TEMERLIN PROFESSOR’S BOOK EVALUATES STATE DEPARTMENT ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN AS POLICY TOOL

Advertising has many purposes: to convince would-be consumers to purchase goods or services from a particular vendor, to increase the brand recognition of a particular product or company, or to alert consumers of chances to save money by making purchases during sales. But since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the United States government has used advertising to change the perception of the United States in the minds of residents of other countries.

Dr. Alice Kendrick, professor in the Temerlin Advertising Institute, has just written a book about the impact of a State Department-run advertising campaign in largely Muslim nations.

In the book, Advertising’s War on Terrorism: The Story of the U.S. State Department’s Shared Values Initiative, Dr. Kendrick explores the role of advertising in the effort to change world perception of America and its government.

“Late in 2002, the State Department used advertising for the first time ever in Muslim countries to improve the impression of America, obviously in response to the events of September 11,” said Kendrick, who co-authored the book with Dr. Jami Fullerton of Oklahoma State University. The government’s effort to improve perception of U.S. policy in such nations became known as the “Shared Values Initiative” (SVI).
 
The events of that day, in the minds of many residents of Muslim nations, either directly or indirectly caused the United States to send military forces into Afghanistan, and later into Iraq. The State Department’s fear, Kendrick said, is that the residents of those and other primarily Islamic nations view the United States government as one bent on aggression toward certain countries, particularly those with largely Muslim populations.

The commercials, she said, were designed to show Muslims happily living in the United States and interacting with American citizens without feeling ostracized or resented for their ethnic backgrounds or religious beliefs.

“They’re called ‘videos,’ but the government bought the time to air them – they’re commercials,” Kendrick said. “The main thing they wanted to show was happy American Muslims, and to talk about how they are able to practice their religion freely in this country.”

The videos, she said, were created not to imply that all Americans feel a certain way, but that the United States is based on a system of open-minded tolerance and acceptance of different ideas, religions and cultures.

“A video isn’t going to make you lay down an AK-47 assault rifle,” Kendrick said. “But what it can do is show that you and I don’t have to agree on everything. It was sort of a way for them to learn about another culture, and to realize that we want them to feel comfortable about the American government.”

The project was conceived when Fullerton joined Kendrick at SMU for a speech by Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Charlotte Beers in December, 2002. Kendrick and Fullerton had acquired a copy of the television commercials Beers had produced that were running in the Middle East, and had read about the SVI and formed a research study to analyze it.

Beers, the only person ever to serve as chief executive of two top-10 ad agencies (J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy and Mather), believed that despite its critics, the ad campaign was effective, and had “achieved her goal, which was to start a dialogue with audiences in the Arab and Muslim world.” The campaign was designed, Beers said, to make ordinary Muslim citizens “aware that America wasn’t such a bad place.” Despite the risk of the perception that the ads were nothing more than propaganda, Beers said, the ads made Muslims in other nations reconsider their impressions of the United States.

An underlying theme in the conversations Kendrick and Fullerton had with Beers was that she was not responsible for the “content of the product” – in this case, the policies of the American government. Her job simply was to sell that product to the residents of the nations in which the commercials were run.

The book was written in part because Kendrick and Fullerton concluded that very little research had been conducted prior to the SVI commercials to determine their effectiveness. Kendrick and Fullerton set out to determine whether the campaign had, in fact, changed the perception Muslims in other nations held of the American government, or whether – as the media reported – the campaign really had been designed to accomplish nothing more than to “win hearts and minds.”