Google sent me an alert this morning that my name was in the New York Times. It's an article called "World Falls for American Media, Even as It Sours on America" which pretty much explains the gist of the whole thing.
The author, Tim Arango, had called me up a few months ago to talk about such matters, based on the fact that I was chairman/CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences when 9/11 hit. He was interested in the fact that I'd attended those high-level Hollywood meetings that were called by Karl Rove in the immediate blow-back from the attacks.
I'm not a big Karl Rove fan but, at the time, there was nothing insidious about the meetings. After 9/11, everybody wanted to talk about what they could do to help. Hollywood knows how to communicate and a lot of people out here were wondering if there was a piece of that in a solution.
In any case, here's my bit from the article:
Bryce Zabel, a television producer who was chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences at the time and a participant in the 2001 meetings with the White House, argued then that the United States needed to regard itself like a consumer brand.
“Products like Coca-Cola are far more effectively branded around the globe than the United States itself,” he wrote in a memo that was circulated around Hollywood. “The American entertainment and communications industry has the technological and creative expertise to improve relations between our country and the rest of the world."
It seems like a perfectly fine quote, I think, except for the context which may cause some people to think I was advocating the dreaded "P" word, or propaganda. So, for the record, I most emphatically was not doing that.
My point then, and now, is simply that while every freaking corporate enterprise in the entire damn world spends time, money and effort on their "brand," the United States of America, arguably one of the potentially strongest brands on the planet, acts as if it's an irrelevant concept for us.
Personally, I think we have taken a massive step forward in "re-branding" America by our election of Barack Obama. Let's hope so.
