iafrica.com

By Branko Brkic

1 December 2006

OK, it’s been a couple of days since Minister of Telecommunications Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri informed Parliament that the SABC paid Leadership magazine R123 000 to feature on its June cover its CEO, Dali Mpofu. I’m sure that by now, government, the SABC and the said magazine have hoped that the whole issue would have been out of sight and no longer important. After all, lots of other big news has happened in the meantime.

Not so fast, I hope.

Do you want the bad or good news first? Bad? OK. The reality is that governments all over the world are spending vast amounts of money on improving their image. My favourite, the Bush administration, is a lovely example. During Dubya's first four years the White House spent $254-million convincing its citizens that their president was doing his job. (That is more than twice what the Clinton team blew over eight years.)

Some of it goes towards straightforward advertising of the benign sort but an uncomfortably large chunk is spent in really dubious ways. Karl Rove and his cronies spent fortunes on pre-packaged "TV News" that would subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) endorse the administration's positions and "achievements". Bush is fighting Kerry in 2004 elections? Enter "journalists" with glowing reports on how much better off "heartland" Americans are under a Republican presidency.

Wanna see what Iraqi Americans think about the fall of Baghdad? Here, there are a bunch of Iraqi-look-alikes shouting "Thank you, Bush, thank you!" … you get the picture. The pre-packaged propaganda snippets, er "news", were then offered to local TV stations, (which always happen to be in some kind of cost-cutting drive), where they were pretty much always accepted graciously and in un-edited form.

Getting TV minutes filled without any costs is too much of a temptation if you are forced to save every penny by your shareholders. So the taxpayers' money gets spent on the worst kind of propaganda, by and for the people that collected the very same taxes. So, looking from a global perspective, the SABC-Leadership magazine affair is not particularly unusual. And the spending on that type of "image-improvement" is unlikely to cease or slow-down any time soon.

More bad news: Buying cover-pages and stories in South African publishing is much more widespread that you ever knew or suspected. And we're not talking about subtle pressure from major advertisers; these are straight money-for-space deals.

What really astounds me is that so many supposedly clever marketers just don't understand that they are throwing their money into the water. It is not difficult to recognise which magazines and which articles have been paid-for if you really look: the company/institution adverts placed in vicinity of the article, everyone's title is lifted straight from a business card, no matter how long or stupid it is. There is no mention of the competition or critics. And every individual featured is either a direct descendant of the gods themselves or hard at work bringing divinity to humankind. The signs are easy to spot.

Readers get it. They instinctively understand the value of anything published in a rag where the piper is paid and the truth discarded. The intended propaganda backfires, because it is impossible to take seriously any entity that would waste good money on obvious bullshit.

Or that would be the case in a perfect world. In this world magazines that sell out are still around, so obviously I'm the one who is missing something. Perhaps readers just don't engage with these magazines sufficiently to get suspicious. Or maybe egos are sufficiently stroked that actual marketing gain is not required.

I'm probably more bugged by this than most, because in my day job at Maverick I routinely get requests for paid-for propaganda. Worse, perhaps, is when naive companies that we contact for interviews want to know what it will cost them to be featured in the magazine. But you, the reader, should be equally bugged as I am: You are being served the cheque-book truth every day.

And the good news I mentioned at the beginning of this column? Let me get back to you on that.