Paper Magazine has published 15 eye-catching contributions from advertisers to a project it called Rebranding America, all of which are laid out here at Adweek mag’s AdFreak blog. Before I give them my thumbs up, a caveat: The admen who delivered them are among the most influential and well-paid in the country. As a true believer, I like the way the “Obama-equals-hope” concept is conveyed - even by the somewhat disturbing image of the Statue of Liberty giving birth to our new President - but I am not so naive as to view these graphics as pure expressions from the heart. I know that Saatchi & Saatchi, to name one of the participating agencies, would not turn down a multimillion-dollar contract from the GOP, for example. (In fact, whereas the Paper Mag proposal is really just a bit of hypothetical fun, the Republicans are openly rebranding themselves, although that effort is so far focused solely on diminishing the formidable brand of its primary competitor.) These ad agents are businessmen, not politicians - and so it should be. So yes, this is mostly a shallow exercise in showing off Madison Avenue’s cleverest rather than a serious effort to promote a new America.
But now let me ride to the admen’s defense. To me, the backlash against these “ads,” as found in the lengthy comment sections below AdFreak’s image display, and separately in response to its article on the same, is way overblown. I’m not bothered by the sadly predictable tit-for-tat between someone called “L NINO” and another using the moniker of - wait for it - “Che was a homicidal maniac,” but by the more serious analysis of the ads themselves. I can’t disagree more with “Cookiepuss,” who argued that there is no worse way to rebrand something than to say “we used to suck but we’re so much better now.” That might be so for most commercial brands, but in this case recognizing recent failures is an unavoidable necessity. There is no getting around the fact that Obama’s election was so warmly welcomed by the rest of the world because of what preceded him. Justified or not, non-Americans utterly loathed George W. Bush and what he stood for. Any attempt to rebrand America – whether in an intellectual exercise such as this one or a real, full-blown PR strategy hatched in Washington – must deal with that fact. And these mock ads do so with great eloquence.
Below, with Alex Bogusky’s mixing of Korda’s image of Che with Shepard Fairey’s of Obama, we find the most provocative offering of the lot, and not just because it was certain to get a rise out of “Che was a homicidal maniac” and his ilk. Comment posters are apt to ask what the political message is here. Is it that Obama offers a peaceful solution to the problems that Che sought to resolve through violence? Does it speak to U.S. hopes for rapprochement with Cuba, and with the Latin American left in general? Or, as a kneejerk conservative might have it, is the artist a radical leftist who believes Obama is delivering a communist utopia? (Sad but true: that’s exactly how some would overinterpret this.) But aside from its ambiguous primary message and its capacity to get right-wingers’ knickers in a twist, this “ad” contains a powerful secondary message on the communicative power of cultural icons. It’s a meta-commentary on how the juxtaposition of political icons and images is used to simplify our otherwise complex reality into elegant little stories. In this case it addresses how Obama’s supporters are subsuming an extremely difficult political rejuvenation into a single, appealing representation of the president’s African-American face while the right plays the same simplification game by drawing far-fetched associations between Obama and extreme Marxism. (As readers of my book will know, the same thing happened to Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a complex human being if there ever was one, when his face became a ubiquitous icon and brand.)
Of course I’m biased, but I think Bogusky’s Che-Obama graphic is wonderful. It turns the mirror back on the admen themselves. It forces anyone seeking to “rebrand America” to reflect on iconic images and how they are manipulated for political purposes.
This looks cool: a picture book of 20th century political icons with some introductory text in which Andrew Roberts discusses how manipulated images mess with our minds, how they make us fall in rapture with their subjects. The book is entirely comprised of postcards.
Che is there, of course. Who else would be on the cover? But he’s far from the only one. Says Carolyn Kellogg, who reviewed the little book in the LA Times, “Everyone, it seemed — Hitler, Pope John Paul II, Emperor Haile Selassie — wound up on a postcard” last century.
Incidentally, Kellogg makes reference to my book and to a generally positive review by her colleague , David Ulin, which ran in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday.
Four words that are already becoming a cliche: Obama is a brand.
I like to think I was a bit ahead of the curve on this idea (and, admittedly, I haven’t stopped banging on about it, having most recently hit the issue in the tail end of a CNN interview.) We don’t even need the news from Spain that eight trademark registrations for the name “Obama” are currently pending there to prove we are dealing with a powerful presidential brand. Obama’s political campaign was very early on focused on the persuasive power of images and on the management of a branded concept of packaged ideas, one that encapsulated desirable notions: “hope,” “progress,” “change.” Inevitably, I hurried to put references to this phenomenon into my book as the Obama juggernaut swept into office before it went to print. And now, as I do interviews promoting the book, I find that the Obama versus Che brand comparison is a question that pops up frequently.
