REBRANDING AMERICA
REBRANDING AMERICA
Credit: W+K12 ad, Wieden + Kennedy
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.
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