State Department works to create brand of the free

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.