Me? This Obama feelgood stuff makes me feel good. But now I find Chris Hedges warning me against being duped into “Buying Brand Obama” - this from the left, not from the whining right. Hedges is excessively morbid, which I find antithetical to my own excessive optimism - a mere glance at the cover of “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” will tell you that the seminarian-cum-war correspondent-cum left-wing philosopher is a gloomy guy. But I admire his intellect. He’s an extremely clear-headed thinker with a rich repertoire of philosophical material to draw on. The problem is that he sometimes has too much of that thinking thing going on. In this case, his erudite unraveling of the nature of “pseudo spectacle” in politics go so far as to deny the existence of some fundamental elements of the human condition.
First, we find Hedges confusing the observation that Obama’s appeal is built around a branding strategy with the question of whether or not his policies are moving the country in the direction of true reform. Sure, there are reasons for progressives (myself included) to be skeptical of the Administration’s “progress: Obama is a long way from introducing universal health care and everything from Wall Street’s TARP to the Big Three auto bailout suggests that corporate lobbyists still rule Washington. But the truth is the ingrained structure of American power is such that dismantling it is not only politically difficult, it would be dangerously disruptive to do it in one fell swoop. Change has to come gradually. And for now I’d say that the gradual change is heading in the right direction. But to be sure, the Obama Administration deserves more than 100 days before I, Hedges, or anyone can pass judgment.
Still, an assessment of the Obama record is not what I most want to challenge Hedges on. Rather it is his assumption that images and brands are nothing but vehicles for distorting people’s perceptions of reality. Yes, they are abstractions from reality but, as semioticians habitually remind us, so too are words and language. We all communicate in stories, embellishing ideas so as to tap into our listener’s or our viewer’s emotions. Regular communication, I would argue, always contains a big emotional element in the same way that commercial branding strategies do. (Question: was Hedges’ choice of title for his new book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” a random decision, without any mind to how it might influence the prospect of the book’s sale?)
Throughout history, images have been the most powerful means of communicating ideas. It starts with cave paintings and moves through the insignia and iconography of ancient religions and tribes to the national flags of the modern era. Just like modern brands, these symbolic images of old reduced something complex and difficult into a simple, appealing concept. It’s how politics, religion and commerce has always been conducted. Branding is really a fancy new name dreamed up by U.S. business schools for a very, very old practice.
Even more important, I find it offensive to think that by letting my emotions be moved by an image or a brand I am necessarily being conned. Note: Nelson Valdes, another writer who occupies the same zone on the left as Hedges has criticized me (inaccurately) for treating the Cuban Revolution as a brand and for misrepresenting those who support it as dupes of a marketing plot. Not only does this criticism contradict Hedges, both miss the point. And they do so by wrongly assuming that the relationship between an individual and a political brand devalues the person. I can’t disagree more. Much of what makes us human, that which feeds our imagination and allows us to separate ourselves from our “inhuman” earthly existence is tied up in the emotional investment we make in images, art and brands.
This became clear to me when I encountered Jaquelin, a teenager in a destitute Argentine shantytown who told me that the reason she never, ever removed her Che T-shirt was because “he is beautiful” and because “I dream of him, always.” (Read about the encounter in the epilogue to my book, excerpted here.) The Che image - i.e. the Che brand - offers her a chance to escape the drudgery of her harsh daily existence through the refuge of beauty and imagination. More than anything, the Che image gives her hope. She deserves this “luxury” more than anything else I would argue, for to indulge in such imagination is what makes her human. The hope, dreams and imagination inspired by the brands and images that surround us are the foundation upon which humanity is built.
Letting people believe in Obama and the change he represents is a positive thing in its own right. Whether or not the real world still sucks is another matter altogether.
No Caption Needed, a blog connected to a book of the same name on photojournalism and culture, offers some superb insights into how images shape our world. Great pics, sharp analysis, unique insights. By Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites.
Look at these pages from a feature in the South African magazine Design Times and you get a pretty good idea of how rapidly the current President of the United States’ face has has become a mega-icon. It’s a good sign that a person’s features have been firmly implanted into the public store of pop cultural consciousness when designers start playing with it and morphing into other iconic faces, such as that of Lincoln.
All this - from the Pop Art bleach-out abstractions such as the Shepard Fairey “Hope” poster and its various imitators, to the sixties black resistance aesthetic in others, as well as the folk art imagery that accompanies them - - are so very reminiscent of the explosion of Cuban and other art that rapidly began to obsess with Che’s face after the Korda image took off in the wake of Guevara’s death in 1967.
