[R-G] "Brand Obama," "Brand Usa," And "The Audacity Of Marketing"

[Anthony Fenton]

"Brand Obama," "Brand Usa," And "The Audacity Of Marketing": Some  
Candid Reflections at Advertising Age

November 19, 2008 By Paul Street
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19692

The election and nomination process is the brand re-launch of the  
year. Brand USA.  It's just fantastic.

-- David Brain. CEO of the global public relations firm Edelman  
Europe, Middle East and Africa



The last eight years broke faith in Brand America, and people want  
that faith restored.



-- Carolyn Carter, London-based president and CEO of the global public  
relations firm Grey Group Europe, Middle East, and Africa



To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David  
Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of  
politics - you made this happen, and I am forever grateful.

-- Barack Obama, Victory Speech, November 4, 2008





Twenty-three years ago the clever anti-television writer Neil Postman  
dissected the authoritarian nightmare that is modern political  
advertising in the United States. The television commercial, Postman  
noted, is the antithesis of rational popular consideration, which  
leading early philosophers of western economic and political life took  
to be the desirable and enlightened essences of "capitalism" and  
"democracy."



"Its principle theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners,"  
Postman observed, "believed capitalism to be based on the idea that  
both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well-informed, and  
reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest...The  
theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires  
that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is  
good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a  
rational marketplace, then he loses out.  It is the assumption of  
rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and  
winners to keep on winning.  Where it is assumed that a buyer is  
unable to make rational decisions," Postman elaborated, "laws are  
passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which  
prohibit children from making contracts.  In America, there even  
exists in law a requirement that sellers must tell the truth about  
their products, for if the buyer has no protection from false claims,  
rational decision-making is seriously impaired."



"The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide,"  
Postman argued, "that it is difficult to remember that there was once  
a connection between them.  Today, on television commercials,  
propositions are as scarce as unattractive people."



The modern television commercial, Postman noted, makes "hash" out of  
the capitalist assumption of intelligent and informed consumer  
sovereignty. It undercuts the notion of rational claims, based on  
serious propositions and evidence. In the place of cogent language and  
logical discourse it substitutes evocative imagery and suggestive  
emotionalism.



When political success came to revolve largely around the same  
manipulative anti-enlightened methods prevalent in commodity  
advertising, Postman observed, the same sorry fate fell to "capitalist  
democracy's" assumption of rational and informed voters.   Like the  
bamboozled commodity purchasers propagandized by radio and television  
ads, voters are subjects of persuasion through deception instead of  
through respectful and sensible communication. Candidate marketing  
makes hash out of the myth of voter sovereignty in "democratic"  
politics [1].





"A CASE STUDY IN AUDACIOUS MARKETING"



This is why you won't hear Barack Obama's progressive and educated  
supporters saying much about the interesting fact that Obama was  
recently selected by Association of National Advertisers (ANA) as the  
"Marketer of the Year." According to ANA trade journal Advertising Age  
two weeks before the presidential election, "Sen. Barack Obama has  
shown he's already won over the nation's brand builders."



Angus Macaulay, the vice president of Rodale Marketing Solutions, told  
Advertising Age that Obama's campaign was "something we can all learn  
from as marketers."   AOL "Platform A" President Linda Clalirizio  
praised Obama for doing "a great job of going from a relative unknown  
to a household name to being a candidate for president." [2]



Six days after the election, Advertising Age heralded "Brand Obama" as  
a "case study in audacious marketing." The journal praised Obama's  
"messaging consistency" and "communications success," placing special  
emphasis on the Obama campaign's "boldness, that trait that happens to  
be the most important for anyone trying to build a brand now, in a  
chaotic time when many will be tempted to shelve innovation and  
creativity to take u defensive postures."



