Some examples of corporate, cultural and state PR

Clint Eastwood Movies

Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood and to be released in Britain in December 2006, is an example of post-9-11 PR. It tells the story of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima and has been described as the first film in which the balance of combat and public relations has been presented honestly.([1]) However, in a new twist, Eastwood has also directed a second movie about Iwo Jima, as seen and felt by the Japanese, the latter’s goodwill relevant commercially as well as strategically. It takes Hollywood in a new direction: one version of a movie does not work for all markets, therefore produce two.([2])

US government PR personnel do not have the same luxury. This is principally because the executive they serve flaunted its legitimacy of action in Iraq by single messaging – e.g. insurgents are terrorists – an advertising technique, rather than a PR one.([3])

Cold War PR

The US executive’s Iraq PR collapsed because, unlike during the Cold War, it unravelled, along with the horrors, in real time. Throughout the latter conflict, America was rightly portrayed as the Land of Plenty, double-sized steaks useful street-advertising for citizen health and prosperity. It took years for the truth, which suggested the reverse, to emerge, the citizen blamed for a problem government partially created and which it is now seeking to fix.

Working alongside national branding were movies and tourism. The Statue of Liberty fronted America in glossy brochures and movies because its ‘shorthand’ – a position-statement of American values – was understood.([4] ) Today, many believe the marketing bears no relationship to its executive’s actions and US tourism chiefs meet in the shadow of the fifth anniversary of 11 September to discuss why the numbers of overseas tourists to the US has dropped.([5])

British spook heritage PR

As part of their PR strategy, two of Britain s spook employers are producing certain bestsellers: public sector 100th anniversary accounts of MI5 and SIS.([6])Moving their civil servants away from the mythology, they are positioning them – possibly as part of spook turf wars – as mainstream parts of our island story, which they are. It is essential for the state to keep control (PR) of these histories because openness and demands for change can impact on existing complex relationships, e.g. with India or Pakistan’s intelligence communities. ([7])

Targeting a wholly different area, SIS used a sophisticated version of multiple single messaging on 13 August, summarised in the press by the heading: ‘Wanted: spies (must speak Mandarin)’.([8]) Putting aside the old Whitehall joke which went something like, Do you speak Mandarin?, meaning Whitehall gobbledygook, SIS used neutral language to speak to separate audiences. I counted seven, there were probably more. It did the following: told the British public/taxpayer what it does, breaking free of attempts to confine its role to policing/ terrorism; acted as an advert to recruiters/educators to talent spot linguists; spoke to potential recruits directly, explaining the skills required; provided a concise resume of Britain’s view of China; and simultaneously cautioned the Chinese/declared intent.([9])

Cool Islam PR

Like the Statue of Liberty in the past, the US boxer Mohammed Ali is an early modern example of the transference of cool from person to that which s/he endorses. (The supermodel Kate Moss has the same ability.) In Ali’s case, his conversion to Islam – providing, in PR-speak, US celebrity endorsement – contributed to its US growth. US media vilification probably helped.

The rise of cool violent Islam PR is one of America and Britain’s biggest executive PR problems because their networks do not always reach the required audiences.([10]) Unable to offer a networked challenge to what some believe to be Osama Bin Laden’s cool, they do the best they can using alternative PR, e.g. photographs of the shoe-bomber Richard Reid consistently depicting him as wild-eyed and mad, not cool. (Photo PR).([11])

Cool Islamic blogs and websites – many of which are peddling vicious, dangerous nonsense – are modern manifestations of old-fashioned networking. They disadvantage top-down executive networkers (cocktail party PR), offer hospitality in, for example, treacherous mountain conditions in a parody of government sponsored visits, as well as alternative friendship groups in cyberspace. To get ahead of the problem the executives are aping retail methods: the think-tank Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE), monitoring Islamic fundamentalist media, appears to have much in common with corporate marketing directors employing cool hunters/trend advisers.([12]) So does the Open Source Joint Working Group created by the Cabinet Office, liaising with the Americans and employing among others, podminers.([13])

It is not all one way. Walking blogs, e.g. some extremists preaching violence, some of whom have cool status, are being rounded up. Meantime, opportunists, such as the Abu Izzadeen, who heckled Home Secretary John Reid in September 2006, are being used to make the government’s point, Playing a cool Islam fashion game (expensive white robes contrasting with the beautiful ebony of his skin) the heckler enhanced his street-cred. His heckle performed the same service for the Home Secretary. In a cynical PR trade-off, both got what they wanted at the expense of political, secular and spiritual moderates.

