesn’t need any professionally crafted themes. The video footage from Sept. 11 is quite sufficient — if anyone anywhere in the world does not understand why the United States is doing what it is doing, the photos from New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that day are all that is necessary.
The other things are just a distraction — or worse. When reports got out that the Pentagon was discussing proposals to plant “disinformation” — lies — in foreign news outlets, the White House quickly acted to extinguish the plan. Even seemingly small matters feel a little discordant this time around. Example: Secretary of State Colin Powell appearing on MTV to discuss the war. Nothing particularly wrong with it — it’s just that it seemed out of tune with the realities we’re living through. Bill Clinton, as a presidential candidate, going on MTV to reach young voters, felt unexpected, unconventional. Colin Powell doing it during this war. . . .
Maybe the intentions were pure: to let the young people of the world hear, from the top, what is going on. But it didn’t necessarily feel like that.
It felt like marketing. Whether it was effective marketing or ineffective marketing almost doesn’t matter. It felt like someone was fighting the last war.
This one speaks for itself.
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– Bob Greene comments on the news of the day Thursdays on the “WGN News at Nine.”
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