"And at same time Mr. Obama was building his brand with grand  
gestures," the journal added, "his campaign demonstrated an  
understanding of ground-level marketing strategies and tactics,  
everything from audience segmentation and database management to the  
creation and maintenance of online communities."[3]



"A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS"



"The result," Advertising Age exults, "was a brand that was big enough  
to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate-enough feel to inspire  
advocacy that raised funds at record-breaking, almost obscene levels..."



Quite right.  Early in his campaign, Obama pretended to complain that  
he had become "a blank sheet on which people of vastly different  
political stripes project their own views."  Reflecting on his  
apparent ability to win approval from people of wildly divergent  
perspectives, Obama claimed to worry that "everybody's projecting -  
particularly the way I came in - everybody's projecting their own  
views onto [me]."[4] The danger, he sensed, was that that some of his  
fans were going to become disappointed when they found out that he did  
not in fact represent an indefinite spectrum of viewpoints and  
interests and actually held positions many of them rejected.  A  
related risk was that people would jump off "Senator Good Vibes'" ship  
of "Hope" once they realized that his real-world version of "change"  
and "unity" would mean some difficult decisions, choices, and  
sacrifices in accord with his underlying commitment to existing  
domestic and global disparities and institutions.



The irony behind Obama's reflection was that Obama and his media-savvy  
handlers deliberately and naturally pursued universal appeal in  
pursuit of victory under America's winner-take all electoral system,  
where  corporate- and media-crafted candidate image tends to trump  
substantive policy positions and ideological identifications.  As  
Rolling Stone political writer Matt Tabbai noted in a February 2007  
article bearing the provocative title "Obama is the Best BS Artist  
Since Bill Clinton:"



"The Illinois Senator is the ultimate modern media creature...his  
entire political persona is an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man  
without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp  
edges of any kind. You can't run against him on the issues because you  
can't even find him on the ideological spectrum. Obama's ‘Man for all  
seasons' act is so perfect in its particulars that just about anyone  
can find a bit of himself somewhere in the candidate's background,  
whether in his genes or his upbringing...his strategy seems to be to  
appear as a sort of ideological Universalist, one who spends a great  
deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of  
all points of view, and conversely emphasizes that when he does take  
hard positions on issues, he often does so reluctantly... His  
political ideal is basically a rehash of the Blair-Clinton ‘third way'  
deal, an amalgam of Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and the New Deal; he is  
aiming for the middle of the middle of the middle." [5]



Acting in accord with the longstanding dance of America's Winner Take  
All politics, the media-savvy Obama Team cultivated his "blank sheet"  
appeal by tailoring Obama's message in flexible, chameleon-like accord  
with his own shifting audiences. Claiming to stand above "ideology"  
and partisan conflict, Obama bashed Wal-Mart and upheld the right to  
organize unions when talking to labor audiences but extolled free  
trade," "free markets," and entrepreneurial values when addressing  
"the business community."  He invoked the legacy of the Civil Rights  
Movement when talking to black audiences but downplayed racial justice  
when speaking to white farmers and workers. He embraced capitalism's  
supposed virtues when talking to the rich and powerful but seemed  
stress its "drawbacks" when addressing the working class and poor. He  
told liberal and progressive primary voters that they could "joint the  
movement to end the war [on Iraq]" and shift U.S. policy towards peace  
and negotiation but made sure to tell The Council on Foreign Relations  
of his belief in the essential nobility of U.S. war aims and empire  
and of his desire to advance American global supremacy through  
gigantic military expenditures and a ready willingness to use force,  
unilaterally when "necessary," to "protect the American people and  
their vital interests." [6]



He suggested to progressive Iowa and New Hampshire voters that he was  
a populist outsider out to change the nation's corrupt, corporate- 
dominated culture but his campaign was staffed by and linked to  
Washington and corporate insiders.  His current transition team is  
loaded with Washington political and policy veterans and his cabinet  
and administration more broadly will be packed with big players from  
the Bill Clinton regime. [7]



Hillary Clinton was a "polarizing insider" in Obama's campaign  
rhetoric. The President-Elect is courting her to be the next Secretary  
of State.