Executive words

In Britain, motorists no longer dodge public sector parking attendants but burleys from the private sector with parking enforcement – the word enforcement an Americanism – emblazoned across their backs. This is aggressive – in PR-speak pro-active – and no longer synonymous with British public service implied by the word attendant.

At Gatwick airport railway station a billboard cautions ‘Unattended baggage may be destroyed by the security services’, the police airbrushed.([14] )This is advertising at its most vulgar, mention of the Security Services unBritish and gratuitous, no more than the self-aggrandisement of one service at the expense of another. By such means, civilian society is altered. Good PR is stealthy, if not invisible.

The state is particularly good at faux-humility: e.g. seeking to imply it is anxious about the public’s apparent disconnection from the political process. In fact, the process is disconnected from the public which is different, the spin necessary to protect the status quo.([15])

My favourite PR words are mainstream and orthodox…. because they have collapsed in political PR. One reason why vegetarians were marginalised for years is because they challenged the meat sector, one of Britain’s largest exports. Today their views on, say, animal welfare are mainstream even if the public is not vegetarian. As a result, the word slips from executive vocabulary. For the moment at least, it maintains ownership of the term ‘rogue state’. A previous US administration managed to support the Contras, as well as organised crime, without being so described, so that it can continue to determine the criminal: e.g. those involved in drug distribution but not land mines; kidnap but not rendition; illegal invasion of a country (Iraq v Kuwait) but not when the protagonist is itself or an ally (UK/US v Iraq).

Hearts and minds PR

At the time of writing (October 2006), another example of cynical PR – because most of the solutions rest with UK/US executive changes to policies – is the hearts and minds campaign to combat the threat posed by violent Islamism. Executive good manners belatedly shown to peaceful, moderate and/or secular Muslims – which should have been a blindingly obvious if not self-interested end in itself years ago – would not have come about were it not for the threat of Islamist aggression.([16])

In a dangerous campaign of selective religious appeasement and favouritism, the UK executive has tried to imitate longstanding inter-faith dialogue between religious leaders, reinforcing exclusivity while simultaneously confining perception of the problem and those tasked with solving it to singular identity (religion).([17]) Mimicking powerful consumer marketing strategies, it offered some nasty, undeserving religious participants a loyalty programme: patronage, favour, flattery and relevance – classic control mechanisms – in return for marketing and data collection. As part of the latter, parents were told to spy on their children, many of them adults, as well as find solutions, PR-speak for shortcuts to containment. Exhorted to confront the seeping villainy of heinous fanatics, they were expected to deliver the hearts and minds of their young without UK executive moral example to support them, or a public service broadcaster equal to the communications necessary.([18]) English language Al Jazeera arrives only just in time to allow British Muslims to see themselves as mainstream and not marginal.([19])

In so far as the existing superpower PR is concerned, war is an accurate reflection of US executive conduct: it no longer pretends to be involved in anything else. China does: but its ‘Harmony’ PR comes unstuck when, for example, the fact it is one of the few global suppliers of ballistic missiles is factored in, in the same way as its appeal for man to live in harmony with nature is imploded by its hugely controversial Three Gorges project.([27]) China’s ‘Harmony’ PR is an example of a rolling state PR programme, running across Asia, parts of Africa and the Middle East. America’s Long War advert is what the political communications industry describes as above line marketing: the public is aware of it, although not necessarily the viral methods used to reach other audiences (below the line). It scares the citizen; demonises others; determines which wars are to be included – climate change is not; maintains the income streams of military commerce; and allows for the backdated admission of the Iraq and Afghan campaigns, subliminally providing a reason for present failure.

