Newswise — The U.S. government missed an opportunity to improve America's image in the Arab and Muslim world when it shut down the 2002 "Brand America" public diplomacy television advertising campaign, according to a new book written by Oklahoma State University professor Dr. Jami Fullerton, and her colleague from Southern Methodist University, Dr. Alice Kendrick.
Fullerton and Kendrick believe the Shared Values Initiative (SVI)—the official name for the advertising campaign at the State Department—improved America's image in Indonesia and possibly throughout the Middle East.
"So, did SVI work?" the professors write in Advertising's War on Terrorism: The Story of the U.S. State Department's Shared Values Initiative. "According to internal State Department documents about SVI in Indonesia, the campaign achieved its objectives. It not only got people talking about Muslim life in America, it also produced more positive perceptions of America."
This finding also is backed up by experimental research the professors conducted in London, Cairo and Singapore. After viewing the five television advertisements, international students were more likely to believe Muslims are fairly treated in the United States and had more positive attitudes toward the "United States government" and "U.S. people." The research also found that attitudes toward the United States improved more among Muslim students than among Christians and other students.
The goal of SVI was to convince the Muslim and Arab world that America wasn't waging war on Islam. The Madison Avenue-produced ads depicted the happy lives of Muslims in America, including Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, who is shown on the cover of the book shaking hands with President George W. Bush. The commercials aired in Indonesia and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries over a month-long period between late October and early December 2002. About 300 million Arabs and Muslims saw them.
"Public diplomacy practitioners and scholars continue to lambaste SVI and the idea of using advertising as a weapon in the war on terrorism," they write in the final chapter to their book. "The official account is that SVI failed. ... However, research presented in ... this book suggests that SVI may have worked. ... So the question becomes: If communication campaigns like SVI have the potential to be effective, what went wrong in 2002 and what can be done in the future to make similar public diplomacy programs work better?"
This book explores what went wrong with the Shared Values Initiative and how to change the U.S. approach to public diplomacy in the future.
About the Authors Jami Fullerton is an associate professor at Oklahoma State University, where she teaches advertising and mass communication research and theory. Dr. Fullerton, who is the recipient of one State Department grant and a participant in two others, often spends her summers abroad teaching and conducting research on cross-cultural communication and media globalization. The OSU College of Arts and Sciences named her an outstanding researcher in 2001. She currently serves as chair of the American Advertising Federation's Academic Committee and is on the AAF Board of Directors.
Alice Kendrick is a professor in the Temerlin Advertising Institute at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Kendrick has published more than 30 refereed research papers, numerous industry reports, and Successful Advertising Research Methods (with Jack Haskins). She has served on the National Advertising Review Board, the American Academy of Advertising's research committee, and the boards of the American Advertising Federation and Dallas Ad League.
Advertising's War on Terrorism: The Story of the U.S. State Department's Shared Values Initiative*By Jami Fullerton and Alice KendrickForeword by David DemersPublication/Street Date: June 12, 2006254 pp / 54 photos, tables and illustrationsIndex / References / TimelineISBN: 0-922993-43-2 (cloth) $54.95 ISBN: 0-922993-44-0 (paper) $34.95
*Available through Baker & Taylor, YBP, Blackwell's, Coutts or any other national book wholesaler.
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Advertising's War on Terrorism: The Story of the U.S. State Department's Shared Values Initiative
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