The Foreign Service Journal, April 2005

to change deep-seated feelings at a politically charged moment. So State turned to the private sector. McCann-Erickson World- wide produced the ads, testing both messages and featured spokesper- sons through its public relations affiliate, Weber-Shandwick World- wide. Weber’s branch offices orga- nized focus groups in Jakarta and Cairo and vetted them with embassy staff in the target countries. Beers failed, however, to anticipate the risk that her communication cam- paign might itself contribute to Muslim-American tension. When she revealed her plans for Shared Values to the press, that is exactly what hap- pened. The campaign itself became an issue. In the context of gathering war clouds over Iraq, a stalled Middle East peace process and arrests of Muslims in the U.S. and abroad, Arab governments and media organizations pushed back. In Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, state-controlled national media refused to accept the ads. Moreover, several embassies curtailed their on-the-ground activi- ties in the face of pressure from local governments or hostile local press reaction to “American propaganda.” Beers pressed on, spending $4.8 mil- lion on media — half the projected amount — in Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Kuwait and on two pan-Arab satellite TV channels (not including Al-Jazeera). By January 2003, the ads stopped. Two months later, Beers resigned her post for health reasons. State conducted no formal evalua- tion of the campaign. But the official embassy reporting available to this writer shows generally scant results. The “Issue Focus” report from INR’s Media Reaction staff summarized world press reaction this way: “Many criticized the United States’ per- ceived belief that it has the ‘right to interfere to reform misconceptions in Arab societies’ or to ‘light a fire under the Islamic world [so it will] behave.’” But in the one country where the campaign was carried out as planned, it succeeded. In Indonesia, the cam- paign did not become an issue and the embassy implemented it as intended. The full ad schedule ran with simulta- neous local activities, including a Muslim-American speaker and a tele- vised town hall meeting for young Indonesians and Americans. A pro- fessional post-campaign survey demonstrated that Indonesians recalled the Shared Values stories and understood their main message. In fact, the local survey company report- ed that our ads fared better than oth- ers advertising commercial products in Indonesia. More importantly, the embassy evaluated the initiative as a public diplomacy success and asset. Beers clearly made a fatal mistake in the timing of the Shared Values campaign, and in how she presented it to the world press. In the Middle East her core message contrasted with real-world outcomes of U.S. pol- icy. But in the Indonesian arena she proved that a persuasion campaign could work. Rich Lessons to Be Learned When the U.S. Information Agency was abolished in 1999, its divi- sions were transferred into different bureaus throughout the State Depart- ment, sacrificing centralized com- mand and control. USIA’s strategic communication office, which had coordinated campaigns of persuasion, was disbanded. Public diplomacy became essentially a bilateral enter- prise, with weak levers of coordina- tion from Washington. Finally, by bringing its public relations in-house, State lost the independent counsel that USIA had offered. State’s bilateral approach to for- eign policy works against strategic communication, which often conflicts with embassy programs. Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian’s report, “Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World,” issued to the House of Representatives on Oct. 1, 2003, judged the Shared Values campaign to have been “well-conceived and based on solid research.” The report laid part of the blame for its rejection in the Middle East at the feet of the embassies, which allegedly disap- proved of the advertising techniques being used and failed to promote them vigorously. Incoming public diplomacy execu- tives can draw rich lessons from Shared Values: • First, research-driven persuasive communication is a valuable compo- nent of public diplomacy. Television and paid advertising are powerful channels of communication that should be available when they are needed. • Second, coordinated action by different embassies is indispensable when publics reach across national boundaries, as they usually do. • Third, our PD officers need both the tools and the culture of measuring audiences and results. Formal evalu- ation is the final necessary step to any professional campaign. To take public diplomacy to the next level, State must find a way to acquire professional expertise and advice from the private sector. A new under secretary can mitigate the problems and strengthen State’s pub- lic diplomacy, but only by learning both from failures and successes of the past. ■ FSO Joe Johnson was principal deputy coordinator of the Inter- national Information Programs Bureau from 2000 to 2003. The bureau provides multichannel com- munications services to embassies and publics around the world. He presently serves as senior adviser in the eDiplomacy Office at the State Department. 14 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 5 S P E A K I N G O U T