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USA Edition | Today Is Sunday, March 21, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Sunday, March 21, 2010 |
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| Pernicious — A Definition | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | The People Of Newsroom Magazine | |
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Branding Elevates Mere Machines Into Alluring & Desirable Possessions
Whether network or local, television news is a branded product carefully conceived and dependent on entertainment values. News branding is based on a fictional foundation whose purpose is to create the illusion of legitimacy while pandering to viewer preferences for entertainment. At all levels, television news is branded — driven by only two criteria, ratings achievement and profitability. Today we know these ideas originated in Hollywood. We also know why millions of Americans remain so easily tricked by pseudo news program branding. What viewers don’t know, or may not care about, is that television news is the journalistic equivalent of fast-food — way too much of what people like and dangerously short of what is needed to sustain life.
Robert Butche
Publisher, Newsroom Magazine
Los Angeles –The single the most valuable contribution Hollywood made to western civilization may not have been movies — but how they were marketed through the use of star power. Early in the last century, well before MBA programs, marketing think-tanks, focus groups and widespread polling, the once mighty movie studios developed a system of public image techniques to enhance the value of movies and those who appeared in them.
The origins of branding theory trace back to the silent movie era when the big Hollywood movie studios discovered that what brought millions of Depression weary Americans into theaters were glamorous, interesting and easily recognizable actors. Doing so required that publicity departments define how each star was to be identified and promoted — a systematic approach to marketing that undergirds modern day branding. The purpose was to create a personality for a given actor both onscreen and off. Star branding was so sophisticated that filming techniques were developed to make the actor more desirable and interesting leading to a larger than life brand that made them easier for moviegoers to identify with.
An Early Branding Success Story -- The Jazz Singer New York Premier
Between 1911 and 1920 Hollywood publicity departments learned to market their actors by creating embellished, sometimes largely fictional identities that leveraged on-screen roles into fantasy. Movie goers, especially the least educated and affluent, followed the fictional lives of the stars much as they did their movies. Movie star branding, Hollywood came to discover, had a direct impact on box office appeal.
By the time former vaudeville show singer Al Jolson sang “My Mammy” in The Jazz Singer, the first commercial talking picture when it was released in 1927, Jolson, May McAvoy and Warner Oland were established stars created and controlled by the Warner Brothers publicity department. What was so significant about The Jazz Singer was that the story was based on the life story of Jolson himself — the perfect wedding between onscreen and offscreen movie star branding.
Branding Characteristics
Brands are a dynamic, often evolving, force in every area of human endeavor.
The foundation of any brand are values, qualities, worth and character.
The purpose of branding is to differentiate products and services that are inherently familial.
Effective brands are communicated consistently and continuously in clear terms.
Successful brands grow with evolving customer needs and conditions in the marketplace.
Branding is central to establishing customer confidence, loyalty and trust.
Every brand is a promise that must consistently be fulfilled for failure to do so turns a positive brand toward a negative one.
Effective branding requires constant reiteration of the underlying values, qualities, worth and character and consistent evidence of those qualities in what is produced.
Within ten years, the Hollywood publicity departments controlled the publically visible lives of movie stars at every major studio to enhance each star’s brand power through careful blending of what was real and what was fictional.
The evolution of Hollywood star branding was first aided, and later promoted by willing and profitable media. While there had been two cooperating forces in the early years, the publicity departments on one side and the Hollywood press, especially the movie star magazines that actively promoted star branding through fictional stories and often staged images, the evolution of radio, and later television, opened entirely new opportunities for artificially created image making.
Shortly after World War II, when enormous war goods production capacity was returned to consumer products manufacturing, the frugal culture brought about by the depression and war-related rationing needed encouragement to spend hard earned money on consumer goods.
WWII Shortages and Rationing Built Flying Fortress Bombers
With radio penetrating nearly all American homes, and television on the horizon, producers turned to the mass communications media to promote their products and services. In the boom that ensued, modern, active advertising was born. Once the explosion in consumer buying took off, corporate America, and their Madison Avenue advertising agencies, eagerly learned to apply concepts learned from Hollywood. If movie stars could be successfully branded, why not everything else?
Driven by an immensely new and powerful medium ( television ) one that possessed the same dramatic, entertaining and image making power of the movies, advertising evolved from passive presenters of product information into active, marketing research driven protagonists. In the doing, product, institutional, and political branding emerged. Over the next five decades, branding became an immensely powerful research based marketing tool capable of creating images for nearly everything in modern media.
On the surface there is no connection whatsoever between branding theory and journalism. Branding is based heavily on illusion, manufactured values, meeting consumer expectations, and attracting the most profitable demographics. Its effects are to spin reality, dismiss faults, cover up unwanted consequences — all while concealing anything remotely negative. Journalism, on the other hand, is about reporting on what matters most, reality, intrinsic values, speaking to power, fidelity to fact, relevancy, probity and responsibility. On the surface at least, there is no reasonable connection between journalism and branding, but today neither could exist without the other.
Absent standards and critical editing, modern day journalism — especially broadcast and Internet based news outlets — aid and abet branding, pseudo news and political spin by failing to be either vigilant or critical. Instead, what were once legitimate news operations have adopted branding theory and techniques to distort reality and conceal journalistic inadequacy. This is done by creating the illusion of being legitimate news outlets even as news programming is openly promoted for values inconsistent with legitimate journalism.
Since the origins of branding theory over sixty years ago, branding has been adopted, developed, and embraced by every news media. Today, anything that is promotable is branded. Newspapers and newsmagazine brand themselves when they openly politicize their content — effectively labeling themselves as liberal or conservative publications. Columnists are branded content, as are the best known writers, and even comics. Even the AP is a branded source of news and information.
But nowhere has news branding so distorted reality, so badly damaged the public interest, threatened American freedoms and damaged The House Of The Fourth Estate than exists in broadcasting — where anything goes regardless of consequences. News branding, driven by pernicious values and what has proven to be this nation’s big media empires’ arrogant belief that nothing else matters when profitability is the mission.