Key to both China and US PR is the insult to reality. Harmony can mean authority, not always benign; assuming no further terrorist horror takes place on the US mainland, those who are not American, e.g. Chechens, Kurds and Palestinians, are the ones involved in a Long War .

David and Goliath PR

This brings me to the final unravelling of US PR. In many traditional American/British fairytales, the bad giant is slain by the child/underdog. A biblical variation is David’s felling of Goliath with his catapult. Both versions conflicted with US superpower PR. As a result, the US executive changed the legend. It had too many missiles to pose as a gentle giant, so it cast itself as a good giant fighting on behalf of boys with catapults rather than the reverse: e.g. overturning a tyrant and taking democracy to Iraq. (!) Herein lies one of America’s most pressing external PR problems: many publics tend to support the little guys irrespective of their merit, and the US does not qualify. Its executive’s admission that it cannot get the PR right – the destruction of somebody else’s country does tend to linger – is further diminished by its practicalities: with reliable bad taste, it has set aside $20m for Washington’s Victory in Iraq celebration.([28])

Prime Minister Blair’s legacy

By the time the Victory Party takes place, Prime Minister Blair will be out of office. Nevertheless, he will be one of the guests. The severed limbs of others have earned him his place at Washington’s top table, an outrage no amount of British crisis-PR can ever resolve. Part of the Prime Minister’s legacy may be this: prior to the Iraq war, and culminating in the political appointment of the then new head of SIS, Whitehall/FCO independence seemed at an end. The collapse of Mr Blair s Iraq policy could result in partial restoration of their former hegemony.

Notes

 

[1] Independent on Sunday 15 October 2006

[2] US advertisers are sticking with the one movie formula, see ‘Coca Cola’s Happiness Factory’, Media Guardian, 24 July 2006: ‘Instead of finding a cultural insight that would resonate in every part of the world, it has created a separate world.’

Unhappy with its lack of respectful representation in Hollywood movies, Turkey has put its own spin on espionage and made its most expensive movie ever – Valley of the Wolves – which follows an intelligence agent as he travels to Iraq to avenge the death of a Turkish soldier. The Times 17 February 2006.

[3] PRs always look to the major set pieces for a steer, such as the US State of the Union speeches. President Bush gave his this year as climate change dominated British media, a subject he ignored. The President seemed unaware that Pope Benedict, the week before – doubtless with the upcoming Presidential speech in mind – gave his first as pontiff, priming global audiences about love, which coincides with China’s ‘Harmony’ PR , discussed below.

Pope Benedict similarly outflanked the President in a private speech in Bavaria when he was rude about Muslims, corrected the impression by being rude about Jews, apologised to the former but not the latter, and got the ambassadors from 21 Muslim countries to a meeting. How do you get Arab media to cover you? You announce you will provide text in Arabic and organise a huge publicity campaign to draw attention to it. (Multilingual lobbyists will be checking against delivery for subtle variations…..)

[4] Tourism marketing is a study in itself. The expression ‘The Holy Land’ is a geographic, political and spiritual position statement. Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia started life as a church, subsequently became a mosque, and finally, with the birth of the Turkish republic, a secular museum: i.e. at every stage of its history, it has been a political advertisement. Conversely, Britain’s Big Ben is merely a tourist site today: the world now sets its watch by, say, computer. Antagonism to religious-build is not unique to Islam. See ‘Battle to block massive mosque’, The Observer 24 September 2006. Scientology’s £24m centre in the City of London has attracted similar controversy. See The Guardian 23 October 2006.