The campaign and candidate's conscious pursuit of "universalist"  
ideological hermaphroditism was strongly displayed in Obama's book The  
Audacity of Hope.  Released in the fall of 2006, this bestselling  
marked the unofficial beginning of his presidential candidacy. In  
Steve Sailer's words, it "show[ed] his wordsmith's facility at  
eloquently restating the views of both his liberal supporters and his  
conservative opponents, leaving implicit the suggestion that all we  
require to resolve these wearying Washington disputes is to find a man  
who understands us - a reasonable man, a man very much like, say,  
Obama - and turn power over to him." [8]



At the same time, the Obama campaign clearly spent a considerable  
amount of time, money, and energy cultivating their candidate's pure  
celebrity.  It relished and profited from his emergence as a  
"BaRockstar" - a mass-cultural as well as mass-political persona  
crafted around the vague and amorphous symbols of "Hope," "Change,"  
and "Unity" to absorb the diverse and often confused aspirations and  
dreams of a mass constituency containing numerous and often  
contradictory values and positions.





"NOT BUSH": THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT



It worked, to say the least.  As mainstream journalist Ryan Lizza  
recently noted in an interesting New Yorker reflection on "How Obama  
Won," Obama's media and campaign managers took the "tactical view"  
that "all that was wrong with the United States could be summarized in  
one word: Bush." Further:



"The clear alternative, then, was not so much a Democrat or a liberal  
as it was anyone who could credibly define himself as ‘not  
Bush.' [Obama's legendary media strategist David] Axelrod had a phrase  
he often used to describe this approach: America was looking for ‘the  
remedy, not the replica.' The appeal of this strategy was that, with  
only minor alterations, it could work in the primaries as well as in  
the general election, and that, in turn, allowed Obama to finesse the  
perpetual problem of Presidential politics: having one message to win  
over the a party's most ardent supporters and another when trying to  
capture independents and ‘up-for-grabs' voters - the voters who decide  
a general election." [9]



The key to success is deception and mushiness through mass marketing.  
Obama's media strategist David Axelrod and Obama's campaign manager  
David Plouffe performed masterfully well in blazing this path to  
victory.



The most genuinely accurate thing Obama said in his highly nationalist  
and propagandistic November 4th acceptance speech was that he owed his  
victory to Axelrod, Plouffe, and the rest of his top campaign staff.  
"You made this happen," Obama rightly told them, "and I am forever  
grateful." [9A]



Obama's handlers sold him as a "new" brand.  They brilliantly  
advertised him as the "not Bush" just like Pepsi once expanded as the  
"not Coke" or like Burger King was once the up-and-coming "not  
McDonald's." They did it with the latest and best selling techniques.



"The 2008 Obama presidential run," noted Bruce Dixon in February of  
2008,"may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in  
history." [10] According to the campaign's financial report to the  
Federal Election Commission. Obama had by then spent $52 million on  
"media, strategy consultants, image-building, marketing research and  
telemarketing."  As Pam Martens noted in early March of 2008:



"The money has gone to firms like GMMB, whose website says its "goal  
is to change minds and change hearts, win in the court of public  
opinion and win votes" using ‘the power of branding - with principles  
rooted in commercial marketing,' and Elevation Ltd., which targets the  
Hispanic population and has ‘a combined experience well over 50 years  
in developing and implementing advertising and marketing solutions for  
Fortune 500 companies, political candidates, government agencies.'  
Their client list includes the Department of Homeland Security.  
There's also the Birmingham, Alabama- based Parker Group which  
promises: ‘Valid research results are assured given our extensive  
experience with testing, scripting, skip logic, question rotation and  
quota control ... In-house list management and maintenance services  
encompass sophisticated geo-coding, mapping and scrubbing  
applications.' Is it any wonder America's brains are scrambled?" [11]



