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Big Bucks Won't Buy Respect for 'Brand America'
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Big Bucks Won't Buy Respect for 'Brand America'
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by Jennifer Wells
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Perhaps it was back in their shared days as directors of Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. that Colin Powell and Charlotte Beers began drinking from the same cup, or the same vat of Kool-Aid. How else to explain how the twosome could conjure the hallucinogenic idea of fixing the image of the U.S. in the Arab world by turning a great and serious task into an advertising campaign?It was Powell, having assumed the arcing powers of secretary of state, who tipped Beers as the huckster for what Beers would call "Brand America." Announcing the appointment in the shadow of 9/11, Powell pitched the job this way: "We are selling a product. We need someone who can rebrand American policy, rebrand diplomacy."That someone was Beers, anointed years earlier by Business Week as the "Queen of Madison Avenue" for her prowess at landing top-line advertising accounts (vacuum cleaners, shampoo) for a variety of ad agencies. Powell deduced, or perhaps Beers convinced him of the idea during breaks in boardroom sessions, that such abilities could be transplanted to the task of convincing, oh, the Kuwaitis, the Pakistanis, the Egyptians etc., that America was tolerant, diverse, eclectically faith-based and much more than an empire of burger joints and Disneylands. Looking back on it, it would take someone with the presence, and the somber inflections of a Colin Powell, to intone: "I consider the marketing capacity of the United States to be our greatest unlisted asset." And get away with it.Thus was born Charlotte Beers, undersecretary of state for public affairs and public diplomacy. And her task: the shilling of American beliefs as the latest gotta-have item, like a car, or a cellphone.On Monday, Beers announced her resignation, citing unspecified health issues. Had the Bush administration been embedded, to coin a fashionable Washington word, in the wisdom of what Beers accomplished in the preceding months, Powell et al. would have quietly walked away from the experiment. But no. Beers has been replaced in her post, at least on an interim basis.In expressing his regret over Beers' decision, Powell defended her this way: "At a critical and stressful time for our nation, she (Beers) and her team sharpened our policy advocacy and took our values and our ideas to mass audiences in countries which hadn't heard from us in a concentrated way for years."He didn't say that she did so with an alarming lack of finesse. Media reports of the public relations disasters of the billion-dollar diplomacy office were plentiful. Raining leaflets in Afghanistan, featuring the image of a shaven Osama bin Laden garbed in a suit, was an idea not only ill-conceived, but as advertising types would attest, off message. "The murderer and coward has abandoned you," was the emotive missive stamped on the leaflets, perhaps leaving readers wondering why bin Laden appeared so, well, Western, which then looked to be a bad thing. That the photo was as doctored as a supermarket tabloid cover — aliens cited in Tora Bora caves — only enhanced the image of a deceitful, crafty America. The Shared Values television campaign had a longer shelf-life, but an equally unsuccessful ending. Featuring five Muslim Americans offering sound bites attesting to the embracing diversity of life in the U.S. — "I have never been disrespected because I am a Muslim" — the spots were denounced as simplistic, arrogant, even stupid. Countering news reports that the campaign had been "suspended," Beers went on CNN to say the ads were "intended to be a Ramadan offering."It's easy now to assume the role of the magpie, hunting down the sparkly bits in Beers' resumé to try to see what Powell saw in her.
Highlights include her reportedly fast friendship with Martha Stewart, her investment at the urging of Stewart friend Sam Waksal to back an Internet endeavor called ibeauty.com, and her additional shareholdings in a little company called Enron. She once tried to vacuum flopping goldfish to win the Hoover account (success) and tasted dog food in an attempt to win the Mars account. (Failure. Yes the chocolate bar makers are in the dog food business.) According to the Economist, she dresses her poodles in sweaters. She has said that her greatest wish was to be a country and western singer.
That all sounds very peppy, and perhaps speaks to Beers' cheerleading assertion that she could turn around a long list of dreadful polling data. In the autumn days of 2001, only 28 per cent of Kuwaitis, 22 per cent of Moroccans, and 18 per cent of Saudis held a favorable opinion of the U.S.
In the ad world, it's conventional practice to do a "brand audit" to measure the impact of a marketing campaign. The brand audit on the Beers campaign offers more unhappy outcomes: the Pew Research Center for People and the Press released data in December showing Turkey dropping to 30 points from 52, and putting Egypt at a wafer thin 6 per cent.
Last week, addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Beers acknowledged this grim reality. "We are talking about millions of ordinary people, a huge number of whom have gravely distorted but carefully cultivated images of us," she said. "The gap between who we are and how we wish to be seen, and how we are in fact seen, is frighteningly wide." It would be silly to suggest that Beers confused "the gap" with "the Gap," but it does appear as though the current exercise in public diplomacy was indistinguishable from an ad launch for the new look for spring. As if "diplomacy" were merely a commodity whose sales potential rises only in certain markets.When Colin Powell said on Monday that Beers spoke to an "audience in countries which hadn't heard from us in a concentrated way for years," the logical follow-up question was, why haven't they? Because diplomacy went out of fashion. Because, as Michael Ignatieff wrote recently in the New York Times magazine, the American presence overseas "is increasingly armed, in uniform and behind barbed wire and high walls." As opposed to the ongoing promotion of non-military influences — foreign aid, the United Nations. Ignatieff cited research showing a decline in spending on the latter from 1 per cent of GDP in Kennedy's time, to 0.2 per cent today.The irony is the U.S. only enforced a stereotype by determining that the way to fix the perception problem was to throw a billion dollars at it. As if hearts and minds could be not won, but bought.
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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