[5] The Sunday Times 17 September 2006. One of the best times for gathering intelligence is after trauma, whether natural disaster or war: e.g. events in US, 11/9/01, or the arrival of Lebanese middle classes in London after the destruction of the Lebanon this summer. The reason why political leaders hate mass tragedy is because it reinforces global public sophistication. For example, anti-US executive opinion hardened post-hurricane Katrina, separating it from the American masses for whom there was sympathy. This was the exact opposite of Cold War PR which dehumanised the masses.

[6] Professor Andrew’s MI5 (Penguin, Allen Lane) to be published 2009, Professor Jeffrey’s SIS (Bloomsbury) to be published 2010. (The Times, 27 August 2006). See also Terry Hanstock’s Re: in this issue – ed.

Note: ‘unwelcome’ public sector histories are always of interest. For example, in his book Murder in Samarkand, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray writes: ‘I returned to London for a conference. At a meeting with Linda Duffield, Director of Wider Europe at the Foreign Office . . .’ Since when has Uzbekistan been in wider Europe ?!

[7] Originally, Brit spooks faced no external competition, the system being designed to create internal competition but with guaranteed separate supply arrangements which prevented internal collaboration. This makes internal consolidation difficult today, leaving Brit spook organisations structurally and culturally unprepared to deal with external competition. An illustration of this spilled into the media when former intelligence officer Crispin Black – presumably on the say-so of some former colleagues – suggested SIS recruit from India’s intelligence services (Independent on Sunday, 2 July 2006). Three months later the BBC’s Newsnight (27 September 2006) reported on a British defence intelligence official rubbishing Pakistan’s.

[8] The Sunday Times 13 August 2006. London Mayor Ken Livingstone has announced all state primary schools will teach Chinese. (The Observer 1 October 2006) This highlights a problem for SIS: it is accused of being too public school when one reason why this may be the case is that public schools teach the languages required.

[9] China is developing cool status by allowing religion, which is cool, to be a mainstream part of its tourism profile. India, exporting Bollywood, books and fashion, has long been cool. Spanish-speaking Hispanic America is not yet in a position to challenge cool Portuguese-speaking Brazil.

[10] Networking: commerce is now aping traditional spook-craft. Throughout the 1990s, corporate networking – unlike spook grooming – was about the job someone holds. Today it is about the job a person could hold if steered in the right way (potential v experience), which was always the method of say, the British America Project and its local equivalents worldwide. In this connection, compare the grooming of two sets of privileged British brothers, the older sons of PM and Mrs Blair, familiarising themselves with international political/executive elites, and Princes William and Harry, with overseas military elites, training at Sandhurst.

[11] See article in The Guardian 24 August 2006, where he is obviously not mad. The photo PR suits the established church since Richard Reid is a convert to Islam. Rejection of UK or US values is not unique to some Islamists. Solzenitysyn also rejected American values. To some, US/UK culture is defined by, say, sex and violence, not democracy.

[12] The Observer 15 October 2006; The Sunday Times, Brand Supplement, 24 September 2006 .

[13] The Sunday Times, 6 August 2006. Seasoned non-spook diplomats were always annoyed some spook analysis was based on recycling overseas newspaper articles (open source). The modern equivalent is mining the net. See also BBC Ten O clock News, ‘Online Jihadism’, 25 October 2006

[14] BAA rather ruined the airport safety message with point 2 of its Important Information to travellers, reading: ‘You can shop as usual, and take advantage of the wide selection of famous brands . . . ,’ advert in The Independent 31 August 2006.

[15] Britain’s Afghan PR came unstuck following the tragic loss of British life in an air crash leaving 14 dead on 4 September 2006. Officials did not know which was better: to put it down to Taliban success or mechanical failure.

[16] When you have a strong brand (e.g. Christianity/Islam) you have a problem distinguishing individual products (e.g. schisms preaching violence) within the brand. Christian PR has relied on the visuals, e.g. Christ’s suffering on the Cross, to promote itself. One of the fascinating things about Islam’s growth is that it does the reverse, with no images allowed. Although it is impossible to judge, I wonder whether this struck a chord with some western Muslims who, until recently, similarly had no image of themselves in, for example, mainstream media.