Besides contracting with sophisticated big client corporate marketing  
firms like  GMMB and the Parker Group, the Obama operation grew its  
own considerable internal, sophisticated, and vertically integrated  
mass market research and sales capacities for identifying and seducing  
political consumers (voters) susceptible to "brand Obama."  When ABC  
News anchorman Charles Gibson visited Obama's sprawling Chicago office  
seven days before the Ohio and Texas primaries, he observed the quiet  
hum of a corporate sales office. "The tone of the campaign  
headquarters," Gibson noted, was "strikingly serene." He observed  
"33,000 square feet of downtown Chicago office space and no one is  
sure exactly how many staff....The 20-somethings in the New Media  
department," Gibson said, "are responsible for everything from  
designing merchandise sold on the Web site to blogging to unloading  
videos and managing chat rooms." By Gibson's account, "the money flows  
through the computers, a steady infusion of cash in $10, $25, and $50  
dollars. Obama's media maven Axlerod told Gibson, "It's strange that a  
computer terminal can make politics more intimate, but that's what  
happened." [12]



In Dixon's judgment, however, the Obama campaign's massive investment  
in selling their candidate was "not a good thing.  Marketing," Dixon  
noted, "is not even distantly related to democracy or civil  
empowerment.  Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational  
bonds between your product and your target audience." [12A]



It's nothing new.  Astute commentators since at least the Progressive  
Age (1890-1914) have noted that campaigns market U.S. candidates like  
they sell cars, candy, and toothpaste.



But as Lizza suggests, the problem has origins prior to the corporate  
and mass consumerist age. "By 1840," distinguished American historian  
Eric Foner has noted, "the mass democratic politics of the Age of  
Jackson had absorbed the logic of the marketplace.  Selling candidates  
and their images was as important as the positions for which they  
stood."[13]



The two-party political system that emerged from the U.S. Republic's  
blueprint does not encourage the development of parties with clear  
ideological and policy differences or strong relationships between  
voter choices and citizens' actual positions on key policy issues. It  
leads rival candidates to blur their policy and ideological  
distinctions in the quest to win those all-important voters in the  
middle, focusing instead on personal qualities rather than hard policy  
and ideological differences. [14]



This harsh reality, combined with the almost complete absence of  
serious left political choices and furthered by the corporate and  
visual-imaginary takeover of much of the U.S. electoral process in the  
20th century,  goes a long way towards explaining why substantive  
policy issues tend to be badly downplayed in U.S. campaigns.  It also  
explains much of the desperation and myopia that leads many ostensibly  
progressive voters and activists to back corporate-imperial candidates  
guaranteed to betray populist and peaceful promises "upon the  
assumption of power." [15]



CHE GUOBAMA: REBRANDING AMERICA WITH "A CLEAN SLATE"



Before he could be in a position to be sold (brilliantly) on the mass  
American electoral market, of course, Obama first needed to sell  
himself to the national political and business elite that controls  
much of the political action behind the scenes.  That sales job did  
not involve deceptive one- or two-message commercials and slogans.  It  
was about candid, up-close meetings in which the candidate made it  
clear that he posed no substantive challenge to dominant domestic and  
imperial structures and doctrines. That earlier marketing project,  
ably recounted by Ken Silverstein and David Mendell [16], took place  
in late 2003 and 2004 and made possible the first great rolling out of  
Brand Obama during the senator's instantly famous keynote address to  
the Democratic National Convention in late July of 2004.[17]  It has  
continued behind the scenes ever since, with Obama continually  
reassuring his many big-money sponsors and corporate media enthusiasts  
that he is not some sort of starry-eyed idealist about to seriously  
question the interrelated hierarchies and ideologies of corporate- 
managed state capitalism, empire, and inequality.



The basic Obama message to the nation's ruling class - NOT advertised  
to the electorate - is that he is safe to concentrated power centers  
even if occasional populist-sounding slivers make their way into the  
construction of "Brand Obama."  More than that, the campaign's message  
to the elite has included the promise that Obama will wrap reigning  
institutions and dogma in fake-progressive rebel's clothing and help  
repair the damage done to the United States' global public relations  
image by the vicious and clumsy post-9/11 excesses of the brazenly  
imperial Cheney-Bush gang.



