Deborah Branscum has written an insightful analysis of marketing and advertising. “This is your brain on advertising” makes clear that marketing, advertising, and public relations exist solely to create desire where perviously there was none. Declarations to the contrary and protests from the industry notwithstanding.
Branscum illustrates her point by using war, of all things, as an example.
Few people realize that that the Kuwaiti royal family hired one of the largest and most notorious multinational public relations companies, Hill & Knowlton, to drum up support for the Gulf War. As a result of extensive opinion polling, Hill & Knowlton learned that the U.S. citizenry was most likely to support the first war on Iraq if Saddam Hussein could be portrayed as so sinister, evil, and insane that he would commit atrocities against his own people. So that’s just the picture that Hill & Knowlton set out to paint.
Remember the gut-wrenching accounts and images of the results of Iraqi soldiers stealing incubators to which we were subjected just before Operation Desert Storm? The seed for all of that was the Congressional Human Rights Caucus testimony of a Kuwaiti girl, identified only by her first name, we were told, so as to protect her family.
Within months, the Senate in a five-vote majority, voted to declare war on Iraq.
As it turned out, the Kuwaiti girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Oh, and the story had been constructed from whole cloth by Hill & Knowlton who also coached the girl in her caucus testimony.
As John R. MacArthur noted in his coverage of the issue in Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, “... Lying under oath in front of a congressional committee is a crime; lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations.”
The question we need to be asking is what story Hill & Knowlton and its partners in crime are hard at work creating for this go-round?
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