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Image Makers

Written by: Andy Marken

Article Overview: Advertising, Public Relations, and the Ethos of Advocacy

Image Makers

Image Makers: Advertising, Public Relations, and the Ethos of Advocacy -- Robert Jackall, Janice M. Hirota; University of Chicago Press, Sept, 2003; ISBN 0226389170; 334 p, $18

Reviewed by: G.A. “Andy” Marken, president, Marken Communications Inc, andy@markencom.com



We aren’t exactly certain what Jackall and Hirota wanted to achieve with their book especially when they loosely put advertising, public relations and lobbying into the same bucket. Image Makers doesn’t seem to be a good historical look and discussion of the industries nor does it help you gain new ideas for your day-to-day work. Perhaps it becomes apparent that the authors seem to start with the premise that everyone is trying to sell you something and use their research to prove the point.

Rather than gain a historical foundation in communications, the sociologist and anthropologist begin their journey of exploring the industries in the ‘30’s and move forward to the ‘90’s. They never really differentiate between the three forms of communications using their definitions interchangeably.

While the words public relations and lobbying (they refer to this in the broader terms of advocacy advancement) are incorporated into the title of the book, make no mistake Image Makers is a discussion about advertising. It would seem that the entire book is built around one core concept – communications is all about selling “something” to “someone” and preferably a lot of something to a lot of someones.

We probably could have gained some value from the book had they given us a quick history of communications refinement and expansion since WW I and then focused on 5-7 different campaigns. Had they studied the efforts in-depth including discussions with the developers to explore their objectives, strategies and tactics their efforts might have been useful to both students and professionals.

Jackall and Hirota make a series of important discoveries early in the book. First, we are hooked on images and sound bytes. Second, we spend little or no time looking behind the curtain to gain an understanding of the issues or positions that are being presented. Third, everyone in the communications industry uses his or her tools and talents to hide certain blemishes and promote certain beauties. Finally, advocacy advancement seems to be counter to best interest of all of us in a democracy.

The authors are to be commended in their work in tackling advocacy but in the final analysis you aren’t certain whether advocacy is good or evil, only that it exists. They move seamlessly between professional and personal advocacy that really doesn’t assess the tools that are available to individuals who want to advance a specific idea or product.

Unfortunately, the authors treat the ‘30’s as the benchmark point against which the rest of the book is measured without taking into consideration the technological advancements which have improved communications. They also don’t “weigh” the increases in the volumes of information we are inundated with today compared to that we received only five years ago. In fact:

 There has been more information produced in the last 20 years than during the previous 5,000
 A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime during the 18th-century England
 Today’s information supply available to us doubles every five years
 The U.S. department of labor estimates that by the year 2005 at least 58 % of all workers will be in data services -- gathering, processing, retrieving or analyzing information
 As recently as the 1960s, almost 1/2 of all workers in the industrialized countries were involved in making (or helping to make) things. By the year 2000, however, no developed country will have more than 1/6 or 1/8 of its work force in the traditional roles of making, moving goods
 Already an estimated 2/3 of US employees working the services sector and "knowledge" is becoming our most important product
 According to the electronic messaging association
 3.4 trillion email messages are sent annually worldwide
 5 billion messages sent worldwide daily
 250 million users sending messages daily
 975 million corporate e-mail addresses exist
 750 million personal email addresses are used

In other words advocacy has almost changed to a one-to-one activity over the past few years which we believe has been grossly overlooked.

The sociologist and anthropologist do spend considerable time analyzing the career of Bill Bernbach, often referred to as the adman’s adman, who did so much in reshaping the image and use of advertising. Unfortunately they didn’t take the same care in examining the careers and achievements of Bernay or any of the other men and women who helped shape the public relations industry we know today.

We’re not certain that the 334 pages of paper were well used by Jackall and Hirota but they did use a lot of their formal training to arrive at their conclusions. We do hope that their second edition is published on the Web because while we found their research interesting we aren’t certain this edition of Image Makers was as meaningful as it might have been.

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