Consistent with that hope, Advertising Age hails President-Elect Obama  
for producing "An Instant Overhaul for Tainted Brand America." The  
journal quotes David Brain, CEO of the global public relations firm  
Edelman Europe, Middle East and Africa, on how "the election and  
nomination process is the brand relaunch of the year.  Brand USA.   
It's just fantastic." [18]



Nick Ragone has an interesting resume.  He is both "a presidential  
historian" and the senior VP of client development at the leading  
global advertising firm Omnicom Group's Ketchum.  "We've put a new  
face on [America] and that face happens to be African-American,"  
Ragone told Advertising Age.  "It takes a lot of the hubris and  
arrogance of the last eight years and starts to put it in the rearview  
mirror for us." [19]



Rigone might want to review Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty  
Four on the deletion of unpleasant history - sent "down the memory  
hole" - by totalitarian communication authorities. "Rearview mirror"  
is code language for Orwellian revisionism.



Then there's the interesting commentary of Harvard Business School  
professor John Quelch.  Quelch is a former "WWP Group" (a global  
advertising firm) board member and the co-author of a recent book with  
an oxymoronic title: "Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for  
Better Democracy."



According to Welch, echoing Orwell, "The election result zero-bases  
the image of the United States worldwide.  We have a clean slate with  
which to work," Welch told Advertising Age. "Let us hope the  
opportunity is not squandered the way it was after 9/11." [20]



According to Carolyn Carter, the London-based president and CEO and  
Grey Group Europe, Middle East and Africa (creator of the popular  
teeth-rotting "Coke Zero" ad campaign for Northern Europe), "The last  
eight years broke faith in Brand America, and people want that faith  
restored." [21]



Enter the openly imperial Obama, who is "almost like Che Guevera, in a  
good way," according to Foreign Policy magazine's web editor Blake  
Hounshell. "He has icon status," Hounshell explains, "with the all the  
art around the world of his face."  The difference, of course, is that  
Che boldly inspired radical challenges to the American Empire but  
Obama inspires captivation with the corporate-imperial U.S. and its  
supposed self-reinvention as a land of progressive democracy and  
endless possibility. According to Scott Kronick, global marketing firm  
"Ogilvy PR's" Beijing-based president, Obama's triumph "send a strong  
message to the world that despite what many people believe and  
feel...America can be very open, democratic, and progressive."[22]



"EXPECTATION CALIBRATION AND EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT"



It's not all good for the masters of American Empire and Inequality,  
however. The Obama-based "rebranding of America" in the wake of the  
long proto-fascistic, arch-plutocratic, and messianic-militarist  
Cheney-Bush nightmare comes with heightened popular product  
expectations at home and abroad. The risks and likelihood of  
disappointment and betrayal are high. Many American and other world  
citizens can be counted on to take "Brand Obama" and the refurbished  
"Brand USA" and give them meanings that do not accord very well with  
the U.S. power elite's agenda. Rising and betrayed expectations are  
the stuff of actual social revolutions (something rather different  
than marketing revolutions), as the left historian Barrington Moore  
once argued. For these and other reasons, Obama will be relying  
heavily on his marketing and public relations experts to keep the  
bewildered citizenry's hopes and dreams properly constrained and  
downsized. Popular thought coordination through mass marketing will be  
important to the governance period as well as the election phase of  
the Obama ascendancy. As Obama's early and excessively candid foreign  
policy advisor and Harvard ally Samantha Power told the power- 
worshipping public affairs talk-show host Charlie Rose last February,  
"Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at  
home and internationally."[23].



Chilling words but they signify nothing new in the long history of the  
dark science of "Taking the Risk out of [American] Democracy". [24]





Paul Street is a writer and activist in Iowa City.  He is the author of

Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO:  
Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post- 
Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the  
Global Metropolis (New York, 2007), and most recently Barack Obama and  
the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, September  
2008), which can be ordered at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987 
.