And as with the Che phenomenon, it’s very hard to separate the part of the Obama icon that has organically arisen out of the raw enthusiasm of the masses from that which is encouraged through marketing or propaganda. The Che icon was actively promoted by Cuba and its Brand Manager in Chief, Fidel Castro, to paint his “Revolution” with a sexy image that didn’t match its harsh inequitable reality. Give me Obama over Castro (and Guevara, the armed revolutionary) any day, but look at the output from the “Designers for Obama” group, whose work is featured in the Design Times article, and it’s easy to see a parallel in the way that Obama’s image is being “managed.”
Argentina-based journalist Brian Byrnes put this great video together for CNN based on my presentation at the Buenos Aires Book Fair in April 2009. Check out more of Brian’s work at his site, www.brianbyrnes.com and its accompanying blog, As Belgrano Byrnes.
In the search for the ultimate bad guy in this scary pig flu thing, some pundits are, understandably, taking shots at globalization.
Laura Carlsen from the Center For International Policy is leading the charge. Her argument is an appealing one: Mexico, the NAFTA-sponsored epicenter of globalized production was almost destined to also become the epicenter of a new global disease. These people outline a perfect storm. They blame companies like Smithfield Foods - whose Veracruz-based Carroll Farms hog facility, with its ominous sounding “manure lagoons,” lies in the vicinity of the first cases found in Mexico - for escaping developed world health standards by outsourcing production to the developing world and they point to air travel and increased trade as the reason why diseases hatched in these polluting capitalists’ cesspools are now arriving on our doorsteps. Globalization, it would seem, has made disease-carrying pigs fly.
Now, I’m not going to charge that this theory is wrong. I’m not a scientist and I’ll defer to the experts on whether Smithfield had a hand in this. (The company strongly denies any link, noting that none of its pigs were infected - and it’s not even clear that the outbreak began with a Mexican pig at all.) Whatever the cause, you can’t argue that increased global interaction has NOT exacerbated this crisis. But if we’re to have a go at poor old, much-maligned globalization, let’s look at the really big picture. There’s a hell of a lot more to globalization than outsourcing pig farms and shifting Spring Break from Florida to Cancun.
First, let’s look at the Mother of all pandemic diseases, the one that is so ingrained in public consciousness seven centuries after it occurred that media outlets immediately reach for it when searching for a metaphor in the swine flu story: the Black Death.
That especially pernicious outbreak of the bubonic plague occurred during the very much unglobalized Middle Ages. And yet it is thought to have traveled from China to Europe, where it wiped out around 75 million people in four years, cutting world population by a fifth. The disease traveled across the world rapidly despite the comparatively fewer global connections. Now, in the 21st century, the reason why we are so far away from repeating such an appalling scenario is, I would argue, the result of globalization’s good side.
Far from blaming Mexico for this outbreak, we should be applauding it for its sensible policy responses, especially the moves taken to limit large gatherings of people, which now appear to be paying off as the rate of case increase encouragingly shows signs of slowing. Such policy response are themselves a product of globalization, of the possibility it offers for a massive, immediately accessible pool of shared knowledge and coordinated international reaction. The World Health Organization is in the eye of the storm right now, but if this scare subsides - which it probably will - the body will rightly deserve applause for the multilateral coordination it has fostered. This too is an outcome of globalization. Margaret Chan’s experience in handling the 1997 bird flu outbreak in Hong Kong and then the SARS scare a few years later represents an invaluable background of experience to bring to the table in this case. If only those 75 million Europeans could have had a Chinese bubonic plague expert at their avail 660 years ago.
In fact, the rise of global quasi-regulatory bodies such as the WHO - and the anti-global capitalism activists’ favorite bogeyman, the World Trade Organization - is a central element of globalization. It is the expanded reach and application of the international norms and treaties upon which these bodies are founded that has facilitated global capitalism, not the other way around. And when global capitalism - in this case, outsourced pig farming and air travel - creates a problem, these international bodies, these stewards of globalization, step up to the plate. We are of course seeing exactly the same with the G-20 summits and other multilateral efforts to confront the global economic crisis.
Some countries are not sticking with the program, of course. Rather than keeping the lines of communication and human interaction open in the face of this scare, they’re closing their borders. But notably, the only two that have ignored expert opinion that stopping air travel from Mexico would be ineffective against the swine flu scare (and counterproductive to the global economy) are two countries whose governments make a habit of railing against global capitalism: Cuba and Argentina. Coincidentally, both countries have also done a terrible job handling outbreaks of dengue fever in the last two years.
Nowhere has globalization produced better benefits from international knowledge sharing than in the field of medicine. And so it is that we don’t just hope that a vaccine will soon come for this strain of flu. We expect it. The WHO is trying to downplay expectations, warning that a vaccine may take months. A couple of months? But let’s put that into the perspective of 1347, the start of the Black Death. Given that the rate of deaths increased exponentially as the four-year plague dragged on, a vaccine in two months would have reduced the total eventual number by tens of millions.
