Mother of all campaigns
What do media wars and advertising have in common? Walter Bosch laments the fact that aesthetics are winning out over ethics on both battlefields today.
Column What do media wars and advertising have in common? Walter Bosch laments the fact that aesthetics are winning out over ethics on both battlefields today.
The images on CNN were seductively beautiful. Tanks covered in dust in the vast desert and everything in the trendy Pantone colors 13-0640 TC to 17-1227 TC, plus acacia, milk coffee from yellow to gray to beige. The tracer bullets in the fresh green of the night vision devices. The digital zooms at the limit of their capacity to resolve the battle scenes into colorful squares. The fighter jet target cameras with their explosions in black and white and, of course, the generals who, far from being shot, appeared before the world's cameras in immaculate combat fatigues, wearing fashionable spats as if it were a Vogue shoot. In short: the images of war were an aesthetically perfectly staged soap opera. There is no better or more beautiful way to sell horror. Or to put it another way: with the right images, you can sell anything. Even the war.
What we got to see was not just a military campaign, but also a gigantic advertising campaign. With the copy platform that the "good guys" defeat the realm of darkness cleanly and efficiently on behalf of the free world. The fourth part of "The Lord of the Rings", so to speak. A video game in a class of its own. It has almost succeeded in making the worldwide anti-war demonstrations appear more brutal than the capture of Basra.
What a glaring contrast to this were the TV images that could be seen on SF DRS, but never on CNN. The Iraqi doctor, for example, standing desperately in the midst of countless corpses, not knowing how to get rid of them, while tens of thousands of flies feasted on them. Such "reality bites" would have damaged the campaign. Just as if an ad for the Porsche Cayenne Turbo had mentioned that it consumes 21.9 liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers in the city. The armored vehicles of the
17th Cavalry of the US Army.
Advertising hides what doesn't fit the picture. There is still a lot to learn from the Pentagon here. No matter how hard CNN tried to provide background information and analysis: The images were stronger, they were overwhelming. And the "embedded journalists" quickly became "buddies" of the troops. How could they have escaped the esprit de corps of their units?
And you can learn even more from the Pentagon. For example, that the simplest ideas are still the most effective. For example, distributing the likenesses of all the bad guys as a deck of cards. It's about death and life. But we are ignoring death in this campaign, just like the fuel consumption of an off-road Porsche. The motto is: Life is just a game. Who wouldn't want to play along?
> Walter Bosch was editor-in-chief of Blick, head of all Ringier editors-in-chief and co-founder of the advertising agency Bosch & Butz. Since selling the agency in 1998, he has been an entrepreneur and consultant in Zurich and the USA.
The images on CNN were seductively beautiful. Tanks covered in dust in the vast desert and everything in the trendy Pantone colors 13-0640 TC to 17-1227 TC, plus acacia, milk coffee from yellow to gray to beige. The tracer bullets in the fresh green of the night vision devices. The digital zooms at the limit of their capacity to resolve the battle scenes into colorful squares. The fighter jet target cameras with their explosions in black and white and, of course, the generals who, far from being shot, appeared before the world's cameras in immaculate combat fatigues, wearing fashionable spats as if it were a Vogue shoot. In short: the images of war were an aesthetically perfectly staged soap opera. There is no better or more beautiful way to sell horror. Or to put it another way: with the right images, you can sell anything. Even the war.
What we got to see was not just a military campaign, but also a gigantic advertising campaign. With the copy platform that the "good guys" defeat the realm of darkness cleanly and efficiently on behalf of the free world. The fourth part of "The Lord of the Rings", so to speak. A video game in a class of its own. It has almost succeeded in making the worldwide anti-war demonstrations appear more brutal than the capture of Basra.
What a glaring contrast to this were the TV images that could be seen on SF DRS, but never on CNN. The Iraqi doctor, for example, standing desperately in the midst of countless corpses, not knowing how to get rid of them, while tens of thousands of flies feasted on them. Such "reality bites" would have damaged the campaign. Just as if an ad for the Porsche Cayenne Turbo had mentioned that it consumes 21.9 liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers in the city. The armored vehicles of the
17th Cavalry of the US Army.
Advertising hides what doesn't fit the picture. There is still a lot to learn from the Pentagon here. No matter how hard CNN tried to provide background information and analysis: The images were stronger, they were overwhelming. And the "embedded journalists" quickly became "buddies" of the troops. How could they have escaped the esprit de corps of their units?
And you can learn even more from the Pentagon. For example, that the simplest ideas are still the most effective. For example, distributing the likenesses of all the bad guys as a deck of cards. It's about death and life. But we are ignoring death in this campaign, just like the fuel consumption of an off-road Porsche. The motto is: Life is just a game. Who wouldn't want to play along?
> Walter Bosch was editor-in-chief of Blick, head of all Ringier editors-in-chief and co-founder of the advertising agency Bosch & Butz. Since selling the agency in 1998, he has been an entrepreneur and consultant in Zurich and the USA.