Paul can be reached at paulstreet99 at yahoo.com.





NOTES



1. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the  
Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), 126-132.



2. "Obama Wins...Ad Age's Marketer of the Year," Advertising Age  
(October 17, 2008), read at http://adage.com/print?article_id=131810



3. "Barack Obama and the Audacity of Marketing," Advertising Age  
(November 10, 2008), read at http://adage.com/print?article_id=132351



4. As quoted in David Mendell, Obama: From Promise to Power (New York:  
HarperCollins, 2007), 12, 310.



5. Matt Tabai, "Obama is the Best BS Artist Since Bill Clinton,"  
RollingStone.com. posted on AlterNet (February 14,  2007), read online  
at http://www.alternet.org/story/48051.



6. For many details and sources, see Paul Street, Barack Obama and the  
Future of American Politics (Boulderm CO: Paradigm, 2008), 1-163.



7. For a useful summary of Obama administration insiders, see Stephen  
Lendman, "Obama Mania," ZNet (November 17, 2008).



8. Steve Sailer,"Obama's Identity Crisis," The American Conservative  
(March 26, 2007).



9. Ryan Lizza, "Battle Plans: How Obama Won," The New Yorker (November  
15, 2008).



9A. Barack Obama, "Remarks on Election Night," read at www.barackobama.com/2008/11/04/remarks_of_presidentelect_bara.php 
. For reflections on Obama's speech as a form of system-legitimizing  
propaganda, see Paul Street, "Barack Obama: Empire's New Clothes,"  
Black Agenda Report (November 12, 2008), read at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=879&Itemid=1



10. Bruce Dixon, "Holding Barack Obama Accountable," Dissident Voice  
(February 15, 2008), read at www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/02/holding-barack-obama-accountable/



11. Pam Martens, "The Obama Bubble: Why Wall Street Needs a  
Presidential Brand," Black Agenda Report, March 5, 2008.



12. ABC News, "Backstage at Barack Obama's Headquarters," February 28,  
2008.



12A Dixon, "Holding Barack Obama Accountable." I would argue (somewhat  
differently from Dixon) that the mass-marketing of candidates is in  
fact intimately related to democracy in that it is a natural effort on  
the part of concentrated power to pervert and subvert it.



13. Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, volume 1 (New  
York: WW Norton, 2005), 377.



14. G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power, Politics, and Social  
Change (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006), 139.



15. Edward S. Herman, "Democratic Betrayal," Z Magazine (January 2007).



16. Ken Silverstein, "Barack Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington  
Machine," Harper's (November 2006); Mendell, Obama, 248-49.



17. A very conservative speech by the way.  See Paul Street "Keynote  
Reflections," (Featured Article), ZNet Magazine (July 29th, 2004),  
available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=5951 
.



18. "An Instant Overhaul for Tainted Brand America," Advertising Age  
(November 10, 2008), read at http://adage.com/print?article_id=132352



19. Quoted approvingly in "An Instant Overhaul."



20. Quoted approvingly in "An Instant Overhaul."



21. Quoted approvingly in "An Instant Overhaul."



22. Quoted approvingly in "An Instant Overhaul."



23. The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, February 21, 2008. See www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/02/21/2/a-conversation-with-samantha-power

(accessed March 1, 2008). For some dark reflections on Charlie and  
Samantha's chat, see Paul Street, "‘Calibrating' HOPE in the Effort to  
‘Patrol the Commons': Samantha Power and the Hidden Imperial Reality  
of Barack Obama," ZNet (February 26, 2008), read at www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16640 
. Thanks to David Peterson for alerting me to the Power comment.



24. To steal the title of Alex Carey's important book: Taking the Risk  
Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty  
(Urbana, IL" University of Illinois Press, 1997). "The twentieth  
century," Carey noted, "has been characterized by three developments  
of great importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate  
power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting  
corporate power against democracy."