[17] Singular identity: few are aware of the Roman Catholic Church’s secular knowledge/long expressed anxieties about climate change, an issue secular executives wish to control. Despite the bus/tube bombs in London last year, there is general agreement that not all Muslims are suicide bombers. (The Germans had to wait fifty years to lose the ‘not all Germans are Nazis’ tag.) This laudable trend came from the predominantly secular public and was not a result of inter-faith dialogue. The term inter-faith dialogue is an example of clever PR. The words inter-faith and dialogue imply inclusivity. Actually both are exclusive with the participating faiths acting pretty much like trade associations talking each other up/to each other, in order to form a common front when interests coincide. In Britain, the biggest winner in all this religion business has been the mainstream churches who have become politically – if not spiritually – relevant through inter-faith dialogue. The result is a bit like a supermarket mix of multi-buy (buy one, get one free) as well as having ten competing cereal brands on the shelf. Welcoming converts but not necessarily engaged in organised conversion (the equivalent, in retail terms, of no longer cutting prices to kill the competition in a winner take all tactic), the major faiths in Britain are playing the numbers game. Together they form a huge political lobby with high street retail outlets (churches/mosques/synagogues/temples).

[18] The US executive talked a lot of rubbish about religious freedom in Iraq and the banning of some Shia religious observances by successive Sunni Iraqi dictators. So far as I am aware, it has not been mentioned that this was often at the request of moderate and secular Shia who otherwise felt powerless against their clerics. One of my memories of mid-1960s Iraq is that adults of all faiths were petrified about fanatics, whereas when we arrived in Britain it was reds under the beds. Families with fanatic sons treated them as if addicted – ie a medical problem.

[19] One reason why Al Jazeera’s airing of some Osama videos or similar, causes anxiety is because tactics repeat. France’s future Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann, head of the French Press Office in Carlton Gardens during WW2, broadcast twice a day to France. Included in these were coded messages to Free French agents.

[20] See senior Chinese government adviser Jia Qinglin’s speech in London 24 October 2006, about building a harmonious society internally/externally: viz. ‘a harmonious world should be a democratic, amicable, just and inclusive world.’ Compare with Times article, 18 September 2006, about a new business in military public relations worth millions of dollars emerging in the US…….

[21] The Guardian 15 February 2006

[22] The Guardian 28 September 2006

[23] It similarly rebuffed Prime Minister Blair’s ‘Arc of Extremism’, designed to complement the American executive’s Long War.

[24] See Timothy Garton-Ash, The Guardian 9 November 2006. If ‘Liberty under Law’ PR establishes itself it could be the first credible US counter to China’s Harmony PR.

[25] There is a lot of Latin American PR coming through – I call it Salsa PR – not least because of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. The tragic shooting of a young Brazilian in London erroneously suspected of terrorism, went far deeper than the individual tragedy. With all the implications for British trade, Brazilians believed the way the error was handled illustrated lack of respect for their country. (The British police are unlikely to have attacked the reputation of an innocent dead white American in the way they did an innocent dead Brazilian.)

[26] I saw the senator on CNN’s Larry King Live, 19 October 2006. In a wide-ranging interview, he stayed clear of climate change.

[27] The Times 8 August 2006 Three Gorges: an example of straightforward news management is the different way BBC News 24 and Sky News initially covered winners at the Venice Film Festival 2006. The BBC led on the best movie award going to the late entrant Still Life directed by Jia Zhangke, set against the destruction of a Chinese community through executive flooding of a river, one of China s most controversial subjects. Sky – reflecting the commercial ambitions of its proprietor – barely mentioned it, concentrating on Dame Helen Mirren’s best actress award for playing the Queen in the movie of the same title.

[28] The Times 5 October 2006. The actual budget could be much higher. The guest-lists/seating-plans will offer a crash-course in US politics and international relations.Studying a year’s worth of Court Circular notices can be similarly helpful.